The College Hill Independent Vol. 40 Issue 5

the VOLUME 40 ISSUE 5 13 MARCH 2020

HAUNTED PAINTINGS

POLITICS IS A FEELING

SCHOOL DISTRICT DÉJÀ VU

The female ghosts in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

A conversation with writer Jenny Zhang

Two education reports, two decades apart

Indy

the

Cover Consent Not To Be A Single Being Gala Prudent

From The Editors

News 02

Week in Necessities Kaela Hines & Alana Baer

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A Panoptic Education Adrian Oteiza

Metro 03

Chalked Up Alicia Mies

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School District Déjà Vu Deborah Marini, Miles Guggenheim, & Ricardo Gomez

The task ahead of us remains the same. We have to fight to win justice and liberation for all people. We have to organize to win universal healthcare and a peaceful, livable planet.

We have to join hands to build power to challenge this empire and its institutions: the presidency, the prisons, the banks that maintain it around the world. This has been and will be our task—until we win, which we will. But it is also our task to win by any and all means necessary; we must win when and where we can. That means the task ahead of us remains the same—to win the imperial presidency for a good man, an imperfect man. A man who will on some days let us down because the office we will put him in can never fully lift us up. A man who will not carry us into the future we will one day win, but who will get us closer. So don’t despair. This is what we have to do. We are going to win.

Ephemera 04

I Let the Establishment into My Home Sindura Sriram

Arts 07

Haunted Paintings Chong Jin Gan

Features 09

Politics Is a Feeling Alex Westfall

11

Kainan Sa Duwar Olivia Mayeda

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Joey Han BRDD ‘22

Science+Tech Flesh Without Blood Andy Rickert

Literary 17

love poem melting + Others Stella Binion

MISSION STATEMENT

STAFF

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

WEEK IN REVIEW Emily Rust | NEWS Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer Tristan Harris | METRO Ricardo Gomez Miles Guggenheim Deb Marini | ARTS Zachary Barnes Eve O’Shea Isabelle Rea | FEATURES Audrey Buhain Mia Pattillo Nick Roblee-Strauss | SCIENCE + TECH Bilal Memon Izzi Olive Andy Rickert | LITERARY Catherine Habgood Star Su | EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Sindura Sriram | X Jacob Alabab-Moser Ethan Murakami | LIST Ella Comberg XingXing Shou Cate Turner | STAFF WRITERS Alana BaeR Leela Berman Mara Cavallaro Uwa Ede-Osifo Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Muram Ibrahim Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Emma Kofman Evan Lincoln Zach Ngin Jorge Palacios Nell Salzman Issra Said Kion You | COPY EDITORS Josephine Bleakley Muskaan Garg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address Christine Huynh Seth Israel Thomas Patti Ella Spungen | DESIGN EDITORS Daniel Navratil these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, Ella Rosenblatt | DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Amos Jackson Kathryn Li Katherine Sang | and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Leslie Benavides Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Ryn Kang Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Pia Mileaf-Patel Claire Schlaikjer Floria Tsui Veronica The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to Tucker Katrina Wardhanna | BUSINESS Caín Yepez Abby Yuan | WEB Ashley Kim | SOCIAL make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing MEDIA Muskaan Garg | SENIOR EDITORS Ben BienstocK Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling process provides an internal structure for accountability, we Chris Packs Tara Sharma Tiara Sharma Cate Turner Wen Zhuang | MANAGING EDITORS Matt always welcome letters to the editor.

Ishimaru Sara Van Horn Alex Westfall | MVP Audrey Buhain

13 MARCH 2020

VOL 40 ISSUE 05

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN NECESSITIES

BY Alana Baer and Kaela Hines ILLUSTRATION Floria Tsui and Gemma Brand-Wolf DESIGN Daniel Navratil

RED SCARE IN A RED STATE

Last week, with 112 votes in favor, none against, and one abstention, the Scottish Parliament passed a bill that will make Scotland offer free pads and tampons to all those who menstruate. Meanwhile, across the pond, a Tennessee lawmaker recently expressed concern that including period products in an upcoming tax-free holiday would encourage menstruators to hoard tampons uncontrollably. Not unlike cramps, the ignorance embedded in such a concern makes this Indy staff writer coil up in a fetal position.

Tennessee’s annual sales tax holiday, held at the end of July to coincide with back-to-school shopping, allows residents to purchase items without paying the usual seven percent sales tax. This year, Democratic Senator Sara Kyle introduced a bill to include tampons and pads on the list of tax-free items. Yet one politician just couldn’t seem to go with the flow. In a recent hearing, the bill faced pushback from Senator Joey Hensley, who follows an agenda that favors anatomy like his own. In the words of Hensley, “I would think since it’s a sales tax holiday, there’s really no limit on the number of items anybody can purchase.”

The Republican senator seemed concerned that once the tax is lifted, people might run up and down the aisles of stores, clearing the shelves and causing a blood-bath over the much sought-after packaged pieces of cotton. Joey, who has yet to sync up with the needs of Tennessean menstruators, fears that shelves would become depleted and dry, not unlike a used tampon—a discomfort he has never had to experience.

Among Joey’s other political contributions is a proposal to classify children born through in-vitro fertilization as illegitimate as well as a bill that would ban schools from discussing LGBTQ+ issues. It is not all that surprising that Hensley would express his concern with a tampon free-for-all. Perhaps Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name” may actually be a problem whose name is Joey Hensley.

The logic of his opposition to Senator Kyle’s bill doesn’t even check out; it remains a mystery why Little Joey would lose sleep over the hoarding of tampons instead of the hoarding of any other tax-exempt item. He pays no attention to potential stockpiling risks of other tax-free items in Tennessee—Viagra for example. This is not to suggest that the senator might be engaging in some stockpiling behavior on tax-exempt items himself, but this proposition would also not be impossible.

To be fair, though, Joey is not the only one who is off-base with regards to periods and period products.

Tampon commercials often make “that time of the month” look like the time of your life—clean, blissful, and always the occasion to play beach volleyball. Even with a growing number of menstrual product options, such as DivaCup and Thinx (underwear that can be bled into and cleaned by machine-washing), far too much period discourse is based on misconceptions that negate financial obstacles and make the bloody topic taboo. Additionally, as covered in an Indy literary piece a few years ago, NASA once asked astronaut Sally Ride if 100 tampons was enough for a week-long trip to space.

What is most notable, not to mention most concerning, about Little Joey’s comment is that it is not

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as unfounded as one might initially assume. His opposition to the bill incidentally points to the financial barrier of products that constitute a necessity for half of the population. Tennessee should, at the very least, sacrifice a slight erosion of revenue productivity for the sake of menstrual equality. And the state should do so not just for one weekend a year, but all year round—a move that a number of states have already made. Even so, when aiming to destroy the economy, the best (and bloodiest) approach would be to do so one tax-exempt tampon at a time. Or, alternately, Tennesseans could abandon such hoarding and start bleeding freely, which would instill fear in both the patriarchy and Little Joey in one fell swoop.

—AB

VIRGINIA IS FOR (YOUNG) LOVERS?

Oh Virginia, the birthplace of our nation, unless you’re not married. After decades of relying on deserted park benches, sandy beaches, claustrophobic bathrooms, and the backseats of their parents' cars, Virginia teens can now get laid in the comfort of their own homes without fear that the police will come knocking. As of March 4th, premarital consensual sex—previously considered a Class 4 misdemenaor with a fine up to $250 —is legal in the Old Dominion State.

Virginia’s fornication law was first enacted in 1950, as many Virginians were still mourning the days of secession from the North. Perhaps the law was imposed to maintain past traditional Southern values of loyalty (to the Confederacy), commitment (to Jim Crow) and gender roles (that disenfranchised most women).

Needless to say, throughout its 70-year history, this law has received minimal attention. Across Virginia, high school lovebirds and children born out of wedlock are living proof that the government has bigger fish to fry. As Democrats began to realize that their state was living a lie, they decided to squash the law once and for all. Introduced for the second time by

Democrat Mark Levine, legislation to repeal the law was signed by Governor Ralph Northam this month. In 2018, Levine attempted to repeal the law but could not get the law past the committee.

Levine, affectionately known as Virginia’s “most sex-positive dad,” was one of the first to suggest the removal of this law, telling CNN, “We should not have laws that make most of the population into criminals.”

Somewhere in Virginia, same-sex couples laughed in the background, well familiar with laws that criminalize people for loving who they love. Levine added, “Times are very different now than they were in the 17th and 18th centuries,” perhaps nodding to the oh-so difficult era before the invention of Tinder.

According to the Sheriff’s Office in Richmond, there were no fornication convictions in 2019.

However, Levine suggested that fornication is often added onto other sex-related misdemeanors, such as public nudity—perhaps to increase the fine. “Charge the crime that occurred, don’t just pile on with things that shouldn’t be a crime anyway,” Levine said. May University of Virginia frat boys now streak across public spaces in peace.

However, the Virginia sex law has unfortunately come in handy for some. In 2003, Muguet Martin filed a complaint against her ex-boyfriend Kristopher Ziherl for failing to inform her that he had herpes. In response, Ziherl filed a demurrer, rejecting the accusations, justified by a 1990 case known as Zysk v. Zysk. This case concluded that if a person participates in illegal activity and is harmed while doing so, they cannot seek compensation for those injuries—taking “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” to a new level. Following the logic that she too was committing a crime, Ziherl’s defense argued that because Virginia banned fornication, Martin could not obtain compensation for her “injuries.” Ziherl's demurrer was sustained, resulting in the dismissal of Martin's suit. In the end, Martin appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, which declared the fornication law to be unconstitutional.

While Virginia has left the chat, Idaho and Mississippi have tightened their chastity belts. Today, a person in these states who has premarital sex could face a six-month jail sentence. Based on North Carolina law, men and women who “lasciviously associate, bed, and cohabit together” could be found guilty of turning their situationship into a relationship.

Although the fornication law generally had little impact in the last century, its invasiveness brings to question which legal constraints still exist and whom they victimize. Further, it exemplifies the ridiculousness of the country’s obsession over people’s bodies and privacy. While most of these laws aren’t enforced, it’s safer to get rid of them than have them resurface with the potential to set the country back decades.

Luckily, after years of suffocating social norms, all Virginians, young and old, married and unmarried, can now hit it without putting a ring on it.

—KH

13 MARCH 2020

CHALKED UP

Introducing an Indy series on public education in RI In 1993, the Public Education Fund—a nonprofit organization composed of Providence business leaders, educators, and citizens concerned about local schools—sponsored a year-long investigation into the Providence public school system. What followed was a document called as the “Providence Blueprint for Education,” a study that identified both problems and potential solutions within an education system that was failing its K-12 students. Stressing problems with teacher development training, English-language learning opportunities, and equity for students from various socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, the "Providence Blueprint for Education" tried to be a rallying cry for systematic reform.

Almost three decades later, however, an independent study from the Johns Hopkins report, confirmed that none of these problems had changed. Teacher and student absentee rates were at an all-time high, building facilities were unsafe, and the Englishlearning programs within schools were so mismanaged and understaffed that they were deemed a violation of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. Unlike “Providence Blueprint for Education,” however, the Hopkins report aimed its critique at the bureaucratic nature of the Providence public school system. In these terms, no amount of funding or attention could alleviate the problems they identified. The issue was portrayed as structural and fundamental, and thus the solution demanded top-down government intervention. Starting last November, Governor Gina Raimondo vested State Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green with unprecedented political power to resolve this multi-decade struggle to “fix” the public education system in Providence.

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at a time. In a moment calling for structural change, Weingarten stressed the importance of community outreach and individual dedication. Pointing to similar underperforming school districts across the country, she was eager to provide examples of school districts that changed their situation from the bottom up, rather than from the government down.

Whether intentional or not, Weingarten’s message reflected an unspoken tension between the teachers, students, and parents hoping to enact change on the ground and the government officials attempting to reform from the top. Although Infante-Green and the RI Department of Education plan to incorporate community feedback from teachers and parents, it is unclear how these more nuanced testimonies of life within the PPSD will mingle with the demand for immediate, institutional change. In the midst of the politcal frenzy, students and community organizers have been struggling to make their experiences heard.

Organizations such as the Providence Student Union and Youth in Action have known and lived the problems before the report put them in ink, but still have to fight to be heard.

Running parallel to the state takeover is a class action lawsuit filed by Providence student activists and parents against Governor Raimondo and the state. It claims that Rhode Island and its public school systems have violated students’ constitutional rights to exercise their civic responsibilities—students require an education that prepares them to be capable voters and participants in the democractic process, and the schools havn't delivered. The civics suit has emerged as an organized push for reform and for basic student rights, raising concern for the other deficiencies within Providence public schools that continue to be under addressed.

On February 29, students, parents, and members of the Providence Teachers Union gathered at the Juanita Sanchez Education Complex for a series of speeches and workshops aiming to address progress in the PPSD. In a rousing speech to kick off the event, President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten chose not to acknowledge InfanteGreen or any aspect of the government takeover. For Weingarten, progress still remaines in the hands of teachers. In her words, teachers are “society’s first responders,” individuals who come face-to-face with the nuanced problems of American life, one student

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METRO

BY Deborah Marini, Ricardo Gomez, & Miles Guggenheim ILLUSTRATION Leslie Benavides DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

DOJ found program implementation to be severely inadequate. Structurally, the report also noted how English-language learners were often unnecessarily segregated from other students.

In her call to action published by the Providence Journal last November, Infante-Green, wrote, “On the RICAS [Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System], just 12 percent of PPSD students in grades 3 through 8 met or exceeded expectations in math, and 17 percent in English language arts. On the SAT, 15 percent of students met or exceeded expectations in math and 25 percent in English. It will take time to move those numbers.” A focus on “moving numbers,” however, has its limitations. Test scores are not the ultimate index of success or positive change. As much as they reflect cause and effect on a surface level, they do not accurately pay attention to the social fabric on the ground. Despite catalyzing the potential for change, government takeovers in Ohio, Arkansas, and Florida have historically compromised the connections between school districts and their communities. When government-appointed officials are held accountable by state power rather than parents and community voters, rifts between what is represented on paper and what is needed in the community can only widen. +++ Gaps in understanding—chasms between expectation and reality—not only point to systematic failure, but also to problems of representation. Over the course of this education series, the College Hill Independent will not endorse one avenue for change over another.

Schools are not reformed in a vacuum. Although it is possible to standardize their inner workings, study their flaws, results, and demographics, we must constantly recognize the reality that schools are not isolated systems, but a collection of various cultures, realities, and social fabrics.

To handle a multidimensional problem, our goal is to produce multidimensional coverage through a combined effort of theory, history, and up-close reporting. Our purpose is not to produce a unified model of seeing, but rather to demonstrate a variety of lenses and voices through which we can process this moment in time.

Almost 60 percent of PPSD students come from homes where English-language is not the primary spoken language and roughly 33 percent of these students are accounted for as English learners. Yet PPSD fundamentally lacks the education that these students demand, and, in 2018, the US. The Department of Justice (DOJ) found that the PPSD had placed hundreds of English learners in schools without the proper instructional language services. Moreover, RICARDO GOMEZ B'22, DEBORAH MARINI B'22, even in schools where such programs existed, the and MILES GUGGENHEIM B'20 lost in tetherball, every time.

13 MARCH 2020

I live in the little blue house on Kim Street with my mommy, my dad, and our small feline overlord. His name is Cleo (though he is called by many, many other non-related names). Cleo is a fully white cat, with a light pink nose and light pink asshole to match. Sometimes his nose looks bright pink, like when he gets it wet or licks it, but usually his nose is a very pale pink that almost blends into his fur. His asshole, always on display, is also always the same type of pink.

"I Let The Establishment Into My Home" a modern sob story

The white bastard, like many other white and speckled-gray bastards, feeds on the emotional toil and labor of this hardworking brown immigrant family. He has been alive for all of one year, and knows nothing of the miseries we have suffered, the poverty we have overcome — He knows nothing of our history. Yet he lounges around the house like he owns the place, sleeps on cushions on top of cushions like he went and earned these luxuries. He can’t remember when we had to sleep on floors, or in the crack between beds, or out on the street. He sleeps on his petite cat-bed, which lays on top of a full-sized human bed. This cat uses beds on beds; obviously his perception of the world is a bit skewed.

Cleo can pick up a lot of minute things, sure. He can at times be a very smart cat — ­ he’s figuring out how to open doors, for instance — but he fails to understand so many basic things. Us three humans all possess the ability to feed him, yet he believes only my mom can. He only ever bothers her, meows at her, climbs on her, even after watching me and my dad feed him many times. We each serve different roles, at least in his eyes. My mom plays the coveted food lady.

I’m not as weak-willed as my mom, perhaps that’s why. She’s scared to death of Cleo biting or scratching her, so she does whatever he says. I am not so scared. The little runt is 10 pounds, I could squash him if I sat on him. I don’t, obviously, but he knows that I think these thoughts.

At times, he is especially cruel to me. Everyday he wakes with the sun or the birds or whatever and insists on being let out of his bedroom immediately to prance around the house. After someone has tended to him and he is adequately fed, he makes his way to my room, where he meows until someone opens the door for him. Then he comes and sits on top of me, right on top of my diaphragm so I can’t breathe. He stares intently at my face, into my face, until I finally open my eyes and acknowledge him.

When I say “Good morning, sir,” he says nothing, only looks deeply into my eyes, studying me silently.

Then he slaps me on the cheek and I feign shock and fear — all steps in our monotonous daily charade around each other. His eyes are full-black as he stares back at me.

I close mine again, hoping in vain that he’ll let me sleep, but I know that he will slap again, and when he does, he nicks my eyelids with his uncut claws.“Ow,” I say, “You’re hurting me, Cleo.”

To this he will laugh, sardonically, and shift his weight so that his ample butt borrows directly into the convex pit of my diaphragm. His posterior comfortably seated, he will rise to his full height on his front two legs, painfully pressing into my breasts. I stupidly close my eyes again, then slowly crack open one eye to see if he is still staring at me. He is, and makes direct eye-contact with my tiny sliver of exposed iris. I see, roughly, a large white figure rising up and I know he is about to strike me again. I pull the blanket over my head, which enrages him; he attacks, he pounces and scratches and scratches at the part of my blanket where my face should be. His claws poke through the flimsy cloth and drag sharply against my face.

When I finally give in and sit up he slides off me like Jell-o and then sits at my side, looking up at me sweetly, so I pat him on the head while I glare at him. I look at the clock and it’s only 5:13 am. All the birds are up, this cat is up, so everyone in this house is up. This is the kind of bullshit he pulls every morning. But when I go to chase him, he skitters away and hides. I know he is just a cat, but sometimes I really do hate him.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY Sindura Sriram ILLUSTRATION Sindura Sriram DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt & Daniel Navratil

EPHEMERA

04

TWO EDUCATION REPORTS,

School District Déja Vu

BY Alicia Mies ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Daniel Navratil

This is the first installment in the Chalked Up Metro series The year was 1993. The Providence River was still covered by a four-lane highway, the school district was facing serious budget cuts, and the now infamous Vincent “Buddy” Cianci was only two years into his first term as Mayor of Providence. It was in this context of new leadership and a severe state-wide economic downturn that a group of local business leaders and educators prepared and released the “Providence Blueprint for Education” (PROBE), which refers to both the 125-page report and the coalition of 33 parents and community leaders assembled to carry out the study.

Under the non-profit Public Education Fund and with support from the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, PROBE was enlisted to complete a thorough, independent study of the Providence public schools. Through analyzing Miller Analogies Test and SAT test scores, focus groups, and surveys with students and teachers, and data collection about school systems in comparison cities, PROBE painted a picture of the Providence Public Schools District (PPSD) at the time and detailed concerns that still ring true today.

PROBE found falling standardized testing scores, low attendance figures, unchallenging and monotonous curriculums, questions of teachers stereotyping based on ethnicity, and problems with the Limited English Proficiency (LEP) language learning program.

Despite these challenges within the school district, the PROBE report remained incredibly enthusiastic, positive and encouraging. Then-president of the University of Rhode Island and chairman of PROBE Dr. Edward Eddy started off the report with a promise that, “Better schools are within the reach of Providence.”

In his introduction, he gives his word of honor that Providence schools will be reformed and transformed with little necessity for extra funds, as long as the city has “bold leadership” and cooperation by all those involved—students, parents, teachers, administrators, city officials, everybody.

Fast forward to 2019. In June of last year, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, based in Baltimore, Maryland, published a scathing report on the PPSD. At the invitation of the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green, Johns Hopkins conducted in-person interviews and focus groups with parents, school leaders, teachers, and leaders at all levels and made visits to schools across the city. The team also reviewed a broad range of documents and data provided by PPSD and RIDE. The report exposed the district’s faults from all angles: students not meeting performance standards, teachers feeling unsupported by the district, and school buildings deteriorating to the point of becoming hazardous.

Unlike the PROBE report, however, the Johns Hopkins report describes public education in Providence as dreadful. Dysfunctional. Heartbreaking.

Some of the anecdotes presented in the report are astonishing. In one school, raw sewage leaked from the ceiling and onto the heads of children. One English Language Learners teacher did not speak Spanish, despite being many Spanish-speaking students’ only academic resource at school. According to students, bullying occurred everyday at lunch in an elementary school, and stealing from backpacks happened frequently across schools. Seeing some of the observed

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METRO

school buildings’ conditions even brought “seasoned members of the [Johns Hopkins] team to tears.”

Filled with bar graphs showing declining proficiency rates, quotes from interviewed students experiencing significant stress in school, and percentages of Black, hispanic, and white students in Providence, the report conveys a real depression and hopelessness—a stark contrast to the almost cheery tone of the PROBE report.

Clearly, little to nothing has significantly changed in the over 25 years since the PROBE report was released—Domingo Morel, an assistant political-science professor at Rutgers who assisted the Johns Hopkins team with its report and attended PPSD schools, told The Atlantic, “there’s really no difference” between the school district now and then. Arguably, Providence schools have gotten a lot worse.

Unlike the PROBE report, the Johns Hopkins report doesn’t provide any concrete solutions­ — certainly, not a laid out plan of action like in the PROBE report.

This could be because the Johns Hopkins Institute of Education Policy was not specifically tasked by Infante-Green to provide resolutions; it could also be because the PROBE commission consisted of 33 local parents and community members whereas the Johns Hopkins team was based out of Baltimore.

The Johns Hopkins report leaves the problems of Providence public schools open and seemingly calls for a state takeover. It criticizes the district’s problems as inherent and structural—it writes that the district is overburdened with multiple, overlapping sources of governance and confusing bureaucratic structures that paralyze action and halt change. The report conveys that the problem is too big for local government or the School Board and, without a direct call to state action, triggered the state takeover. +++

the implementation. Recommendations include redesigning the budget process at the school board level, establishing informal student town meetings and student committees, and instituting professional development and evaluation of teachers.

Despite the disappointing statistics that pointed to racial inequity—38 percent of high school students, for example, believed that teachers made “unfair judgements” based on their racial identity—and the admission that new funds for education were not readily available, the report is surprisingly encouraging.

The report includes students’ glowing compliments of teachers. One student said, “My high school is like a second home. The people and teachers here make you feel welcome. They will help you out and do anything for you.” Regarding increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the school district, one Hope High School student was quoted saying “Everyone likes each other! They don’t care what race you are!!!!!” (Yes, five exclamation marks included).

Each set of recommendations is preceded with an inspirational mantra written in all caps like “IMAGINE WHAT YOU WILL SEE IN THE PROVIDENCE SCHOOLS…...WHEN PEOPLE CHANGE”—PROBE’s own touch. +++ What has changed since 1993 are the demographics of PPSD. In 1993, 33 percent of the district were white, 30 percent were Hispanic, 25 percent were Black, and 12 percent were Asian, according to the PROBE report.

The Johns Hopkins describes the current district as 9 percent white, 65 percent Hispanic and 17 percent black. Johns Hopkins also says that 87 percent of the student body is “economically disadvantaged,” a statistic that the PROBE report does not describe.

The report left Providence residents high and dry, wondering what could be done to enact the structural change needed to truly reform public schools.

After reading the report, Commissioner of Education Infante-Green told WPRI 12, “My initial reaction was devastation. It was tough to read without feeling the pain. I actually was sick after I finished reading the report.”

On the night that the State Board of Education voted to hand authority of the Providence Schools to the state, Infante-Green said the 1993 report was proof that Providence has “failed at least an entire generation of students.” She also promised “there will be no 3rd report.”

The PROBE report is forward-looking and constructive with a clear path towards great schools.

The Johns Hopkins report shows a deep sorrow and regret—without any clear indication of where to go to next, it simply laments the state of public education in the city, and, by proxy, the country.

Written by a committee of parents and community leaders, the PROBE report analyzed budget information, student demographics, MAT and SAT scores, conducted focus groups and surveys with students, and interviewed with teachers and administrators.

The report also compared Providence schools to similarly-sized school systems, including New Haven, Pawtucket, and Syracuse, and found that Providence was both worse funded and worse performing.

Compared to its peer school districts, Providence receives a smaller percentage of their funding from the state. According to the report, 49.5 percent of PPSD funding came from the state while, on average, 57.2 percent of the observed Northeastern districts were state funded; this lead to PPSD spending almost $1000 less per-pupil compared to those Northeastern districts.

PROBE also found that PPSD had the fewest mandatory hours spent by students in school, +++ compared to other districts. Pittsburgh elementary school students were in school three and a half weeks more than Providence students, and Rochester high The PROBE report recommended creating smaller school students were in school four weeks more than learning environments, establishing and enforcing strict code of ethics, instituting professional develProvidence students. opment for school district leaders, encouraging the community to volunteer and donate expertise +++ and facilities, hiring a full-time grant writer, and More than half of the report is made up of 39 concrete more. It advocated for the Rhode Island congresrecommendations (only 15 percent of which were sional delegation to “push with vigor” the funding supposed to require extra funds) and a timeline for of federal programs for preschool opportunities and

13 MARCH 2020

TWO DECADES APART

multicultural arts programs; it also recommended an integrated and networked data collection and dissemination system, “essential health and social services agencies” for students and their families in four to six schools among other measures.

The report concluded with Recommendation 39: “If significant progress has not been made within a relatively short span of time, then—again for the sake of students—the school system must undergo radical, permanent change.” In that case, PROBE suggests a switch to choice programs, in which students can use a government subsidy to enroll in a school other than those in their system, if various choice experiments at the time were beneficial to students.

Choice programs have become increasingly common in some school districts across Rhode Island, with hundreds of students choosing to transfer school systems to access career and technical education , pathways, or programs. The 203 pathways programs in the state prepare students with skills in music, arts, sports and more. Because the money follows the student in Rhode Island, districts either make or lose funding depending on how many students come and go for pathways programs—the Warwick public schools district pays about $17,000 per year to send a single student to pathways programs in other cities in Rhode Island, according to a WPRI article. The potential

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

loss of funding has resulted in inter-district competition that has pushed public schools to actively market their schools to out-of-district families. Nevertheless, in 1993, the PROBE report saw choice programs as a potential pathway for radical and permanent change.

The PROBE report positions Recommendation 39 as a last resort—in the eyes of the commission, the preceding 38 recommendations should have done the job in fixing the district’s problems. Most of the implementation of the 38 recommendations were for the School Board, superintendents, and principals. The report doesn’t call for huge structural change (or even major state funding), nor is it a critique of the public school system itself. Instead, the report recommendation’s focus is clearly local and individual and its message is resoundingly clear: great public schools are within reach if Providence residents work together. +++

needed, to reconstitute the schools by restructuring their governance, budget, program, and personnel and making decisions regarding their continued operation.”

In response to the Johns Hopkins report, Mayor Jorge Elorza echoed this idea. At a series of community conversations, Elorza said, “We really need to get to the heart, to the core, to the foundation, to the structure of this thing, and since we simply cannot do that under the powers that we have here in the city, that’s why we’re looking to the state for help.”

The PROBE report relied on local politics and the power of individual community members coming together—now, over 25 years later, the answer to the enduring problems in PPSD put forward by RIDE is distinctly different. By ending with a board member recommending a “restart”—new teachers, new buildings, new cafeteria board, (seemingly) new everything—the Johns Hopkins called for state intervention without explicitly saying so.

By pointing out that the root of PPSD’s problems is its structural bureaucracy and governance, the Johns ALICIA MIES B’20 enjoys reading 125 page reports Hopkins report indirectly requests a state takeover. from 1993.

The state’s formal written decision to takeover PPSD reflects this diagnosis. It reads: “The time has come for the State to exercise control over the budget, program and personnel of PPSD and its schools and, if further

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The female ghosts in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

BY CJ Gan ILLUSTRATION CJ Gan DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

The vocabulary of film discourse contains a rather reductive palette of praise, one critics love to slather on every striking work that emerges. A selection from reviews of Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is revealing: “A hauntingly intimate vision of love.” “A haunting, erotic, and evocative period piece.”

“Hauntingly beautiful.” It’s a strange turn of phrase.

The question to ask of a ‘haunting film’ is—who is being haunted? And who is the one haunting? For when we speak of haunting, we evoke the figure of the ghost, the specter of the dead, or, put another way, the presence of an absence—something gone but not quite disappeared that lingers on. +++ Portrait is set in eighteenth century France, on a remote, quiet island off the coast of Brittany. Marianne (Noémie Merlant), an artist, is tasked with the job of painting a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young aristocratic woman, which must first be sent to her suitor in Milan for his approval before their marriage can proceed. This affair is arranged by her mother, the Countess (Valeria Golino), but Héloïse is reluctant to give up her freedom and marry a man she does not know, and so refuses to sit for her portrait; when Marianne arrives, she has already exhausted th efforts of a previous painter. Marianne must thus pretend to be her companion for walks while secretly observing her for the painting.

After establishing this premise, the film breathlessly unravels. The two of them are inexorably drawn to one another; when the subterfuge is inevitably revealed, Héloïse coldly criticizes the portrait and Marianne tearfully grabs a cloth and smears the still-wet paint, destroying the face. However, upon seeing the ruined portrait, Héloïse abruptly changes her mind and agrees to pose for a second portrait. The Countess must leave for the coast of Brittany, and in the absence of her controlling presence, Marianne and Héloïse’s attraction grows—but when the painting is finished and the Countess returns, Marianne must leave.

They will never meet again, yet they see each other everywhere.

This is not a spoiler; the events of the film unfold without surprises or twists, almost foregoing a conclusion. In this film, it is not what happens inasmuch as how it happens, not what is shown but how it is shown— and how it is not shown—that captivates.

There is an invisible thing in this film that reveals itself without being shown; that is unspoken and yet ever-present. Marianne and Héloïse’s queerness is never explicitly discussed, never once drawn to our attention as something special or extraordinary. There is never even a mention of them loving one another, an almost necessary cliché of heterosexual romantic stories—though there is a more general discussion of love, it refers only to heterosexual relationships.

There are no words for what they have in a linguistic discourse in which only heterosexual relationships are condoned. Moreover, there is no need for any word for it; it resists the very act of being named. Because to name it would be to mark it as different, as an object upon which meaning can be inscribed, something that must be explained, made sense of, contained. There are no words for this haunting presence. It merely is.

Throughout the course of their romance, Marianne is literally haunted by the vision of Héloïse—a pale, glowing form clothed in white, foreshadowing the agonizing moment of her departure. This surreal interjection in the film is complicated by the temporal framework of the entire film, which unfolds as a flashback in present-day Marianne’s mind. Perhaps this ghostly apparition is Marianne’s knowledge of what will haunt and taint her memories of what came before.

Or perhaps it is truly something seen by Marianne in the past, the premonitory omen of a fate she knows is

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non-being. Power haunts as well, and its ghost does not stay silent forever. It lurks in the shadows, biding its time, only to suddenly, shockingly, lunge into vision, when Marianne wakes up after her last night with Héloïse, walks into the kitchen, and sees a man sitting there. At this moment, you realize that since the fourth minute of the film, for almost the entire runtime, you haven’t seen or heard a single man. It is a chilling moment in which the world that the two women have built for themselves abruptly crumbles. The man in the kitchen is tantamount to a ghost appearing in a horror film—as Sciamma herself put it in an interview with Vox; the “jump scare of patriarchy.”

Even though we only see this patriarchal ghost near the end of the film, it’s evident that it has been haunting this place for a long time. It was waiting for the Countess when she first arrived on the island decades ago. She grew up in Milan; her parents arranged her to be wed to a nobleman living on the island, and sent her portrait ahead to be vetted by her husbnd-to-be.

Stepping into the house for the first time, she looked above the fireplace and saw the portrait staring down at her. “She was waiting for me,” the Countess tells Marianne. The haunting gaze of this marital portrait is reincarnated in the portrait that Marianne must paint of Héloïse. Both are intended not for the sitter but for a ghostly presence who controls the image without being there: a man who appraises the woman and judges if she is beautiful enough to marry.

The gaze inhabits Marianne too. The Countess’ marital portrait was painted by Marianne’s father; she inherits not only his trade as a painter but also the male +++ gaze inherent within his art. Thus, when Marianne But the figure of ghost is not only a vessel for first attempts Héloïse’s portrait, the image is lifeless: marginalized identities to speak against erasure and her face plastered with a faint, sickly smile so cold and

inescapable.

Perhaps their romance cannot last—but that does not mean that it dies. It lingers, even if unseen to all but them. That is the imperative that they lay down to one another: Remember. Do not forget. Black queer feminist Sharon Holland once said that “Bringing back the dead…is the ultimate queer act.” The erasure that society enacts upon non-normative sexualities relegates them to invisibility and non-being. To cling onto haunted memories is to allow that which society condemns to death to live on.

Earlier in the film, Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie discuss the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—how in turning to look back at her on the trek out of hell, Orpheus chooses to sacrifice his future with his wife to preserve one final perfect memory of her. Héloïse, in a flash of insight, says, “Perhaps she was the one who said, ‘Turn around.’” So as Marianne flees from the house, unable to bear what she must do, Héloïse, as Eurydice, commands Marianne to turn back. Sciamma resists the temptation to enact a wish-fulfilment fantasy of queer relations persevering and blossoming against all odds, just as Orpheus ultimately cannot save his lover from hell. But she also denies the tired trope of queer love as a fatalistic tragedy. She rethinks the binary of queer narratives and posits a new way that love can live beyond its death.

Heeding Héloïse’s command, Marianne looks at her one final time. As their relationship dies, a ghost is born.

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removed from her animated, frowning face. Upon Marianne’s confession that she has been painting Héloïse all along, Héloïse scrutinizes the portrait and cannot recognize herself. “Is that how you see me?” she asks. Marianne stutters, “It’s not only me…

There are rules, conventions, and ideas.” It is not only Marianne who is acting here; there is another hand that haunts her brush, a ghostly hand formed by these “conventions” of how art has configured the image of a woman: demure and yielding to the invisibly present male looker. The male gaze, Sciamma shows us, is a spirit that transcends the eyes of men; women, too, can be possessed by it. +++ The presence of the male gaze in the film isn’t remarkable. After all, the male gaze is everywhere; it pervades and infiltrates everything produced within a patriarchal system of meaning. What is remarkable is that the film boldly exorcizes the male gaze halfway through. The Countess—the matriarchal figure who imposes traditional order upon the household— departs, and in her place, another ghost emerges.

At first, it is subtle. The dynamics in the house shift between the three women: Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), the maid. The silent distances between them vanish as the three begin to play cards together, read stories together. Most powerfully, in one scene, Sophie embroiders fabric at the kitchen table while Marianne and Héloïse cook for her. This scene reuses the same shot composition—head-on, wide— used earlier in the film to depict Sophie serving food to Marianne. The visual continuity between both scenes is contrasted against the role reversal of servant and artist in the later scene. Sophie’s practice of a female folk craft is now implicitly elevated to the status of art that is traditionally reserved for lofty mediums like painting.

In the first half of the film, Sophie only ever appears to serve Marianne or provide expository dialogue before she vanishes like a ghost. But after revealing her unwanted pregnancy to Marianne, Sophie’s efforts to abort her pregnancy become a prominent focus of the film’s plot. The film emphasizes the paradox of abortion as a vital health procedure and the absurdly arduous, secretive methods of obtaining one. Later, as Sophie undergoes the agonizing process, Marianne, unable to bear the sight, averts her gaze, only for Héloïse to command her fervently: “Look.” That night, Héloïse re-enacts the abortion scene in their home.

She poses as the doctor, kneeling by Sophie’s feet while she commands Marianne to paint. To bear witness to the plight of women that the male gaze refuses to see, to immortalize a ghost in art, is the urgently necessary mission that Héloïse confers upon Marianne, that Sciamma does herself by making this film.

It is significant that Sophie is a working-class woman—the discovery of her pregnancy would cost her her job as a maid in an upper-class household. Sophie is thus forced to wait until the Countess leaves to finally deal with her abortion. If issues of the suppressed female body affect working-class women the most, it is fitting that the solution comes not from the lofty male-dominated institutional realms of medicine but rather the folk practices of village women on the island.

These women do not conform to the academic, scholarly qualifications policing the profession in this historical moment, during the height of the Enlightenment, but the embodied wisdom and experience of their diagnosing eyes and healing hands has been forged

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and dissected, confronting Marianne’s gaze by looking back at her. This negotiation of the mutual gaze manifests in a camera that frequently swivels and moves between the perspectives of Marianne and Héloïse, as the relationship of subject and object is constantly reversed.

In a particularly vivid instance, Héloïse and Marianne go out walking by the cliffs for the second time, their mouths wrapped in scarves. The entire sequence is shot in one long take without dialogue, lasting 45 seconds. Framed in extreme close-ups which allow us to see only one person’s face in frame, this shot is composed entirely of a tense exchange of gazes. The camera begins on Marianne, who gazes off-screen at Héloïse from the back, attempting to make out her features. As if following the path of her gaze, the camera pans over to the back of Héloïse’s head, assuming Marianne’s gaze. But in a subtle, barely noticeable sideways motion, the camera then exits Marianne’s gaze, framing Héloïse from the side as she turns to look back at Marianne, so that she now controls the gaze. Finally, the camera pivots behind Héloïse to fully enter Marianne’s subjective point-ofview. Just as it seems that Marianne has resumed power over the gaze, however, Héloïse abruptly turns to look back at Marianne, and in so doing gazes directly into the camera.

When characters stare into the camera, they break the fourth wall and confront their audience. In this scene, Sciamma forces us to become self-aware of the thoughtless objectification we engage in when we watch cinema as an unseen, invisible voyeur, lurking behind the screen and staring at the characters as objects of our gaze. Sciamma makes Héloïse look back defiantly, resisting the passive state of the object. In doing so, she makes us, as audience, feel looked at.

As distance disintegrates between Héloïse and Marianne and affection blooms, there is a shift in Sciamma’s visual vocabulary. The eyeline match shot structure of the film’s first half is increasingly replaced with a two-shot, in which Marianne and Héloïse are framed side-by-side on the same plane and talk to one another in unbroken long takes. The camera now shows two characters speaking to one another without privileging the gaze of either, not as self and other but as a female self interacting with another self. In other words, creating female intersubjectivity, the invisible space formed between two women who look at one another not demanding power but rather seeking understanding and love. Héloïse whispers to Marianne, “Do all lovers feel like they’re inventing something?”

Perhaps it isn’t invention as much as it is an unveiling of something that has not been allowed to be publicly seen.

through necessity over centuries: the need to survive, to see and treat the female body that is not acknowledged, let alone cared for, by the rest of society.

When Sophie brings Marianne and Héloïse to a feast held by these village women to consult a doctor on her abortion, something magical happens. The women gather around a fire and begin to sing—nothing but their voices and the clapping of their hands. A crescendo builds slowly on surreal, eerie harmonies that layer over one another, and bursts into a series of polyrhythmic chants and calls. It has the air of a mystical, tribalistic ritual; Sciamma deliberately constructed the scene to “convoke the imagery around witches.” For what is a witch but a ghostly, abject woman, one whose strange feminine magics—like their herbal medicinal brews or psychedelic drugs— are deemed abnormal and deviant by society? These witch-women might be deemed abject by patriarchal discourse, or relegated to the margins of society, but they live fiercely and with fire. They love, they celebrate and make music: all things that have been stifled for Héloïse in her aristocratic upbringing.

Earlier in the film, when Héloïse is first allowed out of the house, she sprints toward the cliffs and the sea.

“I’ve dreamt of that for years.” “Dying?” Marianne asks. “Running,” Héloïse pants, with a hint of a smile.

Later, lying with Marianne, she takes out a drug that she bought from a woman at the feast. “She said it can make you fly,” she says to Marianne, with a glint of magic in her eyes.

In the face of subjugation and oppression, the village women do not accept invisibility and death as their only fate. Instead, they imagine a new kind of life—not a special one but an insistently everyday existence—that lies beyond the purview and censure of the male gaze. They rebirth themselves in an after-life as +++ witches and ghosts, beings who are free, who do not merely dream of running, but instead learn to fly.

The final shot of the film takes place years later, when Marianne spots Héloïse across a crowded orches+++ tral hall one last time. It starts with us positioned as Marianne, staring across the vast theatre at Héloïse.

In cinema, there are “rules, conventions, and ideas…” But the camera smoothly tracks in, creeping closer and that tell you how to see, and what you can see. For closer toward Héloïse until she fills the frame, even example, there is the eyeline match. It is a sequence of as she stares intently off-camera. As the music swells, two shots: first, you see someone gazing at something, Héloïse begins to weep, and in the distant look in her then you cut to what they are looking at. This simple eyes, we know that her gaze is far, far away, searching structure allows the viewer to enter into the gaze of for Marianne—or perhaps just a memory of her. Swept the looker and identify with them, and conversely, to up in the tide of her emotion, the camera tilts as her objectify what is looked upon. Conventionally, the head rocks, matched exactly to the motion as if we are subjective camera is gendered male, as it looks upon locked within her gaze. a female object—and through the act of looking, By moving the camera from Marianne to Héloïse, imposes meaning upon her. The male gaze does not Sciamma refuses to definitively place it in either merely exist on-screen; the male gaze is the screen. woman’s gaze. This is not a relationship in which there So what lurks beyond the edges of the screen? is one authoritative subject whose gaze commands its Sciamma overturns these conventions in the object. It is a relationship of equality founded upon a opening shots of the film. Slashes of charcoal are drawn mutual gaze in which both women are at once looking on blank canvases, but Sciamma cuts away before a and being looked at. Nestling the camera in this intifigure ever coalesces. Then we see the lookers—young mate space between their gazes, Sciamma merges female artists-in-training drawing an unseen woman. Marianne and Héloïse’s subjectivities, so that even as But she does not cut to the reverse shot—instead, she they part ways forever, they are held together, if only cuts to shots of other artists looking at a still invisible for a brief moment, in the camera’s eye, and in ours. figure. And then we hear the woman command us on The camera never cuts to what Héloïse looks at. It can’t, how to look at her: “Not too fast… Take time to look at and it doesn’t have to. We too have been haunted, and me. See how my arms are placed.” The object of the we know. gaze takes control of the camera, refusing to yield to our interpretation without speaking for herself.

CJ GAN B’23 needs his year of rest and relaxation.

This subversion of the subjective camera is evident in the initial dynamic between Marianne and Héloïse.

Marianne tries to impose the conventions of portraiture on Héloïse by trying to wrest her image from her, but Héloïse resists, refusing to pliantly be examined

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A CONVERSATION WITH WRITER JENNY ZHANG

There are mistakes in Jenny Zhang’s titles. The name of her 2012 poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, misspells its final word, and the possessive “s” is lost in that of her upcoming collection, My Baby First Birthday. These are mistkes, but they are also so much more. They are acknowledgements that we live in a world of many languages. They are proof of the impossibility of communicating exactly what we mean. They are refusals to correct, to edit, to conform.

This unabashedness is viscerally felt across Jenny’s fiction, poetry, and essays. The chorus of ChineseAmerican preteen girls who narrate her 2017 story collection, Sour Heart, have treasure-trove interiorities that spill into run-on paragraphs; their innermost thoughts are given weight through entirely capitalized sections. Her essays published in the online magazine Rookie orbit around ideas of coping and uncertainty—how to use humor as a foil for racism; how to resist the burden of your friends’ drama—building for her readers an unofficial survival guide to adolescence.

And her poetry is tactile and urgent: the first human year ever recorded melted so flagrantly it became stylish to be poetic for the end of the world The insistence in this language—one that places geological time and notions of apocalypse in the same space as an earthly, everyday reality—welcomes a sense of extreme closeness, of enormous intimacy. It’s as if once you begin reading, a spotlight shines down, and the distance between reader and writer collapses— Jenny is speaking to you, and only you.

Jenny called me while she took an afternoon walk around her new home of Los Angeles. Over the phone, her voice is sincere and measured, her ideas bursting at the seams. Here, we discuss made-up languages, texting as poetry, and how to champion living in the in-between.

Alex Westfall: What can we expect (or not expect) from the poems in My Baby First Birthday?

Jenny Zhang: The first thing that ever happens to us is that someone makes the decision that we're going to exist. That the first thing we all experience is non-consensual is troubling; so is the great paradox that the only way out of existence is to die. I have this dream of, “Well, what if I could go back in time? Then I wouldn't have had to ever feel like I exist.” It’s a silly thought. Or maybe it’s sad, depending on what place you're in. I’ve also thought, “Well, I've experienced life, I've made it this far.” So in some ways, I can't give up existing, but I've kind of existed against my will. Am I supposed to cherish that?

I’m also interested in the fetish we have for motherhood and being a baby. I’m drawn to this idea that we get to begin innocent, how we're less and less so as time goes on, and the unfairness of that. There is a desire to return to innocence even if most of us probably have no memory of it—it feels like a fantastical place, like a dream.

So the poems are about all that stuff. They’re also not

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about any of that stuff. Some of it is text messages I've had with friends. Texting is a kind of poetic because of its natural line breaks; everyone is creating poems by phone. I don't want to make it sound like the collection is lofty; it’s also extremely un-lofty!

AW: I love the both-ness with which you’ve described the collection, which reminds me—in college, you studied both race and ethnicity studies and creative writing. I’ve found that the separation of disciplines in schools often makes it hard for someone who both studies theory and makes creative work—it is up to the student to navigate the realms of absorbing knowledge and creating things. Is this resonating at all?

respond, “I don't know! I'm no scholar in immigration history; I am simply someone who has immigrated to the United States.” I can't explain the ways in which policy is made and how that trickles down to affect different people—it would take days to just explain how it affected me or my friends!

There is something that happens when I read books that capture an experience that in some way is tied to the macro-changes happening in domestic and global politics and policies. I'm having a hard time articulating, but I think there is something very cerebral about policy and talking about ideology. For most people including myself, in experiencing it first-hand, politics is more like a feeling. So I try to capture that JZ: You’ve unlocked something for me, which was that feeling in my writing.

I've always felt like I was neither that nor this—but I think really, it's what you were saying, that there is such AW: When you mention politics as emotion, I immepressure and a cultural impulse to have an identity diately thought of your prose poem “How it Feels,” with defined borders. I've always felt like I was floating published in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Magazine. between things, living in these interstitial spaces. I You tackle this question of turning raw emotion into was drawn to studying comparative studies in race and writing, making space for your reader to question why ethnicity at Stanford because it was interdisciplinary. we crave to process our feelings. I was wondering if you I didn't just want to take a sociology class—I wanted could talk about how you turn interiority into somehistory, comparative literature, political science. thing that feels ready to be seen publicly. Do you see value in unpolished, uncalculated art?

Depending on the kind of writer you are, it makes sense to be curious about the world. But college is a time JZ: I think a lot of people come to art in whatever form where you're supposed to be “professionalizing,” and I because it gives a shade, a value, a look to something was bad at that; I don't think I respected it. So I studied that we feel but may not always be able to express— a lot of different things. I took lots of creative writing especially when we're young. Everyone has that classes because that was what I was really nerdy about memory of hearing that one song where you suddenly and wanted to do as much as possible. find that your whole body is vibrating, and you don't even know why. I was talking to my good friend, the Stanford was a pretty dorky place. I didn't know what a comedian Jenny Yang, and we were talking about Libertarian was until I got there... every freaking dude the film Mulholland Drive. And she was talking about there was a Libertarian and probably now identifies as how she'd seen it as a teenager, and how there was a a sapiosexual or something—like that class of person, scene with a singer in a club who sings this beautiful, ha! I would meet people and think, “Oh, we share haunting song. And she just started crying. I’ve had similar politics, but we don't share a similar sense of those moments too, where suddenly I see, hear, or humor,” or maybe they’d have regressive ideas about read something, and I can't stop laughing or crying. It sex. And the people I shared more of an aesthetic sensi- was like my body knew before my brain did that it was bility with, they were not people I shared a political meaningful to me. There is something so mysteriously relationship with. So that was a common thing to feel at pleasurable about that. The downside is when you need that age. It has been the project of my entire life up until to process but can’t—when you're like, “My body wants now and is still ongoing: to find people with whom you to die, I don't know what to do about it, and I don't know can be at home in all these different quadrants of your how to relieve myself of this depression, this fear, this identity. It’s been hard, but I'm always looking. anxiety.” So it can go both ways.

AW: You’ve worked as both a union and youth orga- Writing is both a very conscious and unconscious nizer. As you've moved through your life as a writer, thing. Sometimes the first draft of things I write are how have you reconciled the realms of art and politics? more unconscious—I couldn't tell you how I wrote “How it Feels,” I just remember that I was locked up in JZ: I don't want to make it sound like I'm an activist, my apartment for 24 hours on a hot summer day, and because I am definitely not—much respect to those I had no A.C. Somehow, I wrote it. Then there are who are and do that as part of their life and daily prac- other times where I do remember. Editing is more of a tice. As a writer, it was never a conscious decision to be conscious act for me. able to comment about politics or things happening in the world. I was never like, “How do I make the polit- I like when I read something less structured, that ical personal or the personal political?” It was just that I evokes a familiar feeling. But I'm also very happy had lived the life and had been around people who had reading extremely plotted things, being on the edge of lived the life. I encountered politics as a lived person. my seat. I think I try to do a combination of those two things in my work.

When Sour Heart came out, people would ask, “How do you think immigration policy has changed?” and I'd AW: You've spoken before in praise of bands like the

13 MARCH 2020

BY Alex Westfall ILLUSTRATION Liana Chaplain DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Cocteau Twins, who would often sing in their own made-up languages—how you love that you can't decipher what they're saying. What is exciting to you about art or writing that is “illegible?”

AW: I'm thinking about what you said about poetry— how it can be the most unconscious, raw, or pure version of yourself at a moment in time, versus something that's more traditionally thought of as “truth,” like your early autobiographical essays in Rookie.

And then there are your more hybrid works, like the fictional stories in Sour Heart that sometimes draw from experiences you've had. I guess I’m just thinking about the different layers there.

JZ: We come to art in mysterious ways. A song that you first listen to when someone has broken your heart has this power for the rest of your life—when you hear it, it transports you back to that time and a feeling. I remember I had this taste in my mouth when someone close to me had just died. I was really hungry, and had JZ: That word has definitely become politicized. Now eaten this snack. That taste always brings me back to that I've had some experience working in Hollywood, the hospital.

I’ve noticed a fetish for the phrase “based on a true story.” In some cases, it automatically makes people I think it makes sense that many people's first attempt more interested, or it makes it feel more incredible, at creative writing is poetry—it is the form that most that it “really happened.” There is something both closely mimics the unconscious. It embraces the scary and cultish to me about anyone who says “I have unknowable of it all that we’re trying to work through. the answers, I'll tell you how to really live,” you know, And I think the reason it is embarrassing to look back people who are all like, “I want the facts. What oil do I at poetry you’ve written is because it doesn't make eat that will keep me healthy—coconut oil or avocado sense. It's esoteric, so mysterious, so personal, that it oil?” It's constantly changing, you know? People will is untranslatable to someone who didn't live in your preach one thing, and then a single article comes out, brain; who didn't live in your body. It's always inter- and suddenly that thing becomes, like, never again. esting to me: the process of maybe feeling something, but how do you get someone to feel it with you—that’s There’s a fetish in the culture for being able to discern a whole other thing you have to learn to do, if what you the truth, but there are people living in entirely want to do is write stuff for other people to read and get different realities from our own. In writing these something out of. essays for Rookie, I had to get fact-checked for the first time in my life. It's strange, because I don't think there AW: You write poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and now, is one single thing that two people would describe, that scripts for film and TV. How do varying degrees of both have experienced, in the same way. So that hightruth operate across the different mediums that you lighted for me what I don't know. I can only describe a work with? reality in writing, and can only be true to that reality.

writing the essay, and the form has somewhat become a way for young people, queer folks, and people of color to confess their traumas. And that gets consumed in a certain way, and that gets fact-checked by a whole culture, and then that becomes evidence for more truth. There's something about that whole process that feels so unverified and so exploitative. And though I didn’t ever feel comfortable, I participated in it.

AW: In “How it Feels,” you write, “I think everyone just wants to make something touchable.” I love the idea of writing something that is touchable in both the physical and emotional senses. Have you read, experienced, or seen something recently that has felt touchable to you, or something that you've been touched by?

JZ: The films of Yasujiro Ozu and Abbas Kiarostami have been so impactful recently. I’ve started listening to Beach House again—the album Depression Cherry, I love. My friend Victoria Ruiz is in this band based in Providence called Downtown Boys, and I went to their concert a few months ago—I couldn't even use words to tell you how it was because it was beyond words. As far as poetry goes, I started reading Danez Smith, and always like to read my friends Tommy Pico and Morgan Parker. I love to read one of their poems out loud at the end of a long day.

ALEX WESTFALL B’20 is patiently waiting for My Baby First Birthday—which Mitski said “devoured her”—out in May 2020 via Tin House Books.

JZ: I'm curious to know what you mean when you say I’m not sure there is much more that I, as a fiction writer “true.” Or are you asking me to define what truth is? and poet, can do. Maybe that's why I stopped writing essays. There are so many expectations placed on

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10

KAINAN SA DUWAR FINDING HOME IN A FILIPINO RESTAURANT IN AMMAN

BY Olivia Mayeda ILLUSTRATION Olivia Mayeda DESIGN Alex Westfall

Across the traffic circle, through screens of dust and exhaust, I could see that the long line of sandy buildings met an abrupt end. An empty lot opened up to a rare, sprawling view of the hills of Amman. The sun sat over the earth like a yolk, and I followed it to the vacancy. One month into my intensive Arabic program in Jordan, I decided to explore a neighborhood in Jabal Amman near Second Circle. I was missing home, severely out of place in a program designed for forehead. wannabe CIA analysts and American ambassadors “Kamusta ka?” asked the woman on the other side to fill-in-the-blank country. Meanwhile, I dreamt of the counter, knocking me out of my haze. A golden up new ice cream flavors like miso-candied morrel Fortune Cat sat on the display case, rigid, save for its or labneh chamomile when I was bored in class and right paw, which boxed the air endlessly in anticipation made Palestinian Makloubeh and rolled grape leaves of new customers. with my host mom, Faiza, on the weekends. I watched “Mabute! Kamusta ka?” I responded automatically friends rap and perform slam poetry in Arabic at open with the only Tagalog I knew. mic night at the House of Dreams and rewatched the “Are you hungry?” she asked in English, hearing opening scene of Eat Drink Man Woman when it rained. my accent. She adjusted the fold of her hijab under her When the light turned from frothy yellow to the chin. deep orange of a duck egg, I turned back to the road, “You don’t have halo-halo, do you?” thinking of my parents’ cooking, and encountered a “I’ll make it for you.” second sun. This one had abbreviated rays that termiI asked her how much it was, and she waited nated in round petals. Three buttery stars guarded the patiently while my fingernails dug at the bottom of solar blossom on a triangular void, clasped onto two my backpack picking up grit and paper scraps. I was 85 edges by blue and red stripes. Below, magnified photos qirsh short. of food laminated sliding glass doors. It wasn’t just any “That’s okay,” she laughed, brushing what little sun, I realized, all at once recognizing the pixelated change I had produced from the counter into her palm. plates of food as sinigang, lumpia, and pancit—it was a “Sit.” Filipino one, blooming on the flimsy plastic flag of my She slipped through two hanging canvas panels mom’s birthplace. I followed my feet in disbelief to the dividing the dining area from the kitchen. I sat at a long doors and slid them open. The smell registered first: plank jutting out from the wall. Fraying duct tape lined simmering coconut milk and dried bay leaves and the the edges of the wood, serving no apparent purpose. pungent oil left over in the pan after my grandma fries At the plank in the opposite wall, two women ate from tilapia. I was convinced that some inexplicable portal plates of rice and what looked like dinuguan: a stew of had opened to my grandma’s kitchen in the middle of chili, vinegar, garlic, and pork blood. As a kid, I was the Ammanian hills. ashamed whenever my mom made it. I would mimic Like Grandma’s kitchen, Kainan Sa Duwar was the disgusted expressions of my friends when they smaller than my bedroom on the other side of the came over to our house, horrified by our vampirism, city, cases of coconut milk cans shoved in the back but I grew to appreciate its unrivaled richness over corner. As a kid, I always knew it would be a good day time. at Grandma’s house if I saw those familiar brown and The chef returned with a familiar, psychedelic white labels peeking out of the garbage—a promise arrangement of layers of red and green Jell-o and sweet that coconut milk chicken adobo bubbled in a blue beans on a bed of condensed milk-drenched shaved enameled cast iron pot on her stove. ice nested with a scoop of deep purple ube ice cream, a Displayed in what looked like a recommissioned square of leche flan, and, of course, Rice Krispies. I dug gelato case were tubs of golden battered shrimp, in, excavating each layer one by one, overcome with stewed chicken liver, and whole fried fish towered childlike bliss. The flan was dense, barely jiggling from one on top of the other in alternating orientations like the bowl to my mouth, just the way my mom made it— tempura jenga, the glass windshield so scrubbed and no skimping on egg yolks. scored in a past life to the point of fogginess. Lining the shelves on the walls were kutsinta, the caramelly +++ medallion sticky rice cakes I would sneak from my grandma’s pantry. There was turon filled with banana One of my earliest memories is of resting my cheek on and langka—jackfruit—wrapped in pastry and deep the cold, granite countertop in my parents’ kitchen in fried. When I was six, I crouched on a stool, helping my the summer. Across the counter, my mom, wearing mom fold dough around slivers of brown sugar-dipped slippers taken from a hotel, scooped an overripe banana and langka for my grandpa’s surprise birthday avocado into an old plastic bowl of whole milk. She party, but I was clumsy and didn’t tuck the dough into spooned in white sugar and used a fork to mash the itself properly. I watched the filling bubble out of its creamy avocado meat against the sides of the bowl so wrapper, filling the pot of oil with cinnamon and loose that deep green paste burst between the metal tines. fruit. “Oops,” my mom laughed, kissing me on the “This is what we would have in the Philippines

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when there was nothing else. Just milk, avocado from the neighbor’s tree, and a little sugar. Here, Olivia, try.”

She brought the rim of the bowl to my mouth. The milk was a muted, Hulk green and chunks of avocado stuck to the sides of the bowl, browning from oxidation. My mom, having grown up in a household where abundance was unfamiliar, raised my sister and I not to be picky. I took a sip without hesitation. Fatty, sugary molecules lathered the inside of my cheeks. It was rich and delicious.

Afternoons in my grandma’s kitchen in Pinole, one nucleus of the Northern Californian Filipinx community, taught me the intuitiveness of good food.

Pork stewed in coconut milk and oxtail served with fermented krill paste were some of my favorite meals from childhood. They were neither simple nor extravagant, but every bit as sumptuous as the fine dining at French or Italian restaurants in the East Bay. There was something just as indulgent about fork-mashed avocado, milk, and sugar as there was about a slab of pan-seared foie gras.

Still, when the upscale Filipino restaurant—FOB Kitchen—debuted in Oakland, my parents complained about how expensive it was. The only Filipino food they would pay for was fast food halo-halo and breakfast combos of longanisa sausage, garlic rice, and a fried egg at Jollibee for a grand total of four dollars.

“If we’re paying that much we should just go across the street to Pizzaiolo!” my dad groaned at the dashboard one night while we were deciding where to have dinner. There was something about exposed brick and imported prosciutto di parma that put an immigrant family like mine in the mood for 30 dollar chicken. +++ Kainan Sa Duwar turned out to be something of a hub for the Filipinx community of Jabal Amman, and it didn’t pander to anyone. Produce was bought wholesale out of a van that came by every couple days. The woman who had served me was known tenderly by her patrons as Tita Thelma, or simply Ate, a term of respect used when addressing an older woman. Tita had been living in Jordan for over thirty years, and she had four daughters, all studying back home in the Philippines.

When I returned two days later, eight men were sitting at the left plank eating shrimp. One of them was a soldier in an exchange program between the Filipino and Jordanian air forces. He was accompanying a fleet of jets on loan from the Jordanian military back to the Philippines in another six months. Another was a company driver, two of them students, here to study the Quran, and the other four were civil engineers.

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They met in a pickup basketball league in Amman and became a team. After failed attempts at English and Tagalog, we spoke only in Arabic.

“Sit,” they said, and a bowl of rice and shrimp was assembled in front of me before I could sit down.

I asked them if there were any other good Filipino restaurants in Amman.

“Only this one!”

Tita Thelma smiled and showed me a framed picture of her and the team she kept by the register. We peeled the shrimp with our fingers, and they told me that they missed the fuller tropical air of home. When all that was left were serrated antennae and translucent scales, I noticed a golden orchid painted on the bottom of my bowl, and I thought of my grandma’s garden in Pinole. Thick stems and waxy petals in various stages of life and death rocketing from the depths of repurposed paint cans. She would water each row, telling me that when she was my age, she would run lunch over to her grandfather while he tilled the family farm. We had taro, bitter melon, sweet potatoes, avocado trees, rice, corn, everything!

The electric insect trap crackled a neon lilac, startling only me. The soldier, Romnick, rolled a log of baklava as dense as a roll of quarters onto my plate. I asked him how he liked living in Amman, and he said it was “okay,” breaking through layers of filo dough with his molars, “most of the time.” It was worse for the Filipina women who worked in the homes of Jordanian families as housekeepers, he said, who were tasked with nearly anything the family needed at all times.

“They don’t get to eat with the families you know,” Romnick continued. “They have to eat in a separate room.”

I asked him if that was the worst he’d heard, and he stopped peeling his shrimp, leaving it fleshy and half armored in its bowl. “No.” After finishing my homework and a plate of dinuguan, I took two cans of coconut milk home with me.

I left them on my bedside table next to the tea candle, the avocado seed I was hoping would sprout but never did, and the persimmon Faiza had left for me because she knew it was my favorite: a makeshift shrine to all the women in my life who fed and cared for others before doing the same for themselves.

I came back to eat Tita’s food every week for the next three months. I met a lot of the women Romnick had told me about. Like many of the women in my family, they had left the Philippines—their homes, their spouses, and their children—to find employment as domestic workers for affluent families in the Middle East. For decades, migrant Filipina workers in the Middle East have been the backbone of an otherwise

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debt-ridden Filipino economy. In theory, these women are granted the same rights as Jordanian workers under Jordanian labor laws, but domestic abuse against Black and Southeast Asian domestic workers is commonplace.

One woman, Lorewina, left her home in Mindanao 15 years ago to work for a family in Saudi Arabia. She always came to Kainan with her best friend, Edna— also a domestic worker from the Philippines. They met at the supermarket in Galleria Mall while buying groceries for their employers.

“Edna looked so lost,” Lorewina remembered. “I helped her, and we became friends.” They told me over pancit that it had been six months since either of them had been home to see their families, loops of translucent glass noodles hanging off the edges of our plates like necklaces. Neither of them had been given a formal day off by their employers until years into their contracts—for Lorewina, it took ten years of working for the same family. When Edna asked her employer, whom she called “Madam,” for a day off several months into her contract, “Every day is your day off” was the only response she got.

“But Madam and her children like Filipino food,” she added, “they love pancit.” Edna and Lorewina hugged me before they went back to work. “You make me miss my daughter!” Edna said to me, tears in her eyes.

I heard more stories: stories of physical and sexual abuse and pay witheld for months. While Jordanian law dictates that this kind of treatment is illegal, many women don’t go to the authorities.

“Embassies trust Jordanians more,” Tita told me over lunch one afternoon, “If they report the abuse, they’ll be sent back.”

Black and Southeast Asian domestic workers were everywhere in Amman. I never endured their experiences, but I brushed up against lesser symptoms: the wary closeness of store managers tailing me from one aisle of clothes to the next, cars packed with young Jordanian men slowing down to solicit my attention, sometimes in Tagalog, as I walked home from class.

One evening, as I ate my usual Armenian sausage sandwich at my favorite barbeque restaurant in the neighborhood of Weibdeh, I observed a familiar scene: a family sitting around a table, enjoying the same wax paper-wrapped meal. The parents tapped their phones while their three children fought over an iPad. A woman looked on, not sitting, but standing awkwardly where the register met the wall. She had thick, dark hair that reminded me of my mom, which reminded me of myself. She was a shadow, still and unspeaking at the edge of the frame, materializing only when one

of the children dropped a napkin or when the mother asked for her reading glasses. I felt myself fading too.

Kainan was the one place I felt at home while abroad, a home open to the public seven days a week from 8 to 12 a.m. The restaurant was everyone’s grandma’s kitchen, brought from oceans away in worndown bowls. It was where people, who looked like the pictures of my Grandpa Valentin when he was young and worked at a textile factory in Manila, came together after long shifts, after basketball games, and for the one day they had off every two months.

Before I left Amman, I brought the two brown and white cans from my bedside to the kitchen in the next room. I poured one into a pot on the stove and simmered it with chicken thighs, soy sauce, and bay leaves for my host mom’s dinner. I used the other to temper six egg yolks whisked in sugar and canned ube.

I cradled each yolk until the gelatinous white released through my fingers into the water glass below, leaving in my palm a yellow globe. I left the frozen coconut ube custard in an old pickle jar at the restaurant with the torn corner of a page.

“For Tita.”

OLIVIA MAYEDA B’21 is still looking for Filipino food in Providence. Hit her up if you have insights. She is also looking to start an ice cream company that invents Filipinx and Japanese ingredient-based flavors and is in search of a business partner. Serious inquiries only.

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BY Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Alex Westfall

GRIMES, DIGITAL EMBODIMENT, AND THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN LIVE AND RECORDED MUSIC Grimes delivered her performance at The Game Awards in traditional cyberpunk fashion. Hunched over a bulky computer terminal while lasers cast a Tron-like grid over the stage, the popstar borrowed from science fictions of the past to imagine a show in the future. At first, the concert could be mistaken for any other of Grimes’, who boasts a decade-long career making experimental electronic music. However, after the singer dons a headset halfway through the song and collapses into a smoking vat, the performance, it seems, is over. On the monitors behind her, a blue woman in a metallic dress and glowing hair is rendered from the feet up in a vast digital landscape, picking up the show from where Grimes left off. What’s immediately striking is how natural this transition feels. The woman on the screen bobs and twists just like Grimes, while the virtual cityscape below her leaves no desire to return to the physical stage from moments ago. The spectacle of Grimes herself is certainly lost, but the way the camera chases the new figure across its vast digital skyscrapers couldn’t be possible with only her flesh and blood. Shortly after, the avatar turns to dust, and the song fades out.

“I think live music is going to be obsolete soon,” said Grimes on the podcast Mindscape. “People are actually just gravitating toward the clean, finished, fake world. Everyone wants to be in a simulation. They don’t actually want the real world.”

Music fans’ immediate uproar would appear to disprove Grimes’ sweeping claims—how could something become obsolete that no one is ready to surrender? As headlines like “Grimes Believes Artificial Intelligence Will Make Live Music Obsolete” circulated, fans took to Twitter to express their outrage, with one performer outright calling Grimes “the voice of silicon fascist privilege.” For many, the live concert is a critical part of engaging with any musician’s work.

The uniqueness of each show, the physical presence of the artist, and the communal experience of a crowd all culminate in something computers can’t simulate. However, Grimes is far from the first musician to perform digitally. Hatsune Miku, a fictional animated popstar, has been touring worldwide as a digital projection since 2012. At Coachella the same year, a holographic 2Pac performed alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Even without embodiment, these performers are able to please a crowd of festival goers all the same.

What’s lost in uniqueness is made up for in novelty.

Digital bodies are more or less capable of performing just as any human might. Grimes asks if they could ever replace live performance altogether. +++ In 1967, American rock band The Doors stopped playing their instruments in the middle of a live, televised performance. Several monitors had been left onstage, tuned to the channel of their very broadcasting. After turning up the volume, the band sat and watched their own performance on TV on TV, the rebroadcasting of the performance becoming the performance itself. This stunt gestures toward a truth concealed within any mediated culture: the original, essential piece of art is not the event the cameras have been pointed at—it’s the recording itself. Recording is not a foreign presence that captures a live event and distributes it to an audience that wasn’t physically there—the live performance is the recorded performance. The camera is as much a part of it as the guitar.

This story runs contrary to common assumptions about live performance, which performance theorist Phillip Auslander helps us understand: “the categories of the live and the recorded are defined in a mutually exclusive relationship, in that the notion of the live is premised on the absence of recording and

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as the live. One of the most iconic album covers in contemporary music, The Clash’s London Calling does not depict the band in Wessex Studios, where it was recorded—its cover features their bassist on stage, smashing his guitar into the New York Palladium.

The live allows the studio recording to exist, because it suggests that there is something authentic or real behind an otherwise opaque, mass-produced object.

It’s barely a secret that every artist on a major label has a team of writers, sound engineers, and creative consultants. However, rock music depends on the mythology of the live performance as the origin of its art object, even though its origin is a studio. Listeners expect the artist to have written a song to translate their strife into something beautiful; rarely do they sever the music from the body that bears its voice. The mythology surrounding the performer informs the experience of listening.

The live concert thus becomes a way to access a mythological authenticity. If a guitarist is unable to perform a solo they once recorded, the musician loses their integrity. For the rockist, the listener who subscribes to this cultural mythology, the live is where performers can’t hide behind the facade of autotune or 30-person writing teams. Without an unmediated live, there would be no way to know whether the talent behind the record is real. The binary of live and recorded can thus be theorized in terms of Baudrillard’s simulacra, in that both parts of the binary are “conceived from the point-of-view of their very reproducibility,” resulting in a “reversal of origin.”

Neither the record nor the performance are “real”— both are artificial and point to the other as its origin.

This blame game produces its own reality that is both independent from and dominant over its audience; a play of signs called simulacra.

This simulated reality can be unweaved when the rules it defines for itself are revealed as arbitrary or merely referential. At a concert, tools like autotune break down the binary between live and recorded by suggesting that there never was an authentic origin to the art piece—it was always artificial. In the rockist mythology, all forms of technology threaten authenticity because they mediate the presence of the performer, allowing for deception. Of course, a tool like autotune can be employed deliberately—that is, without the intent to obscure—just as Jimi Hendrix might use an electronic pedal to create a new sound from his guitar. Therein lies the arbitrariness of the opposition of live and recorded: it’s not that the live can’t be mediated by technology to still be considered live, it’s that a specific threshold of mediation has been culturally constructed, and varies from generation to generation. Up until a certain point, the live artist can appropriate technology and still be authentic. Whether it’s Bob Dylan going electric or a hip hop MC rapping over a sample, the appropriation of technology into live performance has always threatened the fictional authenticity of the live, only to eventually become the status quo.

Grimes’ performance and comments on Mindscape mark the most recent iteration of this trend. If the performer onstage is a digital body, then everything about the performer’s image is thrown into question. How can we locate the origin of the song on the record without a voice, much less a body to place it onto? The ability to verify the physicality, much less the entire existence of the popstar, is lost. Of course, this has always been the case behind the thin curtain of simulacra—a name on an album has never needed to point to a living person in order to have a page on Spotify. Digital performance could set us free from +++ this limiting narrative of authenticity, but its audience The origin of the rock record as a world of its own would first have to be ready to let it go. becomes obscured under the mythology of its origin

the defining fact of the recorded is the absence of the live.” Under traditional assumption, liveness implies spontaneity and authenticity, whereas the recorded is more contrived or artificial. The live performance is a moment when the audience can access the unmediated performer, without the meddling of sound engineers or the opportunity to redo a take. Upon further inspection, this binary breaks down; technologies of recording have mediated the way audiences experience performance from the introduction of the modern rock record. This false opposition plays a crucial role in weaving the mythology of the artist, both in the popular imagination and in the music industry itself.

Auslander describes how common understanding maintains that “the live event is ‘real’ and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow artificial reproductions of the real.” In this case, the assumption would be that The Doors’ concert is the origin of their art product while the record is a mass-produced recreation. While The Doors challenged this assumption by placing a recorded event within a live event, such that the live event very literally became its own reproduced depiction, this binary had been threatened from the very beginning of the rock genre. Whereas a jazz fan attends a performance to see a unique improvisation, or a classical listener evaluates the success of a performance through paper scores from the 17th century, the original, essential object for the rock listener, with few exceptions, is the studio record.

Pre-rock genres are certainly recorded and mass produced in the same market as rock, but the content of these records is not predicated upon the act of recording. An art object exists outside of these records. Classical records always distinguish a specific orchestra performing a specific symphony—one recording never claims to be the definitive version of Beethoven’s Fifth. Although jazz records might not make this distinction in their title, the unique, singular recording session that constitutes an album like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme informs the listening experience. The recording does not insist upon its own reality; it still points to a specific moment or event. For rock, however, the studio album is its own world.

Abbey Road is not a recording of something that happened; it doesn’t capture something that exists independent of it—Abbey Road is Abbey Road. Its iconic cover and audio mastering are just as much a part of Abbey Road as the music itself. To witness John Lennon perform “Octopus's Garden” is not to encounter the original piece of art in the same way one might see the Mona Lisa in person after only encountering reproductions on a postcard or on a TV program. For the rock album, the mass-produced object is the original art, and the performance is a reproduction of the recording.

The success of the record is not gauged by how closely it mirrors the live show. Instead, the success of the live show is gauged by how closely the performer can capture the essence of the record.

I first saw Grimes at a music festival after my freshman year of high school. I don’t remember much, other than how badly I wanted to hear “Genesis” performed live. Every time the audio faded between songs, I got excited all over again thinking the next track would be “Genesis.” When she finally closed with it, everything around the song made it incredible; the backup dancers, the massive fan blowing her hair every which way. “Genesis” sounded great live, but it was performed nearly identical to the studio recording.

What made the performance special was the context, not the content of the song.

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+++ Two decades before Grimes first took to the stage, widely speculated claims that the Grammy Awardwinning R&B duo Milli Vanilli had lip-synced on their record were confirmed by the performers. The fallout—having their Grammy revoked, full refunds for purchased albums, lawsuits, and petitions—should come as no surprise. A manufactured talent threatens the rockist by revealing that the origin the album pointed to never had to be there for the music to exist.

Moments like this are not a crisis because an artist cheated their fame, but because now any artist could conceivably have a ghost performer on a record. Of course, it's always been the case that the mythology of the performer did not mirror the origin of their art, but crisis pulls away its plausible deniability. For Auslander, moments where reality leaks through can be catastrophic for the industry as a whole. He writes, “If the distinction between live and mediatized performance were to be revealed as empty, then the ability to sell the same material over and over again—as a studio recording, as a music video, as a live performance, as a video of the live performance, as a live album—would disappear.” Milli Vanilli can no longer step foot on stage and offer the authentic, unmediated version of the record once it has been revealed that it never existed.

Many of such crises have happened, and yet the rockist mythology persists in the popular imagination, even for genres that came after rock. For Baudrillard, the persistence of this myth can be attributed to the regenerative power of nostalgia, “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality...an escalation of the true, of the lived experience.” In this case, the “real” in question is the belief that the live and the recorded exist in polar opposition. In the years following the Milli Vanilli scandal, the music industry placed a heightened emphasis on the authentic: the acoustic, the song about love and the song about death, things from the heart of the artist whose truth could never be manufactured.

No piece of media exemplified this more than MTV Unplugged, the NPR Tiny Desk Concert series of the 1990s. This program depicted acoustic performances by music industry titans, playing into the nostalgia of fans who missed ‘the good old days’ before technology distanced the performer from the fan. Its title alone locates the program as distinct from the qualities that threaten the live.

The irony here, that a televised program could simulate an unmediated performance, is clear. Yet

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

this series of acoustic performances became a rite of passage for all corners of the industry. Crunchy icons like Neil Young were primed for Unplugged, but what about acts like Mariah Carey, without a single acoustic song in their catalog, or Bob Dylan, whose adoption of the electric began one of the first crises of mediation 30 years prior? MTV Unplugged perfectly embodies Baudrillard’s conception of nostalgia in that it produces a myth of origin whose truth only has basis in opposition to the threat to simulation. The past that Unplugged draws nostalgia from never really existed; there never was a time where rock was unmediated. However, the crisis of a moment like Milli Vanilli makes the rockist vulnerable to such false histories.

The threat to simulation only tightens its grasp. +++ “Delete Forever,” the first single of Grimes’s latest album and her first release following her comments on the obsolescence of music, begins with acoustic guitar chords. In an interview, she admits that she is not playing the guitar here, that this song is the “opposite of Grimes,” that she wanted “something raw.” The subject of the lyrics is death from the opioid crisis.

There is a violin solo, perhaps the last instrument that comes to mind when imagining a robot apocalypse. In the music video, she sits solemn atop a white throne in a galactic, Ozymandian landscape. The set plays homage to Akira, an Icarus story about a boy who fuses with technology in an attempt to be more than human, and then explodes. One YouTuber comments, “this song makes me nostalgic for a year that doesn’t exist,” and Baudrillard smiles from his grave.

The album is titled Miss Anthropocene after the geological period in which humans are the dominant influence on the climate. Everything about this project feels like a past being imagined from a distant future, a mythical nostalgia for our present. By crowning herself ruler of this epoch, she signals its approaching end. The rhetoric of ‘computer replacing man’ from her interviews is still here, but Grimes has assumed a new role. The harbinger of obsolescence no longer descends into machine mid-performance—she clings to the things that make her human. That this song takes on the death of her friends to heroin is no coincidence. The unique, inevitable experience of death couldn’t be any further from the world of immortal data, a truth winked at by the title of “Delete Forever.”

The public rollout for Miss Anthropocene follows a familiar script. A new form of technology, in this case digital embodiment, threatens the human qualities of live performance by revealing how the difference

between the recorded and the live is largely simulated.

Fans get upset. A performer—in this case, the very same one—provides an antidote through nostalgia.

The threatened simulation has been regenerated, even stronger. This is not to say that Grimes has pulled a fast one on her entire audience, or even intended to reinstate this binary opposition. Rather, it goes to show how the pattern of simulation deprives Grimes of the ability to imagine a post-human concert. It’s not that artificial representation could never replace live performance in theory; it’s that the simulation that necessitates such a lie to stabilize power would never allow it. Considering how pissed her interview made everyone, it’s no wonder she brought in the violin solo.

The rest of Miss Anthropocene furthers this motif.

As the refrain of “You’ll miss me when I’m not around” goes: “if you don’t bleed, you don’t die.” On the closing verse, a pitched-up, synthetic voice appears over her vocals. The reverence for the body and the fear of a bleak, immortal future is just as present as on “Delete Forever.” Even the cover shares these technophobic undertones. Yes, it features a 3D rendering of an angel taking a selfie, but it also includes the graphical user interface of a photoshop-esque software and dozens of lines of code superimposed behind the image. If Grimes wants to celebrate human materiality, what better way to do that than by calling attention to the hollow, nascent, digital body, which doesn’t bleed when you cut it, but crashes. +++ Grimes’ album might have answered her own questions, but is it still worth asking what performance could do without humans. Four years after he watched himself on TV on TV, Jim Morrison of The Doors passed away after a heroin overdose. In an interview about “Delete Forever,” Grimes offers an explanation: “we see so many artists dying because people use drugs to chase the heightened state of emotion they need to be a great performer.” The rockist obsession with authenticity exploits the human qualities of the performer it claims to exalt. Pitchfork named the Grimes track “Oblivion” from several years back the second-best song of the decade. The lyrics recount Grimes’ sexual assault, and the tastemaking publication lauds it for “galvanizing pain into a complex anthem of vulnerability and nihilism.” Grimes, on being asked to sing it every time she gets on stage: “Fuck, this is crazy that I have to just constantly think about this song.”

ANDY RICKERT B‘21 is exploring the possibility of a digital Spring Weekend.

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What does it mean to fix the very system of public education in America? As engineer W. Edwards Deming said of the things we build: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” This is equally true of mechanical systems and of social creations such as public schools. However, among nationwide surveys, barely half of high school students describe their schools as “satisfactory” and over 70% say they are bored “some to most of the time” that they are in class. Be it student absenteeism, decaying buildings in Providence, or the chronic underfunding of education across the nation, public schools seem to be failing. I’d like to propose, however, that the American school system is working perfectly: the issue lies in what it was designed to do. As it stands currently, public schools limit student success through a process of controlling homogenization.

The American public education system is incredibly complex. Not only are there excessive bureaucratic complexities in the funding and running of individual schools, but the majority of decision-making power and funding is concentrated on the local level. While there are occasional elections, most governmental positions are appointed directly by the state governor or other political bodies without the general public’s approval. For this reason, school policy across the nation is as heterogeneous and complex as the diverse groups it serves. However, there is also much about American public schools that work the same. Despite the many structural intricacies, such as complex budgets and ever-changing curricular requirements, there are commonalities. All of us would be capable of recognizing a school and are familiar with common structural characteristics and practices such as classrooms, teachers, and grades.

However, public education hasn’t always been available to all. The modern conception of a standardized public education system emerged near the start of the nineteenth century in Europe and was closely followed by a near-identical system in the United States. While there may have been a political revolution in 1776, the United States still modeled itself, culturally and philosophically, after Europe. In the 1840s, Horace Mann, an educational reformer and politician, proposed a plan to institute an extensive public education program in Massachusetts. In order to pass such a large and expensive piece of legislature, Mann convinced his fellow congressmen of his most steadfast belief: “Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.” Like much of Mann’s philosophy, this quote is embedded in a militaristic and homogenizing belief about what it means to be an American citizen.

Unfortunately, today, the public rarely thinks critically about education as a civic responsibility. In fact, a group of students has recently sued the state of Rhode Island for providing inadequate civic education.

Surely, Mann would be displeased with such an ignorant implementation of his vision. However, in the 19th century, Mann’s principle to educate everyone in the entire nation was highly visible and was created as a means to advance American democracy. Mann argued that by educating everyone, the people would be able to keep the government in check.

Under the leadership of Horace Mann, public education came to America, not as a way to uplift individuals, but to ensure the government could be checked by the people effectively. Mann was a staunch supporter of the power of standardized opinions going so far as to say, “We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.”

It is through education and socialization that we learn what is accepted by the majority and what is not. Without an educational process, our democratic norms would fall into chaos. Just like other state-created systems, education was essential to properly maintain peace in society. For Mann, “Jails and state prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more you must have of the former.” There is a clear philosophical relationality between schools and prisons that extends beyond the school-to-prison pipeline. For Mann, public education was nothing more than a secondary line of policing. By ensuring everyone was in agreement about what the laws were and how to enact them, school would keep citizens in line. For Mann, the education system was designed to homogenize society.

Public education—as envisioned by Horace Mann—is often described by education reformers as a “factory system.” There is some validity in this comparison and it serves as a good model to understand the school system but is not entirely accurate. Neither

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NEWS

Mann nor any of his contemporaries spoke of a factory model. The term itself is a product of school reform movements from the late 20th century whose goal was to reimagine the entire way school defines a successful student.

While the “factory model” highlights much of the day-to-day functioning of the school system, it isn’t as helpful for describing how school homogenizes individuals. Instead, the theory of the Panopticon provides a good model to understand how discipline, examination, and systemization combine to create complacency within schools. Designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham near the end of the 18th century and first built in 1817, the Panopticon is a prison in which cells cover the outside walls of a rotunda with a central guard tower in the middle. While the singular prison guard cannot actually watch everyone at once, the threat of possibly constant surveillance would scare the prisoners into self-regulating their behavior.

Famously, the postmodernist thinker, Michel Foucault applied the metaphor of the Panopticon to better understand discipline as it occurred in prisons, hospitals, and even schools.

However, the theory of the Panopticon assumes that subjects enter already knowing how to behave, which is rarely the case. One common pattern with panoptic prisons is that those imprisoned are made to go through a few weeks of intense punishment and scrutiny before they are expected to“self-regulate.”

In other words, in the logic of the panopticon, those imprisoned need to learn the rules before they can follow them.

This period of intense punishment and scrutiny is the primary job of schools today. They serve as a smallscale simulation of the rest of the social world. Clear rules and standards of success help guide student behaviors. Some of the harsher edges are taken off and teachers tend to be more kind than the panopticon’s prison guards, but the effects remain similar.

The education system measures one’s success by how closely students are able to follow the rules. Primarily, to avoid getting punished by teachers or administrators, students must learn to respect their teachers, refrain from physical violence, and arrive to class punctually—all characteristics of social life outside of school as well.

Consider your own school experience. Teachers only scold the students whose behavior is disruptive to the rest of the class or in clear violation of school policy. However, school has an added complication.

Unlike prison, which is exclusively for people who are not conforming with the rules of society, school is designed for all children. As a result, there is a multitiered measurement of success that enables people to measure their ability to conform through getting good grades. Those who struggle have their future career options limited or are even held back to repeat the lesson. This especially hurts marginalized groups who already have to struggle more to meet the same requirements because of systemic inequalities perpetrated outside of the school building. Those who struggle economically, for instance, rarely have as much time or resources to study for tests as those who can afford tutoring and don’t need to work a job.

Mann’s system of education exists not as a Panopticon in and of itself, but rather as a critical component of the Panoptic aspects of post-secondary society. By providing students with extensive rules and continually reminding us how well we succeed at following them, we are inculcated with the rules of complacent behavior, and we naturally begin to self-regulate.

Is there anything wrong with self-regulation in schools? In general, those involved in education reform paint schools as total failures. While I do agree that a panoptic education is concerning, there is an extensive grey area when it comes to thinking about the purpose of school. If all they did was teach people to speak out, we would likely be in the midst of a rebellion. Furthermore, following the rules in school and self-regulating is the fastest way to succeed financially.

The most common and successful pathway into the middle-class today is through the pursuit of STEM fields or other “professional” degrees. For those who wish to succeed in American economic society and provide for their families, self-regulating is central.

There is a very good argument to be made that this is, in fact, a good thing. It is incredibly honorable and valuable to provide for one’s family. However, I still wonder if this is all school should be doing. As young children, we are often full of our own definitions for

success and school drives us toward a singular idea of what our life goals should be.

Education has changed since Mann’s ideas were first envisioned nearly two centuries ago. While there have been adjustments to school curricula—Latin and Greek, for example, are no longer taught in most public school—the largest changes on a structural level have happened on the national stage. The goals of President Obama’s Race To The Top (RTTT) fund highlight some of the priorities of modern education. The plan establishes four priorities for K-12 education: 1. Developing a national definition of educational standards 2. Measuring student success via testing 3. Continuing teacher development 4. Turning around the lowest-achieving schools.

Interestingly, priorities one and two of RTTT perfectly match the 200-year-old model of preparing students to fit into society by measuring their success in class and prioritizing standardized education, mirroring the goals of Mann and the theories of Foucault. Priorities three and four are what’s new in schooling. Priority three is driven by much of the new research from the early 2000s that suggests that the largest predictor of a student’s success in class is having skilled and caring teachers that look like the students they are teaching.

If students have a teacher they can trust, it makes students more successful in the classroom. Priority four echoes coded language for replacing public schools with public charter options. It is often easier to scrap a failing school and try again with an alternate system than to fix the school from the inside.

The philosophy that guides charter schools is to make traditional schools “better, faster, and stronger” as Todd Dickson, founder of Valor Charter Schools in Tennessee, put it. They generally try to tailor the broad programming of schools to fit a particular type of student (generally a group that has historically struggled in school). While this approach often seems to work, the highly specialized and unregulated nature of charters makes it difficult to evaluate their success along standardized lines and has critics concerned that the charters are not providing crucial services to their students. Most concerningly, charters often take away large funding streams from the local public schools that need it the most. By turning around our lowest-performing schools through the creation of charters, the American education system abandons the very public schools that need care and attention the most.

Be it in a charter school today or a Massachusetts schoolroom in 1840, American public education continues to provide the same model of success to its students. By inculcating young minds with a strong sense of the rules, schools work to make sure students fit into society. Like a Panoptic prison, regulated society works because we watch ourselves. It’s because of school that we know what behavior to watch ourselves for. Is this bad? Not everyone can be above-average, but should a good education provide us with the tools to reinvent the world if we want to? As poet Gloria E. Anzaldua says, “Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.” Education is ultimately the fundamental basis for constructing those images. What if schools helped us each curate our own blank canvas instead of simply photocopying the world around us? I believe school can be more than just training for us to live in a social version of the Panopticon even if that is all that we are told to expect from the real world. If we truly wish to use education to build a better world, certainly we should ensure Mann’s goals are met. A better world should have a stable society, but a good world should also be more than just stable. As the great American philosopher—and contemporary of Horace Mann— Henry David Thoreau writes, “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind.” So why must school define success so narrowly? Surely, there is more than one way to thrive. A proper public education should embrace this multitude and teach students to self-evaluate not self-regulate.

ADRIAN OTEIZA B’23 is watching you.

13 MAR 2020

BY Adrian Oteiza ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Alex Westfall

A PANOPTIC EDUCATION HOW PUBLIC SCHOOLS TEACH US TO WATCH OURSELVES

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

16

love poem melting in the swell of the moving shifting bits of I can’t hear anything but the wind running against my neck — moan gargle whisper enough without trembling dig into the cement sidewalk of this or that or open or closed or curbed curling kicking

Oh but when I come, I will begin & end in a center nowhere I am an outskirt here in this dream-imagining we are everywhere I am never by myself in a tornado remembering and returning settling & you, the ground tugs closer beneath feet believing mistrusting, maybe, our mass body boulder so that time runs slowly across back shoulders hunched hard around the yielding warm of us gooey not yet ready I think of skin softening in the sunshine again & how everything jogs into stillness just in time

BY Stella Binion ILLUSTRATION Leslie Bena-

vides

DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

& even if I’m saying something useful I’m not saying anything with a locked jaw cemented with I know until I

—soothed hands & lick across back’s blade & a now belonging in the same place— know we will not fleet when buried somewhere

pulsing molten a want for soupiness

a choice so clear

a dream of August I remember how August got caught / hot & salt-soaked in the back of my throat / again I guzzle when I want to gulp the sun our most powerful body hidden behind a smudged sky / morning until dusk recently / still maybe the cement keeps the earth so cold here / how would we know? how come skin stays blue in a bath tub steaming / soaked soaping / shea-rubbed / still there must not be oxygen on my surfaces again my brown / loud-mouthed / father-born / all of a sudden hidden each day covered / woken / without sun each morning, sitting in the front room, I have woken up & painted in the sun on a palette I mix shades of daylight / the ones that I know the ones hidden behind bank buildings / man-made metal circuses / circuits florescent-soaked it’s a cloudy day here / again shaded grey / land-burdened / standing still minutes pass / still lethargic without sun I become unmoving / again wombed / I remember the red in the skin that I know hot / soaked in the solar / lodged between the tissue we keep / hidden my mother says that our mother is hidden that we’ve made her still / recently I’ve been dreaming of leaving my home / a suitcase soaked in all the down pour from here & a ticket west / I set out for sun move away from what I know I dream of August / red / sticky / again I’ve only known waiting / a mourning cold / until summer returns again valleys / sanded / in the southwest / or nearby / hidden I’ve only ever believed what I know a city / myself in movement / a day on a subway / so much hung above my head / no place to be still no one asks / where is the sun?

I sit next to a window unopened / lying in a bath tub / soaping / relearning warm / soaked again / I am blue-soaked I know to / dry / bare my shoulders / prepare for sun I leave the front door unlocked / the key on the stoop unhidden / & even though I don’t

look back / I throw one last prayer / into the sky / still

17

LITERARY

13 MARCH 2020

land-kept / water-locked new skin / February-kept hard-shelled over / tight zygomatic / the swollen fruits of my face Savannah / shallow with water low / pulls her body in as a buoy I’ve dreamt of Lake Michigan monsters in moats around my bed / a shoe lace pull like puppet / at lungs and necks we all sink further toward spring water floor / littered Papa places his hands in his pocket / a rain hat / a mask tells stories of salt-water storms / five night clubs in Greenwich village a cigarette break in the back alleyway / drag / says lungs could still exhale the smoke then at the water’s edge I see no break in earth and sky / the in between / my home this land left to what devices / but the ones darting in airfields above ground near souls / in gas masses a stratosphere / over so many material things neon signs / plastic grocery bags / sidewalk trash next to drawn chalk moving beside me as though within all of us oil detonates beneath a current / of which our earth-body / my home did not want all this sorrow man-made from beauty / a vein poisonous politicized / machined not sure if I’m ready to go but I may / we may in a December-summer / February-skin peeling I’m soon to be years old / water’s surface melted Savannah-sister and I / a body spilling / a safety hazard in an oiled current a plastic buoy / no boats permitted in years a bottle / a shoelace a lung / a neck

rescue recollected

Wife

Husband

balcony

fiddles a colored-bright plastic ring

unrailed

Daughter

looped around fingers

this balcony above Tagus River

age two

spinning circles

pours to the Atlantic

undisturbed

serene the woman herself

fair-featured slight the man

Daughter

in brassiere and underwear

dark-skinned older

restless in still

sighing short stories to

sits shirtless

reading a newspaper

the woman cradles her

walks to the apartment

turns again

begins

shaking pushing

panic ripples

the sunny

door

grasps knob

turns

Husband stands

joins her attempt

breeze

between two parents

a building ledge

their unsettled infant

Inside

Little Boy

shaggy matured

features mirror baby sister’s

five

sits

television reruns

Rugrats Scooby-Doo

Father’s voice

Luca. Lucas!

Listening

his back

he wonders if he is in trouble

listen close

follow closely

his sister

wailing

His mother

breaths out a path

kitchen with keys

the stool

knocking pounds the balcony door a commercial jingle floats at

Mother has her serious voice

pressing his ear to the small hole of light

they keep yelling

Key. Key. where?

down the stairs

the hall

toward the

please be careful on the stool

look

there is a bowl

is there a bowl?

safety pins and rubber bands

like at Montessori

Get the keys.

Held-breath silence

ears pressed against

keyhole

the woman rocks Daughter

paces balcony edge cautious teetering Chink ring

looped around finger

of fear

Little Boy

door pushes forward

steady in stature

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

relief

metal

rushes remnants

unconcerned

LITERARY

18

content warning: police violence In New Bedford District Court on Monday, activist Sherrie Andre was found guilty of trespassing and disturbing the peace after participating in an anti-ICE protest in the summer of 2018. They were sentenced to 30 days in jail—the maximum sentence—to be served in the Bristol County House of Corrections. Inside the courthouse, the behavior of those wielding institutional power—the racism of the prosecutor, the apathy of the judge, the violence of the security guards—made shockingly evident how the criminalization of peaceful protest is legitimized inside the courtroom.

These charges are the result of a nonviolent direct action organized by members of the FANG Collective, of which Sherrie is a co-founder. By blockading the entrances to the Bristol County House of Corrections, the protest was intended to raise awareness about the horrific conditions inside the facility. The action was held in solidarity with a hunger strike by those detained inside the jail and marked the launch of FANG’s “Shut Down ICE” campaign.

“We are surprised by the guilty verdict, and shocked and enraged that the Judge decided to impose the maximum sentence on Sherrie, despite dozens of letters of support submitted on Sherrie’s behalf by community leaders,” said FANG in a statement. “This harsh sentence is ref lective of the violence that the Bristol County Sheriff ’s Department inf licts on people every single day.”

The Bristol County House of Corrections has received widespread national attention over its inadequate food, abusive guards, medical neglect, and lack of mental health care. According to the Boston Globe, the facility is responsible for a quarter of all jail suicides in Massachusetts, despite holding only 13 percent of the state’s jail population. The Bristol County House of Corrections is overseen by Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, who is currently facing lawsuits over the mistreatment of those held inside his facility and who infamously offered up the labor of ICE detainees to build President Trump’s southern border wall.

FANG’s protest was also meant to call attention to the ways in which local sheriffs control and dictate immigration policy. Bristol County is one of three counties in New England with a 287g agreement, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as immigration agents within their jurisdictions. This agreement allows police officers to question people about their immigration status and detain people on immigration charges.

Bristol County also has an Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA), a federal contract in which local jails and prisons provide space for those detained on immigration charges.

The trial itself was painful and drawn-out. Originally scheduled for January 7 and 8, the first day was inexplicably postponed, despite the full preparation of both the prosecution and the defense. Over 100 people showed up in support of Sherrie on January 7, but all were agressively removed from the courtroom. Once underway in early March, the trial lasted two full days.

Before the jury delivered their verdict, multiple security guards filed into the courtroom and faced those who had packed the room in support of Sherrie. After the verdict was delivered and the maximum sentence announced, the exclamations of shock, shouts, and audible gasps were followed by immediate and harsh directives from the court officers. All those who yelled out in support of Sherrie were ordered from the courtroom. One supporter who refused to move was violently arrested.

In addition to revealing the entrenched power of local immigration policy, Sherrie’s trial highlights the intentional way in which the criminal justice system chooses to debate not the brutality of the police or the violence of 287g agreements or the existence of the Bristol County House of Corrections but the technicalities of nonviolent protest. For all those fighting for the freedom and dignity of the people detained in Bristol County, the outcome of this trial is enraging.

“We will continue to support Sherrie in the coming weeks as well as all those impacted by the Sheriff ’s violent policies,” said FANG in a statement. “We will keep fighting to support our community and hold the Bristol County Sheriff ’s Department accountable for their violence.”

-SVH THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ANTI-ICE ACTIVIST SENTENCED TO 30 DAYS IN BRISTOL COUNTY JAIL