The College Hill Independent — Vol. 44 Issue 7

THE INDY*

03 IN THE NAME OF GOD 05 SUNDAY REFLECTIONS 13 DOGS, DROIDS, AND DRONES

Volume 44 Issue 07 08 April 2022

THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY*

Volume 44 Issue 07 08 April 2022

This Issue

Masthead*

00 UNTITLED

02 WEEK IN MUSIC

MANAGING EDITORS Ifeoma Anyoku Sage Jennings Isaac McKenna Alisa Caira

03 IN THE NAME OF GOD

WEEK IN REVIEW Masha Breeze Nora Mathews

Julian E. Linares Masha Breeze & Nora Mathews Kanha Prasad

FEATURES Anabelle Johnston Corinne Leong Amelia Wyckoff

05 SUNDAY REFLECTIONS Tierra Sherlock

09 LOSING CHINESE: FINDING THE SELF IN BETWEEN LANGUAGES Kathy Wang

NEWS Anushka Kataruka Nicole Kim Priyanka Mahat ARTS Jenna Cooley Justin Scheer Arden Shostak

11 FAITH WILDING Nell Salzman

13 DOGS, DROIDS, AND DRONES Sacha Sloan

15 “ANGLES OF JUDGEMENT” Mick Chivers

16 EPISODIC MEMORIES: TYLENOLS, TREMORS, AND TURBULENCE Faiza Chowdhury

17 “MONSTERS”

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Ayça Ülgen METRO Jack Doughty Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Sacha Sloan SCIENCE + TECH Rhythm Rastogi Jane Wang BULLETIN BOARD Deb Marini Lily Pickett X Soeun Bae

Isaac McKenna

DEAR INDY Cecilia Barron

18 DEAR INDY Cecilia Barron

LITERARY Alyscia Batista Annie Stein

19 THE BULLETIN

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deb Marini Peder Schaefer STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Caroline Allen Zach Braner Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Swetabh Changkakoti Danielle Emerson Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Mariana Fajnzylber Edie Fine Ricardo Gomez Eli Gordon Eric Guo Charlotte Haq Billie McKelvie Charlie Mederios Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Alex Purdy Callie Rabinovitz Nick Roblee-Strauss Nell Salzman Peder Schafer Janek Schaller Koyla Shields Ella Spungen Alex Valenti Siqi ‘Kathy’ Wang Katherine Xiong COPY EDITORS Addie Allen Evangeline Bilger Klara Davidson-Schmich Megan Donohue Mack Ford Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Alara Kalfazade Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Tara Mandal Becca Martin-Welp Pilar McDonald Kabir Narayanan Eleanor Peters Angelina Rios-Galindo

From the Editors 1. Got mad at the Wordle; asked my roommate for help. (She couldn’t get it either and I lost.)

2. Watched over my friend’s shoulder as she did the Spelling Bee; found the pangram.

3. Met with Tierra to figure out how to rephrase “pay tribute” in her piece. (In the end, we just added the word “with.”)

4. Said “Verne!” when Ife, doing last week’s Indy crossword, asked “Author Jules?”

5. Volunteered to write “From the Editors”; asked everyone, “How do I do that?”

(Working together to find the words.)

-AS

01

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DESIGN EDITORS Anna Brinkhuis Sam Stewart COVER COORDINATOR Seoyoung Kim DESIGNERS Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Elisa Kim Tanya Qu Emily Tom Floria Tsui WEB DESIGN Lucas Gelfond ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvie Bartusek Ashley Castañeda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Michelle Ding Rosie Dinsmore Quinn Erickson Lillyanne Fisher Sophie Foulkes John Gendron Amonda Kallenbach Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Tom Manto Sarosh Nadeem Kenney Nguyen Izzy Roth-Dishy Lola Simon Livia Weiner GAME MAKERS Loughlin Neuert Maya Polsky WRITING FELLOW Chong Jing ‘CJ’ Gan MVP Annie Stein — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

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

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

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures.

Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Music

TEXT MASHA BREEZE & NORA MATHEWS DESIGN FLORIA TSUI ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY

9 Local Bands to Check Out While You’re Getting Hyped up and Pumped in the Head for Spring Weekend

1 2

First up, it’s Marrow Fleetskip, an indie band composed of Providence locals who only perform in craft breweries and places an elderly person rediscovered their sense of wonder. Not to be confused with fellow Providence bands Fritbone, Fleerskirt, Boneflower Freep, or The Skulltown Feet Marigold Project, Marrow Fleetskip will make your heart soar, your leg numb, and the left side of your face droop with their folksy-yetsexist ballads about women’s bodies and the ways they are just like natural landscapes! With such hits as “Mama Was a Mountain,” “River Girl,” “Landslide Woman,” “Hill Person (Girl),” and “The Wetlands and the Marsh” (a graphic extended metaphor about the merits of anal sex), Marrow Fleetskip has clapped, shouted, and tambourined their way into my heart. And I love it!

Can we entice you to listen to something a little more…middle school gym teacher’s noise project? Give this one a listen while you’re covered in crumbs, eating yogurt, or having sex. Who knew basketball floors could produce such a wide and profoundly human variety of sounds?

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Bringing you hit tracks like “someone talking about how they were ‘too creative for public school’” and “someone describing the intricate interconnected ecosystem of high schools in New York City,” be sure to check out the new compilation album, Conversations You’ve Overheard in Coffee Shops that Make You Want to Commit an Evil Act! These local musicians have teamed up to create a truly unlistenable four hours of recording. Wii Fit spokeswoman Helen Mirren once said that music is about evoking powerful emotions, and this compilation sure does it.

They’ve got everything: from a woman describing her dog in so much detail that you’re sure she wants to have passionate, tender intercourse with it, to millennial dads telling each other about how they learned basic empathy from drugs, you’re sure to find something you hate!

4

Experimental project alert! Have you ever wondered: what if instruments were made of 100% certified angus beef? And the only noises they could make were wet slopping? Well keep dreaming, sicko, we caught you asking all of that on tape. While you’re being hauled off to weird person jail, listen to this recording of progressive parents giving their seven year-old the sex talk! Let their bone-chilling euphemisms for genitalia lull you into a trance state as you imagine what it would be like to call a man with 70k TikTok followers for pointing at screenshots of relatable tweets “Dad.”

5

Torch the porch and stash the hash, it’s Liza Minnelli! That’s right, as everyone knows, the queen of the musicale herself is from Providence and performs every Friday night at a different CVS (in the part of the store where they have the tights and the hair clips). Remember when she went missing for a few years in the early 2000s and everyone thought she was back on G? She was here! In Providence! The City of People! The Road Capital of the World! Right here in the Clam State!

6

Get ready to pull on your teeth and gnash and gnaw all night long, it’s Dental Illness, a local Providence band made up of only dentists! Ever had your dentist’s hands in your mouth and wondered whether they have an outlet to express their decades-long feud with their twin brother who’s also a dentist and technically identical, but maybe a little bit hotter? And maybe that medium is a soft acoustic album? Well, look no further, please, I’m begging you to stop looking, like actually.

7

If you have a chip on your shoulder and want your music taste to alienate your support system, look no further than singer-songwriter and Providence local Mikayla Turner. Don’t be fooled by her weirdly generic name; this woman will fucking destroy you. If you’re prone to reaching for something you will never have and your core wound is being told that you are crazy, Turner’s discography will feel like a hammer to the head and a childhood blankie all at once. Do you want to sit in bed and feel every capillary in your body dilate and constrict? Do you want to sink into the ecstasy of righteous anger? Do you want to stumble out of your house every day laughing at nothing, hungry for power, happy to let the knuckle of the world crush you so that if not the king, you can at least be the fool? Turner’s latest album, Get the Cheese Grater, diagnosed me with a personality disorder and then spat on my dog. With bangers like “I’m God,” “Evil Scary Girl Who’s Bad,” “Angry Lady Blues,” “She’s So Me(an),” and “Raisin Bran Person,” Turner delivers a triggering performance that is sure to leave you sad and worse!

8

British! This band is British and also brothers. These 12-year-old experimental noise DJs perform in Providence’s famed British Quarter every night! Want some mash with these bangers? Brothers Thom and Fwank start their set with some raucous sea shanties that will make you feel like you are a pirate in the Caribbean, and end the night with a pro-monarchy rap that will have you feeling your bad and confused fantasy, queen! Don’t blame them, they’re soooo drunk! Did I mention they’re gay?

9

This is the last item on this listicle which means it’s basically a joke and not worth considering, but if you’re free this Saturday at 8, go check out Kelsey and the Voles, live and in the street on the corner of Benefit and Wickenden. This is our intern’s band (yes, we have an intern, no, the other sections don’t), and the only reason we’re advertising it here is because Dink Scapparelli—the hottest sophomore in all of Brown University High—plays bass in Kelsey’s band, and a certain two scheming women might just have convinced him that they are the princesses of Denmark. It’s a whole thing but basically fuck you Kelsey, we’re doing this for Dink and no one else.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 07

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NEWS ILLUSTRATION TOM MANTO DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS TEXT KANHA PRASAD 03

IN THE NAME OF GOD What the protests over the hijab ban in Karnataka colleges tell us Trigger warning: brief mention of bodily harm In the past 4 months, colleges in the southern Indian state of Karnataka have imposed a ban on hijabs as a part of their efforts to regulate the school ‘uniform.’ The ban generated a movement by hijab-wearing students to defend their right to wear the hijab to school. But their movement was matched by a set of counter-protests organized by Hindu students—many of them their own classmates—who added saffron-scarves to their uniforms to signal their allegiance to Hindutva (or Hindu nationalism), the dominant political ideology in India today.

In the face of these protests and counter-protests, the Karnataka high court made an interim ruling on February 10, 2022 which banned all forms of ‘religious dress’ in colleges until further notice. Then, the high court delivered a ruling on March 15 that upheld the ban, declaring that the hijab is not an ‘essential religious practice’ in Islam. The protests, however, are continuing and show no signs of abating. Just a few days ago, NDTV reported that 40 hijab-wearing students in the coastal town of Udupi refused to show up for their final examinations to express their disapproval of the March 15 judgment. Some protesting students have appealed the high court’s ban in the Supreme Court.

But outside the courts, both the hijab-ban and the protests against it are being replicated across the state by ordinary people (bank-tellers, schoolteachers, students) acting either in their own name or in the name of God. On March 18, Karnataka’s Muslim community did not go to work or shut their stores to observe their Maulana (scholar-leader) Sagir Ahmad

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Khan Rashadi’s call for a peaceful state-wide bandh (strike) to express their disappointment with the March 15 verdict. On the other hand, the Hindu right in Karnataka have followed the lead of the saffron-sporting students and begun a campaign to ban Muslim traders and food vendors from setting up stalls at temple premises or fairs.

While the protesting students’ dissent is dominated by the language of their ‘right to wear the hijab,’ and while they continue to appeal to higher institutions (the Supreme Court) or documents (the Indian Constitution) meant to guarantee these rights, the movement does not depend upon these state authorities. Rather, it is grounded in a sense of religious duty and conviction, and its character as a civil-disobedience struggle makes it akin to a Gandhian satyagraha (‘struggle for truth’). In his own time, Gandhi argued that such ‘struggles for the truth’ involved withdrawing one’s cooperation from agents of untruth, which were often colonial institutions but could also be one’s own relatives, friends and teachers. Focusing on the words and actions of the protesting students helps us understand how the hijab has become the latest and most powerful symbol of defiance against a Hindu nationalism engulfing Karnataka and India.

Six Students in Udupi In late December 2021, six students attending the Governmental Pre-University (PU) College for Girls in Udupi were barred from entering their classes for wearing the hijab. Rudre Gowda, the college principal, told these students (originally a group of 12) that while they would

be allowed to wear the hijab or the burqa in campus premises, once they reached the classroom they would have to take it off. The reasoning claimed here was ‘uniformity’ amongst all students being maintained and teachers being able to fully see their faces. For three weeks, the barred students camped outside their college gates demanding their ‘fundamental rights and nothing else,’ as one student told the Indian Express. Gowda was not acting on the basis of a prescribed uniform policy, but gave a historical and disciplinary justification: “though there is no uniform policy or guidelines, it has been followed for the past 37 years. But now, these issues are polluting the college environment.”

The number of protesting students eventually dwindled down to six. One among them told the Express that the others had acquiesced after they were issued threats that they would not be given hall passes for their final examinations.

The six students who carried on the protest were a minority among their fellow Muslim women classmates and acted on their own authority and conviction. Gowda himself expressed this fact when he alleged to a BBC Hindi reporter that the six students were deliberately creating problems and that the rest of the college’s Muslim students —around 70 amongst a total population of 700— had no objections to the rule. And to the aforementioned the Indian Express reporter, he said that he had even spoken to the parents of the six students who had accepted his reasons but could not influence their children in one way or another.

With the help of some relatives and local Muslim student organisations such as the Campus Front of India (CFI) and the Popular Front of India (PFI), the six students collectively filed a writ petition to the Karnataka high court in February objecting that their fundamental rights were being violated. While the court deliberated upon the students’ petition, their college showed no signs of towing to their demands to enter with the hijab.

The issue soon reached the halls of the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Parliament, where it was debated by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. But like Gowda, they too had difficulty comprehending the protesting students’ agency. The state’s education minister BC Nagesh, for example, told BBC Hindi that the issue essentially boiled down to a political game in lieu of state elections next year, and held the PFI responsible for stirring it up so that they could influence the coastal Muslim vote. Former Karnataka chief minister and the Indian National Congress party leader Siddaramaiah, on the other hand, blamed the BJP and its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for stoking inter-religious tensions by making the hijab a political issue.

There is certainly no doubt that external organizations such as the CFI and the BJP/RSS have had a hand to play in the issue’s unfolding.

Almas A.H., one of the six students from PU college, admitted this fact to BBC Hindi when she said that though she is not a member of the CFI, she reached out to them for help after the college stopped them from entering classes. But her reasons for protesting are entirely her own.

Almas told the BBC categorically, “we have a few male teachers. We need to cover our hair before men. That is why we wear a hijab.” Existing journalistic explanations that turn the issue into a proxy war between institutional interests deprive the protesting students of their agency and belie the manner in which the issue eventually spread from Udupi to the rest of Karnataka.

The latter had everything to do with how scores of Hindu students eventually decided to break the uniform code by wearing saffron scarves to school in support of the ban. The color saffron signaled these students’ allegiance to Hindutva, whose violence in India today is rarely carried out through the BJP-dominated parliament or state legislatures (of which Karnataka is one), but most often takes the form of direct action by their civilian supporters.

Saffron in the Classroom A rapid escalation of hijab bans across the

NEWS

state took place in the first week of February.

On February 2, around 100 Hindu boys in the neighboring government college of Kundapura wore saffron scarves to their classrooms to protest against hijab-wearing students. Raising the slogan of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Hail the Lord Ram)—a Hindu chant which is a common Hindutva refrain—they stated that they would only take off their saffron scarves if the hijab-wearing students were also made to take off their hijabs and follow the ‘uniform’. The following day, the college administration buckled and stopped around 20 of their hijab-wearing students from entering the college premises. In Udupi, 40 students were also stopped outside their college gates that day, including both the original protestors but also their non-hijab-wearing Muslim classmates who chose to stand in solidarity with them. In many places, the same treatment was not meted out to saffron-clad students, for example on February 8 when a group of them attending the Government First Grade College in Shimoga replaced the school’s Indian flag with a saffron flag.

But as groups of saffron-scarf-wearing students entered their college premises in large numbers, and disrupted the flow of classes, colleges across Karnataka eventually implemented bans on both the hijab and the saffron-scarves.

The counter-protesting Hindu students were thus able to force an equivalence between their saffron scarves and hijabs as ‘religious’ appendages to a uniform bereft of them. It was this equivalence which the high court took for granted when it issued an interim order on February 10 prohibiting the wearing of any ‘religious’ clothing to colleges until further notice.

And it was upon this same equivalence that the high court would begin deliberating upon whether saffron-scarves and hijabs were ‘essential religious practices’ in Hinduism and Islam respectively.

While the saffron-scarves have received an unforeseen visibility with this controversy, their use as a protest tactic is not unprecedented. In an article for Scroll.in, Johanna Deeksha interviewed Saadiq Hamza, a second-year student at the Government First Grade College in Koppa in Karnataka’s Chikmaglur district. Hamza recalled that in 2018, a similar controversy over the hijab’s place in the uniform had almost erupted in his college, and that four of his own Hindu friends had worn saffron-scarves to counter-protest. The controversy briefly spread to the Governmental PU college in Koppa, where his 16 year old sister Shifa was studying, and where her own Hindu friend had also donned a saffron-scarf in protest against her. But before it could erupt, the town’s administration allowed students to wear the hijab, but as long as it was not ‘pinned’ to their uniform. This February, when saffron-scarved Hindu students escalated the issue across Karnataka, Hamza told Deeksha that his friends expressed a sense of pride for pioneering the tactic 4 years ago. The News Minute has minutely detailed the manner in which local organizations like the Hindu Jagrana Vedike were seen distributing saffron-scarves to Hindu students and instigating them to protest for ‘uniformity.’

But while the protesting Hindu students echo the rhetoric of ‘uniformity’ and ‘equality’ that the BJP and local Hindutva organizations tout, they also profess their independence from institutional or parental interference. In this one respect, they are similar to their Muslim classmates. Subhash Gowda, an alumnus of the Government College in Koppa and now a member of the Hindutva student organization Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) said that though the group had helped organize saffron-scarf protests against the hijab four years ago, the protests this year were organized by the students themselves. Akshay, a saffron-scarf wearing student interviewed by Deeksha, said that the protests did not form a part of the dinner table conversation with his parents, though they believed that all students should be ‘treated equally.’

Whether it is true or not, the stated sincerity of Hindutva students is taken at face value by their hijab-wearing Muslim classmates. Like

Shifa, many Muslim students have been hurt by their erstwhile Hindu friends donning the saffron-scarf. Raziya K., a final year student at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College, told Deeksha that she was surprised by the sudden change in her friends with whom she was sharing ‘food and notes’ one day, but who wore saffron and shouted “Jai Shri Ram” or “Vande Mataram” outside their school gates on February 8. Another student even took the attempted equivalency between saffron-scarves and hijabs as ‘religious’ items of clothing for granted when she told the News Minute “If the saffron scarf is compulsory for the religion, let them wear it. In our culture, we have to wear the hijab.” Though it often prompts hurt and surprise, what is noteworthy about hijab-wearing students’ attitude to the saffron-scarf is that it bypasses the tortured attempt of the Karnataka high court to discover whether the saffron scarf or hijab was of the true ‘religious essence’ of Hinduism or Islam.

Taking their Hindutva classmates at their word has allowed hijab-wearing students to conduct their own struggle autonomously, while also allowing creative solidarities to emerge. This is surely what accounts for the fact that their struggle has survived the March 15 court judgment, while Hindutva students have stopped wearing saffron-scarves, demonstrating that their own protest was only an oppositional one and did not stand on its own conviction. On the other hand, Dalit students used the scarf creatively on one ocassion to offer their solidarity to their Muslim classmates. On February 8, Dalit students from the Indavara Dodda Siddalinge Gowda college in Chikmaglur sported blue (an emblematic color in Dalit politics) scarves and confronted a group of saffron-scarf wearing Hindutva students shouting “Jai Shri Ram” with shouts of “Jai Bhim” (a slogan venerating the Dalit intellectual and statesman Bhimrao Ambedkar).

This issue, like many others in India seemingly limited to ‘religion,’ thus contains a secret history of caste. Historian Shireen Azam pointed out in an episode of the Anurag Minus Verma podcast that the Dalit students’ solidarity brought this history to the surface, as they have long faced discrimination in Karnataka from their upper-caste classmates regarding what they ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ wear to school (she mentions one student whose wrists were slit for wearing a watch, for instance). Their solidarity also reveals the blind equivalences which legal-administrative categories like ‘uniformity’ or ‘essential religious practice’ can construct in Karnataka specifically and India more broadly where codes around who can wear what have always been overdetermined by a complex intersection of caste, Hindu-Muslim and gendered hierarchies.

The Gita of Gandhi On February 8, another momentous event occurred. Student Muskan Khan drove in on a bike into the parking lot of her college in the town of Mandya, where a large mob of young men wearing saffron scarves shouted “Jai Shri Ram.” Though Khan tried to side step them and walk to the college, the mob only grew louder and inched closer towards her, demanding that she take off her hijab. Then came the defiant cry from Khan four times: “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar [Islamic takbeer meaning God is the Greatest].” The mob was provoked and only became more frenzied, but Khan was now outpacing them and echoed the takbeer twice more before being escorted by her college’s teachers into its premises. Khan’s lone struggle was captured by a news cameraperson, and almost instantly became viral on social media. She has since gained iconic status, and her figure along with the takbeer routinely adorn protesting-students’ posters and their profile-pictures online.

In an interview with the Wire a few days later, Khan reiterated that she had not taken the name of Allah ‘to offend those who were saying Jai Shri Ram’ but to find the courage to face Hindutva protestors who demanded that

she take off her hijab there and then. When the Wire asked her what the hijab means to her, she said: “Hijab is my first priority. No one is forcing me to wear it. It’s my right, my dignity and my respect. I can never leave it. I feel safe wearing it.” And then to her fellow protestors she said, “Don’t be scared of anyone. Remember God during times of difficulty, pray to him.

He honoured me with so much respect in the whole world. He’ll do the same even to you.

Just be strong and fight for your rights.” Khan’s bold action captured and defined the terms on which the hijab-wearing students have understood their own struggle, as safeguarding a right guaranteed not by Karnataka’s courts or India’s constitution, but ultimately by God alone.

A few days after the Karnataka high court upheld the hijab ban in March, the state’s chief minister Basavaraj Bommai casually suggested that the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text, ought to be included in school curriculums as an exemplar of moral values. His suggestion parallels a similar effort being made in the BJPruled state of Gujarat, where it was recently announced that the Bhagavad Gita would be made a part of the school syllabus for classes 6-12 starting in the 2022-23 academic year.

There is an irony in the fact that in the midst of a controversy centered around mandating a ‘religion’-free uniform in Karnataka schools, the government there is seeking to make the Gita a mandatory part of school syllabi. But what if the truth of the Gita is already being administered to Hindutva students and teachers by their hijab-wearing classmates?

It is indeed true that the Gita has been an influential text for moral instruction in India and beyond. As a part of the epic Mahabharata, it occurs at a moment when the Pandavas and the numerically superior Kauravas—a set of cousins who are the epic’s protagonists and antagonists respectively—are about to face each other for destructive war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. At the penultimate moment, the great warrior Arjuna of the ‘good’ Pandava side asks his charioteer Krishna how he can kill his cousins and relatives, as well as his teachers who happen to be on the ‘evil’ side. The content of the Gita is Krishna’s advice to Arjuna on why it is his duty to fight. Partisans of Hindutva today take their cue from early 20th century commentaries by B.G. Tilak or V.D Savarkar, who argued that the Gita justifies political violence necessary to establish a politically independent, culturally Hindu India.

But another 20th century tradition of interpretation goes back to M.K. Gandhi. Gandhi saw the fight between Pandavas and Kauravas as an allegorical one between good and evil that takes place not only in the political realm, but also within all of us. In his telling, good and evil are intimately and inextricably related like cousins. And in his own struggle against British rule in India, he found in the Gita ‘the principle underlying noncooperation—that the evil system which the [British colonial] Government represents, and which has endured only because of the support it receives from good people, cannot survive if that support is withdrawn’.

By withdrawing good from evil, partisans of non-violence could ensure the inevitable victory of satya, or Truth, which is the true subject of the battle of Kurukshetra.

Khan and her comrades see many of their Hindu friends and teachers arrayed against them, but are confident that they can be won over to the truth. One flash of light in this dim present came on March 30, when seven teachers of the C.S Patil High School, who were later suspended, violated the March 15 high court order and allowed their hijab-wearing students to write their exams. When the Wire asked Khan if she intended to make a complaint or take action against the group of men from her college who heckled her, she said, “No, how could that happen? They are my brothers. I would never do that to them. Today, they’re a little misguided but tomorrow they’ll realize and come back to the right path. I have faith.”

KANHA PRASAD B’22.5 believes that God is with Muskan and her comrades.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 07

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Sunday Reflections Trigger warning: self harm

LIT

October 2001 My parents move from Maspeth, Queens, to a small Jersey suburb, and my mother luxuriates in the backyard space. Baby number one has just completed her first year, and though baby number two is nothing more than a possibility, she runs inevitable circles around the new parents. Behind the rusting basketball hoop, my mother displaces a couple of handfuls of dirt, sticking hydrangea bulbs in their place. Fall gives way to frost, but by the time mid-spring arrives, there are no hydrangea plants to welcome baby number two home.

April 2010 My mother never planned on having kids. Just like she never planned on moving to the United States, or getting married, or living in a corner house.

I spend my unsupervised afternoons on the pavement. Before heading to work, my mother arms me with a bucketful of chalk, and when she returns home, she helps me pluck the gravel from my knees. I don’t know much about my mother’s life in the Philippines before us, but I like to imagine it was filled with island-hopping and exotic pets. I cover the sidewalk with drawings of purple trees, orange boats, and blue monkeys.

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

June 2013 I reach middle school and trade chalk for embroidery floss— you can make friendship bracelets even when it’s raining. I remember my mother telling me that Lola used to braid Auntie Glory’s hair with red ribbons. On the day that the American military jeeps rolled into Manila and declared it a liberated city, they handed out Hershey bars and cans of Coca-Cola. One soldier gave Auntie Glory an extra chocolate, and Lola always thought it was because of those pretty red ribbons.

I use up the red thread the fastest and gift all the finished bracelets to my sister. She won’t tell me if she likes them, but I saw her wearing a bunch during recess last week. She gave up

her signature long sleeves in the nearly hundred-degree heat, and I could spot the thick bands of red embroidery from across the blacktop.

When I brag to my mother, she sighs and says her razors are missing again.

My mother never planned on having a daughter who draws blood in place of blue monkeys, but she does her best to reestablish order. She grounds my sister, and I don’t see them speak for weeks.

TEXT TIERRA SHERLOCK

DESIGN TANYA QU

May 2014 My sister’s “Congratulations 8th Grade Class!” lawn sign stands amid a blossoming garden: stargazer lilies, rhododendrons, amaryllises, yellow roses, and peonies. Last summer, my mother threw herself into gardening.

In the waist-high blooms, she plunges her arms into the entangled stalks, becoming a top-heavy flower herself—head hanging below her shoulders, aiming for the garden bed. My mother refuses to wear gloves when she weeds, so her arms brush against abundance. The roses graft her skin onto their thorns. Wispy scratches wind their way around her flesh, but the thorns don’t seem to bother her much. It’s the price she has to pay for raising the prickly flower, and she knew the risk when she chose the bush with coils of sun-colored barbed wire.

After an afternoon of dead-heading the imperfect flowers and steering clear of the roses, her skin erupts into angry rashes, a “plant sensitivity.” Gradually, the irritation travels to her legs and grows in frequency. Almost every time she works in the garden now, her skin weeps.

Bullheaded and bare-armed, my mother ignores the doctor’s instructions to stop. They prescribe her ineffective topical creams and steroid shots. After seeing three specialists, she eventually gives in to wearing long sleeves while she works. The “plant sensitivity” won’t dissipate since surfacing. She can’t get around this confrontation.

05

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LIT

January 13, 2015 Today, my firstborn will turn 15 years old. 14 was an interesting year of discovery and rediscovery for each of us. The child has challenged me to look closer, more deeply, love unconditionally.

Parenthood is such a responsibility. It can be heartbreaking and heartwarming. I thank her for giving me the privilege to be her mother.

(She gets 55 likes and 8 comments. None of which are from my sister.)

April 23, 2017

My Sunday reflection: I’ve kissed the fast asleep teenagers and said goodbye to the husband, cleared TSA security, and settled at my gate.

Airports are exciting and heartbreaking places, ferrying bodies all over the planet. I’m a little weepy sitting here, but Barry keeps me company as I wait 120 minutes until take off.

As he sings about his love for NYC, he helps me measure my own.

My husband has let me play completely Barry playlists on road trips.

I’ve dragged my poor mom along the streets of San Francisco, LA, and anywhere else that sells his posters and sheet music. This is a love that comes without strings attached.

(She gets 48 likes and 32 comments. Family and colleagues wish her a safe flight. My sister and I counted down the days until takeoff.)

September 2014 Over the last three weeks in the Philippines, my parents, sister, and I have spent more time together than in the last three years. Most of my mom’s family still lives overseas, so between brunches with great aunts and sightseeing with cousins, there is always some buffer between us. Cite our report cards, give a rundown of extracurriculars, and elevator pitch career goals. This always satisfies the relatives, and afterward, the conversation turns away from the kids. Before we board the plane back, they make my mother promise to finally join Facebook to stay in touch. She spends the plane ride home making vacation photo albums in her camera roll and planning her first posts. By the time we shove our luggage into the back of a cab, she’s already created her profile.

It doesn’t take long for her to learn the ropes, posting upwards of five times a day.

But unlike the reposts and short status updates that flood the platform’s homepage, my mother writes on her page like it’s her diary. In half a year, she’ll start her weekly “Sunday reflections.” The first one will be about her fear of spontaneity and how little control she has over life. It’ll get 20 likes, 4 comments, and 2 shares. She will grow a sympathetic audience, and eventually, start waxing poetic about Daughter #1 and Daughter #2. She debuts my sister on the platform with a birthday post.

July 2015 The dryer buzzes for the fifth time and without any sign of someone coming to fetch the freshly tumbled clothes. After training an ear to the hallway and hearing no footsteps, I grab the laundry basket outside my sister’s door and run downstairs to the machines. Black leggings, black t-shirts, black socks—I sift through the monochrome static, folding as I go.

While picking a piece of lint from the fibers of a well-worn band tee, the laundry basket slides out of my peripheral. My mother upturns the stack of folded clothes and sends them to the linoleum with a muted thud. She doesn’t say anything—she doesn’t need to—and I climb the stairs, still clutching the shirt in my hands.

In January, my sister started dating a boy my mother doesn’t approve of. He has lip and eyebrow piercings, at least three visible tattoos, and a habit for dying his hair all kinds of unnatural colors. My mother was worried that this boy meant trouble, so she did what she never could with the self-harm: She talked to my sister, and she tried to help.

No one enjoyed those conversations—my sister felt smothered, my mother fumbled around conversation until she resorted to reproach, and my dad was always called to mediate. I found my purpose best served by just staying out of the way.

In May, my parents caught my sister sneaking out to see the boyfriend they thought she’d broken up with, and my mother decided it wasn’t worth trying to intervene anymore.

That’s when the shunning started.

I don’t know how long you can swear off parenting before it becomes neglect, but my mother won’t walk into the same room as my sister, won’t speak her name, won’t make her dinner, and won’t acknowledge that she still lives in this house. I don’t know why I thought I could get away with doing her laundry.

I fold my sister’s shirt, still warm from the dryer, and leave it in front of her door.

June 2016 I sit on the plastic Toys“R”Us stool that barely rises to my mid-calf. My mother doesn’t wear much makeup, but before every dance recital, my sister and I used to take turns glued to the stool while our mother did her best to ready us for the stage.

When she raised the eyeliner pencil to my face, I shook with terror. A pretty awful combination—her untrained hand, my relentless shudder, and the sharpened point so close to my cornea. When my sister learned how to do makeup well enough for her work to pass as mediocre, I took the opportunity to escape my mother’s strained focus on my waterline.

Planted on this familiar stool, my sister helps me prepare for my eighth-grade graduation. She puts her throwback playlist on shuffle, and I try not to move as I mouth the words to the Fall Out Boy song. When it gets to the bridge, my sister gets a little misty-eyed. At her eighth-grade graduation, she gave the valedictorian speech and ended it with a quote from this song: “So let’s fade away together one dream at a time.” She got it approved by claiming it was a powerful message about the willingness to change and accept the passage of time—but really, she just wanted to sneak in a lyric from her favorite song. My mother said that at my graduation I had to find a way to slip some Barry Manilow into my speech.

But today, I have no speech, no academic title, and no lyric to pay tribute with.

My mother tells me that my graduation doesn’t count because I’m not valedictorian, and I cry in the bathroom while she puts on her jewelry.

December 20, 2015 My Sunday reflection: Last night, Daughter #2 went with us to pick up my mom and sister from Newark Liberty Airport.

We saw families reunite as people rushed into each other’s arms.

I’ve always believed in homecomings, that those who are meant to be in your life will find their way back.

No matter how long it takes.

(She gets 42 likes and 4 comments. My sister wasn’t invited to join us.)

October 2017 The marigolds, pink dahlias, and dragon’s breath are still in the late stages of their growth cycles, but my mother begins preparing for winter. She accumulates 31 orchids, 6 mini orchids, 3 cacti, 2 succulents, 1 bromeliad, 1 anthurium, and 1 ivy all in one corner of the dining room.

Our house is shrinking. Beyond the seasonally accepted contraction of its wood frame, the walls seem to inch closer to the furniture as a consistent terracotta layer develops around the perimeter of the rooms. My mother trades the family photos and pepper shakers for flowerpots, reserving as much surface area as possible to maintain her indoor garden through the winter.

My sister and I also begin our seasonal hibernation—mine housebound as I pore over my homework, hers at the dance studio for as long as she can bear. Thrust directly into the arena of my mother’s care, I learn of her extensive watering regimen, and my sister stays as far away as possible.

Grand rounds and watering are at 5:30 AM. My mother boards the 190 bus before my sister and I wake, but when I turn on the light in the morning, I notice the orchid on my dresser glistening. Flowerpot rotation is at 5:00 PM. I lift my textbooks off of the dining table so my mother can reconfigure the plants for tomorrow’s sun.

My sister slips out the side door to go to dance. Misting is at 9:00 PM. My mother likes to blast music as she makes her way around the house, and she turns up the volume when she hears the garage door open. You’re not expected to talk to people if you’re too busy singing. My sister hides away in her room, and we start the routine again tomorrow.

My mother tends to the plants as if her own life hangs in the balance of the

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perfectly bright petals and hydrated leaves. She whisks away any bloom that doesn’t stand as stiff and tall as the rest, as if the wilt is contagious. I wonder if she resents the dead ones.

LIT

March 2018 My mother enlists me to keep her awake late enough to see the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time. To keep our brains occupied and eyes open, we watch The Joy Luck Club—her pick. The film is based on my mother’s favorite Amy Tan novel, and it follows four Chinese women as they unspool stories of immigration and their family lives. When the credits roll and it’s not yet midnight, she regales me with a rare snippet of her life before us.

I know she never wanted children, but before this emotionally primed night, I’ve never dared to inquire what changed. Or if anything had. She brings me back to that Maspeth apartment, describing its cramped, poorly lit rooms. There was no space for a garden nor a full-sized kitchen, so she spent a lot of time cleaning. On a Saturday afternoon when my dad was visiting a friend, she found herself crouched down by the baseboard, armed with latex gloves and a sponge. She spotted a trace amount of grime on the perimeter of a power outlet, and while picking away at it, she burst into tears. Is this what her life had come to? Is this how she would spend the rest of her time? Children had never been in the cards, but if it meant a more fulfilling existence than obsessively cleaning power outlets, maybe it was time to reconsider.

Somewhere in our conversation, we lose an hour. I go to change the clock on my dresser, and my mother sneaks into my sister’s room while she’s asleep to account for the lost time. We inch a time zone closer to my mother’s home, halfway across the world. We’re still a dozen hours behind, and we always will be, but the gap between her and her loved ones, my world and hers, narrows, if only slightly.

August 25, 2018 It is August 25, 4:12am. This is not jetlag, but an emotionally-wrecked mom. Late afternoon yesterday, we packed the car for the firstborn’s move-in day. I was stoic to camouflage my selfish sadness. I know she will be fine.

Me, not so much.

TEXT TIERRA SHERLOCK

DESIGN TANYA QU

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

(The comment section is flooded with encouragements. She doesn’t respond to any of them. My second cousin writes, “The sadness will melt away when she comes home with all of her laundry!”)

07

February 5, 2019

I have always enjoyed Chinese New Year. As a child, it was all about getting red envelopes (with money inside!) from the grownups.

Now, as a grown-up, this holiday represents second chances. Whatever resolution I made on January 1st, and likely break by the 2nd, gets another shot when Chinese New Year rolls around.

And that’s what it is, isn’t it?

Being able to tell yourself it’s ok to start over. To try again. And again. In hopes of someday getting it right.

(She snaps a photo of the red envelopes before handing one each to my dad, my sister, and me. My sister stays for dinner, and we chow down on Chinese takeout.)

July 2018 My mother peers apprehensively out the window, storm clouds looming over the foxglove and bok choy she just potted. The plants might get carried away with the tide. The flooding brackish water might tamper with the salinity of the potted soil.

The plants might drown and be perpetually waterlogged.

My mother paces back and forth, cycling through hypotheticals with my dad until he can’t take any more of her worry. He pulls on his rain boots and makes his way outside. Hoisting the garage door open, he starts to empty the storage space of its boxes of comic books and never-used basketballs. Every square inch he clears sparks possibility.

My mother runs out after him, and they work in tandem—my dad consolidating clutter and my mother placing a pot in the newly opened floor space. I watch from the bay window, and my sister puts two towels by the door. The rain starts to come down in sheets, but our parents work until the garage is transformed into a greenhouse and my mother can’t find any more potted plants to save.

They trudge into the foyer, dripping with the trial round of what could turn into an overnight deluge. After rescuing the plants from the flood, the pair now turn to help each other climb the stairs. My mother’s body finally buckles, no longer able to fight the pangs of her chronic back pain. The plants can’t know how much she wears herself out to protect them. She can’t tell them how much she loves them, and even if she could put it into words, her language would be lost on them. But she still checks the forecast on the regular, and I suspect this won’t be the last time she spends hours bringing her plants in from the rain.

The storm lasts for two days. As soon as the sun returns and the soil sufficiently drains, my mother crouches down in the backyard with a trowel in her hand. Despite her herniated disks and inflamed patches of skin, she can’t refuse the summon of the earth. She plants hydrangea bulbs. It’s time to try again.

September 2018 I didn’t start drinking coffee until this year. Every morning, my dad brews a pot and sets out three mugs on the kitchen table. The third cup used to be for my sister, but since she moved into her college dorm last month, I’ve taken it in her place.

This Sunday morning, I wake to a remarkably still kitchen—the air free of any light caramel or nutty scent. I check my phone for the time and see a text from my dad saying he took the car into town for inspection. So I take it upon myself to brew today’s pot.

After pouring two steaming cups, I walk to my parent’s bedroom. It’s empty. I call out and hear my mother respond from across the hall, from my sister’s bedroom.

Following the voice, I back my way into my sister’s room, balancing a mug in each hand. The windows are thrown wide open, the bed is stacked with a pile of newly folded clothes, and the only trace of clutter left in my sister’s room is from the microfiber cloths, Windex and Lysol bottles, and dustpan lying on the floor. My mother sits in the corner, latex gloves at her side, cradling my sister’s old stuffed animal.

Joining her on the hardwood, I sink to the floor and offer her one of the mugs. We don’t say much, but we sit together until we’ve drained our cups.

I can’t help but check the power outlet. It’s spotless.

June 2020 Today I graduate from high school. I’m in my backyard, hair pulled back, wearing basketball shorts I bought when I was twelve. Although we’re accompanied by the reverberating bass from my sister’s second-story window, only my mother and I sit opposite one another. She’s been working from home for the last two months, and my textbooks have been lying untouched in my locker since March.

The pandemic sewed an acute terror of idleness into both of us. Two weeks in, she started capitalizing on the virtual garage sales, scouring Facebook Marketplace for any old furniture or decor. Birdcages, conch shells, teapots—you can turn anything into a planter if you have the vision. I dragged the potting mix out from the garage and instead of turning a tassel, I put my fingers to work packing soil.

I know there are so many things worse than missing a high school graduation, and I know that quarantine can’t last forever. But right now, it doesn’t feel that way.

Somewhere between lining the base of the birdcage and loosening the fanflower roots, I start crying. My mother doesn’t try to hold my hand or run to get me tissues.

But she doesn’t turn away. She just listens to my stuttered breath and watches me unravel.

When I blink my last tears away, I see her drag a soil-stained hand across her cheek. We sit together until the sun sets, our fears oriented in the same direction.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

May 6 2018

My Sunday reflection: Today, my baby Tierra turns 16.

As a mother, I have such fears. But not with this child who walked at 9 months, who found ways and means to get where she wanted to be, who continues to surprise me with her toughness.

Baby, stay true to who you are. Because you are pretty much who I always wanted to be.

(She gets 134 likes and half of the comments are her responding to birthday wishes. I help her comb through old scrapbooks to look for my sonogram. She doesn’t let me know if she ever finds it.)

January 23, 2019

Our firstborn turns 19 today. She who made us a family. She who made me realize how motherhood is something worth continuing to work hard on.

This is her first birthday away from home. I wish her peace, courage, hope.

Above all, love.

(She tags my sister, who doesn’t respond to the barrage of “Happy Birthday!” but is the first to leave a like on the post.)

LIT

November 4, 2015 It’s difficult to watch the ones you love suffer. All you want to do is shield them. Love simply feels inadequate. If only they can feel and know and believe that they are good enough. Much more than enough.

February 4, 2017 My mother used to get upset when I would say I never wanted to be a mom. She thought that somehow I was so traumatized by her parenting that I would never willfully choose to be one.

What she didn’t know was that I was beyond terrified, and I still am. I could never be ready for parenthood, for that magnitude of responsibility, for the example she set.

More than anything, I was and am deathly afraid to fail because it is not just about me anymore.

April 26, 2020 I try to talk myself into looking up, believing there is a light somewhere at the end. There are days I do. Most days I don’t. Optimism can be so exhausting.

October 29, 2017 My Sunday reflection: I chanced upon this photograph taken years ago when we went apple picking. It has been years since our daughters have held our hands when walking. When I look at a photo like this, I want to be frozen in time. When you were their go-to person, when you could do no wrong.

December 2020 My mother asks my sister and me to help write Christmas cards. She tasks us with addressing and stuffing the envelopes. I’m surprised that she trusts my handwriting, but she gives us both ballpoint pens, and we start crossing names off the list.

In the States, Christmas celebrations don’t start until December. But back home, without any Halloween or Thanksgiving to push back festivities, my mother grew up celebrating Christmas for a whole season. She loves the holidays, and they’re the only thing that can persuade her to move some of her plants. When my dad brought the decorations down from the attic, my mother had to relocate some of her orchids, and retire others. Now, a red and green runner stretches the length of the dining table. A couple of framed photos from Christmas pasts stand at half the height of her flowers.

My mother makes quick work of her envelopes, and I try to mimic the movement of her trained hands. She learned calligraphy when practicing the strokes to form Chinese characters, and without any vases or pots between us, I can see exactly how she holds her pen.

We make it a quarter of the way through the address book before it falls silent.

My mother asks my sister to put some of her music on, and when she takes her seat again, we all mouth the opening lyrics of “Save Rock and Roll.”

January 2021 I finally set foot on my college campus. There are loads of pandemic restrictions, but my parents get to help me move in. We make the bed, line the drawers, and fill the closet, all conscious of the unrelenting rotation of my analog clock’s hour hand.

Before we hug goodbye, my mother places a babymoon cactus on my shelf. A plant even I probably can’t kill.

To keep from crying, my mother jokes that I’m lucky for leaving home, because now she’ll let me follow her on Facebook. My high school friends have followed her page for months, teasing me about its profundities, and my sister has had access since she moved onto campus over two years ago. She warned me about the cliché Sunday reflections, the self-indulgent streams of consciousness, the boasts and birthday posts, and, of course, the convenient omissions. I sent my mother a friend request this morning, and she waits to accept it until I watch her car pull away from my second-story window. I’ve finally achieved the prerequisite distance for this rite of passage. I curl up on top of my comforter, open my laptop, and start scrolling.

Growing up, I spent so many days wondering. Wondering what my mother was thinking, where she was going when she walked away from our conversations, and who I could be to earn her attention. I didn’t feel loved for a large portion of my childhood, but I always knew I was.

My sister can’t say the same. When I ask her how often she reads our mother’s Facebook posts, she says as little as possible. Sometimes, when she’s looking for an old picture, she gets sucked into a Sunday reflection from one week or another. But they don’t inspire anything in her besides frustration. The woman on this platform is not a woman my sister’s ever known and not one she can bring herself to meet, at least not yet.

I don’t know what I was expecting from the moments when I’d finally get to pore over this archive, but it wasn’t this.

In her words, her pictures, and her silences, I meet a woman who was, and is, grappling with what it means to care for life that she created. Life that she loves with every ounce of herself, even if she doesn’t know how to express it. I meet a woman who is so much more than a mother, but is trying her best to be a good one. I meet a woman who knows how to put her fears, hopes, and frustrations into words but can’t speak them aloud to her children. And even if she could, her language might be lost on them.

Maybe her kids would have had fewer questions if they had always been able to access this account. Or the person capable of expressing these emotions. Maybe her kids wouldn’t have grown up on wondering.

But I understand my mother’s impulse to shield, to redirect, to hide. Here I am, holding a dialogue exclusively with words from the past.

The children in her pictures wanted to hear that she was proud of them. That she expected a lot but forgave them for falling short. That it was going to be okay.

I imagine the woman who took those pictures wanted to hear the same thing, and maybe she still does.

June 7, 2020

My Sunday reflection: I found this picture of us from Easter a dozen or so years ago. It breaks me wide open. We had a swing set where my garden is now.

The girls had so much fun with it, but we eventually dismantled it because they had outgrown it.

I can never replace the time on the swing set, but I am trying to nurture something still in this back garden project.

(I want to comment that this picture also breaks me open. I don’t know if I’ll ever outgrow my memories, but right now, this project displays undeniable amounts of care and effort. Your garden really is beautiful.)

November 13, 2016 Today, I think of legacy. My mother gave me this Christmas card address book a decade ago. From her, I learned you can never fully avert chaos, but you can certainly organize it as best you can. In this book, I keep a note written by one of my daughters years ago to remind myself of a child’s honesty and the truth that parenting is hard.

It comes with no instruction and at times, your best is simply not enough. But you can keep at it.

TIERRA SHERLOCK B’24 forgets to water her cactus.

September 23, 2018

January 10, 2021

My Sunday reflection:

My orchids may not be perfect—squished atop a buffet that we inherited from the owner of our first home in Queens. More than half are dormant, others bloom, others wilt. I admire them, fret over some, and believe in them and their ability to grow roots. They may not be perfect, but to me, they will always be beautiful. And no, you don’t give up on something just because it isn’t perfect.

This morning, I was feeling slightly blue, and my daughter made me a cup of coffee to comfort me. It is, perhaps to most, a small thing, making coffee for someone.

To me, however, it represents so much more. Grinding the beans, measuring out the proportions of coffee, water, half and half, brown sugar. It is a gesture that says, “You are worth my time.”

And sharing a cup together tells me so much more, “I want to share this time with you.”

Life, after all, is about the small quiet moments that make it beautiful. And less blue.

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TEXT KATHY WANG

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

FEATS

Losing Chinese:

09

Finding the Self in Between Languages 爱, ài, love.

Sometimes I find it hard to say “I love you” in Chinese. 我爱你, or “wo ai ni,” feels tight on my tongue, pulling a weight down through my body and freezing its operations. It’s making an oath—permanent, heavy, loyal. It’s a ritual, almost divine, a mantra I never find myself worthy or qualified to sing.

I’ve written it on paper, typed it by keyboard, and heard it echo in my chest, yet it never comes out of my mouth the way it means to me. I question whether I love someone enough to say it; if I don’t, then saying it is mocking my own love’s insufficiency. I wonder if I deserve to, or will ever, feel the intense love that will make me want to say it. Perhaps only for my parents.

I’ve said “I love you” countless times. To friends, to my ex-boyfriend, to relatives, to strangers. Once a friend showed me a post saying that some international students can only express vulnerable feelings in English because Chinese feels too close to them. “This is exactly how I feel,” she said, and I questioned myself if I would ever become like that, or if I already was. I tried to imagine the feeling of loving, or hating, or missing someone—did they operate in Chinese or in English? If my emotions exist in two different languages, then which ones are real? And if these emotions are a large part of me, then how do I exist?

To which language do I belong? 成绩, chéng jì, grade My first TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) score, which was required for applying to American high schools as an international student, was 86/120. My counselor expected at least a 100/120 for my to-apply school list.

TOEFL consists of four parts—reading, listening, speaking, and writing—each 30 points.

To raise my score, I stared at mock reading tests about rocks that made up the Earth and ancient artifacts buried between them, skimming through unknown words to find justifications for answers in my sixth sense. I remember unfamiliar voices talking to me about art history; me giving suggestions to the recorder about strangers who lost their student IDs. I didn’t speak their language until their language grew into me. In after school classes and during breaks, I learned to read and listen and talk and write in another way. This new voice bestowed me with a language to talk over another.

I submitted a 104/120. 到达, dào dá, arrival I went into the settings on my phone and changed “language” into English after arriving at my high school in Princeton, New Jersey. I was struck by the simultaneous sensation of owning a new phone and borrowing someone else’s—maybe living in two languages is both an embrace of and estrangement from yourself.

The second thing I did: switching the language of WeChat—China’s dominant social me-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

dia—back to Chinese after the system converted every app’s language into English. Whether or not this was only a gesture, I didn’t want everything to change. A small, green app on my phone seemed to sustain the Chinese part of me, invisible fibers across the sea, through the internet, bringing me words and voices of home, reminding me of who I once was. 变化, biàn huà, change I flew home to China from New Jersey every winter break in high school. Since 2016, I’ve been spending every New Year’s Eve with 李若 凡 and 林思悦 in Beijing. How we spent these intermissions between one year and the next changed after I left for an American high school and they prepared for American college applications in China. I thought maybe I was bringing these changes back from the US—feeding them the foreignness and estrangement needed to peel off their Chinese skin.

The first few minutes of 2018, I called my high school roommate, Elizabeth. 林思悦 said I sounded different when I spoke English. I started to call them Betty and Jessie in my works.

We talked about applying to American colleges and choosing majors. I wondered if the reason why they stopped noticing changes in me was because they changed with me. 儿歌, ér gē, nursery rhyme Some Chinese nursery rhymes have been carved into my memory.

Last semester in Fiction I, a classmate included the English translation of “小燕子,” “xiao yan zi,” which her grandma has always sung to her, in a story. I didn’t recognize it until she explained in class. The song no longer registered with me. Do certain words only live in one language? Will I ever be able to process these words in another? “小燕子 穿花衣 / 年年春天来这里 / 我问燕子 你为啥来 / 燕子说 这里的春天最美丽” “Little swallow, wearing colorful clothes / coming here every spring / I ask the swallow why it’s here / the swallow says, because here it has the most beautiful spring.” 古诗, gǔ shī, ancient Chinese poetry In elementary and middle school I could recite tens of them. Sometimes our teacher would call on students to write from memory on the blackboard. Before big exams we rushed to memorize the meaning of every poem, line, and character.

I scored high on those exams. Chinese ancient poems brought muscle memory to my vocal chords, tongue, and hands because I’d murmured, spoken, and written them so many times. But I never learned them by heart. Later, in high school and college, whenever ancient Chinese poetry was mentioned, I felt more estranged. Only when other people were foreign did you feel that you belonged—yet I traveled further away from Chinese in the land of English.

I started to wonder how much of the Chinese in me is not muscle memory. 仿照, fáng zhào, imitation When I attended middle school in Beijing, Chinese vocabulary tests required us to write out characters of words we’ve learned. It’s weird because I always thought I knew those characters already until I saw their Pinyin1 on the practice sheet and realized I’ve merely recognized them. I couldn’t recreate them with my pen. I only semi-knew them and Chinese classes gave shapes to vague sounds and forms.

In high school I thought I’d kept these shapes in whole because I’d been typing a lot of Chinese every day on WeChat. And yet I forgot and I’m still forgetting. Now and then when I write in Chinese in ink I have to constantly type up words on my phone to check their forms.

I imitate Chinese spoken by a machine and hope to make it mine. When I see my cousins’ Chinese tests back home, I feel the ruins of my melted-away Chinese and know that I lack the hands to mold them back together. 进退, jìn tuì, forward and backward Elizabeth joked that I spoke “funny English” at the start of every school year. We walked around campus to run errands and I brought a hypersensitivity to everything I said—hi, I’m fine!, summer is, I mean summer was good, that sound, sounds so fun! My tongue curled in such a way that I knew certain sounds would come out late; I consciously put it between my teeth to make the “th” sound for every “thank you” and “think.”

My “normal English” returned after a few days, according to Elizabeth. Every year before summer, I erase it all over again to only speak Chinese at home. Every fall I push all Chinese accumulated over the summer into the back of my mind.

In this game of forwarding and backwarding between two languages, I lose. 留下, líu xià, stay; 路过, lù guò, passing by.

Last summer, when I was reading Jane Eyre on Beijing’s subway, a man in his 30s asked me if I did this every day. “Did what every day,” I said. “This, reading things in English,” he answered. I didn’t know what to say because many times I didn’t have a choice of which language to read in. Because I had a choice that day and still decided to read in English. Because I was busy “preserving” my English throughout summer and didn’t realize the price I was paying.

Many times that summer, I walked through subway stations and envied everyone else.

Everyone else seemed to own a life in Beijing.

Everyone else got to stay when they arrived but I arrived to leave again. I was only a passerby. 空缺, kòng quē, blank We remember in a specific language. I can 1 Romanization of Chinese characters based on their pronunciation.

FEATS

never combine the memories made in Chinese with the ones associated with English. My life is divided by the language I live in. When I live in one, the other is left blank.

Every break in China I search through that void, trying to find something to fill it in while my mouth spits out English words involuntarily.

It was like forcing myself to become someone else—someone I once was, someone I no longer was. 名字, míng zì, name Starting high school, it became hard to answer “what’s your name?” My Chinese first name, 思琪 “siqi,” meaning “a thoughtful gem,” is printed on every legal proof of my existence.

I’ve had many English names growing up.

In kindergarten, our teacher told us to find ourselves an English name, and I forgot to do it. The next day we could trade our English name for a flower sticker. For this ‘emergency,’ I named myself Apple, a fruit of anxiety and limited English vocabulary. I sold Apple for a red flower sticker with golden linings.

The immediate successor to Apple was Angel. Angel became Katherine, Catherine, and Cathy, among others, before a self-introduction at some 2016 summer school compelled me to write “Kathy.”

I didn’t consider myself “Kathy” until life and blood and feelings wove into the name.

Every high school name card and test paper and email signature held the name “Kathy.” I finished my first official creative writing piece being “Kathy.” “Kathy” became known among the faculty for being the editor of the newspaper. Years passed and I fell in love with various English names but only “Kathy” told me and others who I was. Slowly I realized that Siqi didn’t speak here, that I in the skin of Siqi couldn’t speak here, that Kathy had gained enough voice here to form her narrative.

I wouldn’t want to change my English name anymore, and I wondered if this loyalty to Kathy was a betrayal to Siqi. The simple question of “what’s your name” is a testament to this loyalty and a conviction of this betrayal. 日期, rì qī, date I found their calendars confusing when checking the time and date on friends’ phones back home. I didn’t recognize the Lunar Calendar anymore and I wondered if I ever did.

We say ‘year, month, day’ when telling a date in Chinese. In English, it’s month, day, and then year. Is this difference a switch—a bridge where I cross into another timeline with entirely different sequences of life? A bridge that’s hard to walk back. I find myself staying and stuck on one side, behind a glass wall that blurred and distanced the other.

I grew used to writing month before day and year. When marking time, I wrote abbreviations of English months and numbers that ended with ‘th’: ‘st’ when it’s 1 and ‘nd’ when it’s 2 and ‘rd’ when it’s 3. I learned this rule at five years old and have never forgotten since.

I’ve been carrying another time with me until I decided to let go and leave with it one day.

Yet only when I occasionally record time in Chinese do I feel the weight of time—heavy, feathery, unable to hold but stings and burns. 藕丝, ǒu sī, lotus root fiber In Chinese, there’s a chengyu2 called 藕断 丝连 “ou duan si lian.” It means that even when the lotus root is severed, its plant fibers in between are still connected. Oftentimes this idiom is used to describe a couple still longing for each other after a break-up.

I sometimes consider this the relationship between Chinese and me. 十一, shí yī, eleven Chinese public schools group students into homerooms called 班级 “ban ji,” or class, through placement exams. There were 12 classes in my middle school grade, each had about 2 Traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions, most have four characters.

45 students. I was in class 11.

Our class was called the “English experimental class,” which gathered students who were “good at English.” We created an English class slogan—Class 11, the best or nothing!—and shouted it at every grade gathering event. Our bulletin board was in English, our daily schedule too. No one paid attention to English classes because we all had harder English to learn.

Many of my middle school classmates eventually went abroad for high school or college— scattered across the States like fire sparks. Some of them became my best friends, and we would visit each other’s colleges during breaks. It’s strange because even though we were defined to live in English from the very beginning, seeing them always reminds me of the Chinese part of life. My middle school years were pure happiness and youth; whenever I think of them, I remember in Chinese. 亲切, qīn qìe, closeness When I stay in the US for too long, I feel a special closeness with people who speak Chinese. Like being the one late to the party but finding someone who has arrived just as late as you did. But throughout my entire virtual high school senior year in Beijing, I yearned for people who knew English like I did. Whenever I was with them, I felt my heart glued to theirs and this closeness we shared separated us from others.

The distance between me and a language isn’t defined by physics. I don’t lose something or someone because we are far away from each other.

guage can define. When we talk in Chinglish, I strangely feel the sense of belonging that I long for: maybe I was wrong all along looking for a place in Chinese and English. Maybe I exist in between. 音乐, yīn yuè, music Starting in ninth grade, my playlist gradually went from English to Chinese songs. I developed almost an obsession with Chinese pop songs in the 2000s. When doing karaoke with friends we sang mainly in Chinese, not Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Avril Lavigne anymore.

While in China we used VPN to bypass the government’s ban on Google, Instagram, and YouTube, we used VPN in the States to avoid location limitations on Chinese music apps.

Whenever asked for my favorite song or artist here I always struggle for an answer. I practice, constantly, to see it not as a sign of foreignness. These conversation starters are designed for those I almost always fail to join, but melodies and lyrics of Chinese songs talk to me in ways that I can answer, in ways connecting me with the self that has stayed on the other side of time and date. She understands me, even though we’ve parted ways long ago, even though we see each other only through reflections. We never cease to be one.

Sometimes language is not the only way to ourselves.

同学, tóng xué, classmates Among the middle school classmates who stayed in China, I remained best friends with one girl. We parted ways after middle school graduation; we have written entirely different life stories in entirely different languages since.

While she solved problems in the High School and College Entrance Examination in Beijing, I wrote application essays to prove I could fit in at private high school and colleges here.

But when we see each other during breaks, we still talk for hours. When Brown released its decision at 3 AM in Beijing, she Facetimed to open the result with me. When I said “I got in” we were both smiling and crying and covering our mouths and I knew she didn’t quite understand how I was feeling. And it’s okay.

正解, zhèng jiě, correct solution In middle school, for math problems, we were taught to write 解 “jie,” or solve, on the top left corner before writing down anything else. In all cases, at least you secure one point, our teacher would say.

I’m trained to search for answers. Yet after writing down too many 解, I realize there exists no single, perfect solution to any problem in life. We simply cannot frame everything in a binary of this or that. It’s forever impossible to discern how much Chinese I’ve lost and found or how much English I’ve gained and discarded; they don’t ever exist on the same plane.

Language cannot be added or subtracted, and neither can life, time, feeling, people, place.

I’ve been focusing on the wrong thing all this time. Perhaps the key of 解 is not its solution but the search itself. Perhaps I need to do just what my teacher has told me—writing down 解 and continuing this process of solving, ceaselessly. I may not need an answer this time.

忘记, wàng jì, forget I forget English words, too.

KATHY WANG B’25 is getting better at not losing things.

写作, xǐe zuò, writing When I write in English, I constantly wish I could write in Chinese. I keep Youdao Dictionary, a translation app I’ve been using since third grade, open whenever I write. Sometimes when I write on paper and certain words only pop up in Chinese, I jot down the Chinese.

Sometimes I don’t even know how to write the Chinese; I take note of its Pinyin.

I wish to have better English while fearing to lose my Chinese. Random thoughts I record in the Notes app on my phone appear in English more and more as time passes. But I still let myself at that inspired moment decide what language to write in. I try to not see the relationship between English and Chinese as one of give and take. Do I have to trade my expressions in Chinese for ones in English? Perhaps the two language systems operate simultaneously whenever I write. Perhaps I’m not converting one into the other. I never write in one language, even now when typing these letters; they don’t just belong to a language. They belong to me. 朋友, péng yǒu, friends My Chinese friends who also go to school in the States and I talk in three languages: English, Chinese, and Chinglish.

It’s fun to mix English and Chinese words in one sentence. It’s like creating a language that nobody else can speak—maybe living in two languages is creating a life that neither lan-

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 07

10

ARTS

Faith Wilding

TEXT NELL SALZMAN

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION ASHLEY CASTAÑEDA

My encounter with the mother of feminist art

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A few weeks ago, I left the library in an anxious state and decided that I needed to start some sketching projects.

As I paced in the middle of the pencil aisle at Blick Art Materials, an older woman walked up to me. She had white hair and was wearing all black. “These are the pencils I like,” she said, pulling down a Faber-Castell heavy dark graphite one. She then grabbed all of the pencils from the cubby to buy for herself, but gave me one.

“They’re special pencils,” she said.

She asked me what I was studying, and how I was doing. I explained that, for some reason, today I was feeling especially overcome by the weight of the world’s problems and my tiny place among them all. “I’ve always liked drawing,” I told her. “So I decided to draw about it.”

She said she understood, and helped me find an X-Acto Mightymite pencil sharpener.

I asked for her name. “Oh, you’re never going to believe my name,” she said cheekily. On the graphite test paper, she wrote it down for me— Faith Wilding.

With a name like Faith Wilding and such specific taste in art supplies, I was intrigued. I asked her what she did. She told me she was an artist, who drew trees.

I felt a sudden urge to talk to her, so I asked her if she would be open to doing an interview with me and, if so, how I should contact her.

She said she didn’t have an email and didn’t know her phone number, but gave me a time and place to find her for lunch—the Pembroke Center at 11:30 a.m. that Wednesday.

I don’t know what exactly made me ask her if she would be open to an interview, but I think I was compelled by her eccentricity—her inquisitive and sensitive way of talking to me.

At the end of an exhausting week for me— two thesis deadlines, a job rejection, a romantic rejection—it felt like Faith had appeared just when I needed her most. I was worried about where exactly in the Pembroke Center I would find her, but Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. sharp, we ran right into each other. We got chicken quesadillas and sat outside, admiring the way the sunlight sifted through the trees around us. +++ I did some research before meeting up with Faith, and was blown away by her career and work. Her pieces are stunning—colorful, detailed depictions of nature and semi-erotic

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

imagery.

At lunch, she was open and honest about her career, her love life, her neuroses, and her accomplishments. She grew up in unusual circumstances—on a Christian commune in Paraguay.

Her British parents moved there at the height of World War II. She told me the commune started in Germany in 1920, and then moved to England to avoid persecution. When England entered the war seriously, the only place that would take the commune was Paraguay. Faith’s father was a conscientious objector, so he chose to move and raise his four children abroad.

Faith called herself a “war baby.” Though she was born in 1943 and the war was over soon after, she grew up among other European World War II exiles—from Russia, Ukraine, Germany and England. Many of the families were large, with more than ten children. Schooling was a priority. Children were brought up speaking, reading and writing in English, Spanish, and German. “It was paradise in many ways,” she said.

The commune had been in existence for just three years before Faith was born, so living was basic. Her father worked in a sawmill, and everyone lived off the land, without much electricity; each house had a lightbulb that came on at six in the evening and went out again at 10. The only line of communication with the outside world was through the radio.

The kids learned to forage from local Paraguayans. Faith described learning to grow and eat yuca, make furniture, and weave mats. There was no distinction between handy-craft and art.

“The kids were praised for making things,” she said. “We had competitions. I just liked it—crocheting for example. We crocheted washcloths, blankets, things we needed. Later, I applied it to my art skills.”

As a young child, Faith was always outside and always drawing. She started drawing at age three. In an old baby book, her mother described a drawing she made at that age, asking Faith what it was about. “Ein Junge auf der Weise,” Faith said in German, or, “A boy in a meadow.” This was her first registered artwork.

Faith had a very close relationship with her mother, a schoolteacher who was a voracious reader and made the children recite classic poetry—William Blake, J.S. Woodsworth, among others. They spent a lot of time together—read-

ing, talking, crocheting. She told me she used to walk hand-in-hand with her, telling her everything she had dreamed and was thinking about.

She inherited her mother’s love for words.

The commune had a massive library, and Faith could read anything she wanted to. “I read all the time, particularly about women. I just wanted to read about women,” Faith said. +++ Faith observed a strong gender separation on the commune. “The religious commune was anything but feminist,” she said. “All my friends’ mothers had six, eight, ten children.

There was no birth control. Every child was a gift from God.” She told me that the children were carefully watched and observed. It was hard to sneak out and meet people she might be interested in. As a young girl, however, Faith was sexually curious and open to love. “I was in love with everybody on the commune. Well, not everybody.

Several girls, and a couple of boys, and one or two men,” she said. Because of the religious and cultural norms, sex was never openly discussed.

Faith describes a German book that her mom gave her on desire—about a man and a woman who meet each other, go on walks, and then “want to taste a sweet cake.”

Faith laughed when she talked about the blatant euphemism: “I was reading this, and I was like, ‘What? What is this about?’” It never became explicitly clear to her, except that they decided to eat the cake and then had to go to a priest to confess their sins: “You know, I’ve eaten a lot of sweet cake, and baked a lot. Those Germans. They eat a lot of sugar.”

In 1961, at age 19, Faith moved to the U.S. where she went to high school for a year and then on to college at the University of Connecticut. In keeping with her love of literature, she studied William Blake.

But having gained an understanding of war at a very early age—surrounded by the unusual people and circumstances of her upbringing— Faith was interested in politics. She began marching in anti-Vietnam War protests in Washington, DC, then joined a pacifist group and flew to England to protest the way that Britain was working with America in the Vietnam War. At a Labour Party convention, members of her group denounced the prime minister’s speech.

“The minute we got up to speak, the pa-

ARTS

rishioners who were sitting next to me—little old ladies—started hitting me with their bags,” Faith said. “I went limp, because that’s what we pacifists do. These big English bobbies carried me out of the church. It was in all of the newspapers.”

Faith was put in Holloway Jail—a women’s prison in London—where she went on hunger strike for four or five days. Faith pointed out that suffragettes at Holloway Jail in the ‘20s also went on fasts, were force-fed, and were treated badly. Faith and her cohort’s hunger strike didn’t go over well, so she was let out and shipped on a plane back to the United States.

Back in the states, delved again into classical literature. She transferred to the University of Iowa where she majored in Comparative Literature and wrote her thesis on William Blake’s America: A Prophecy. What drew her to Blake was his illuminated manuscripts—his interest in combining word and image. “I saw a lot of medieval manuscripts,” she told me. “I find that stuff so beautiful and fascinating.”

Faith draws inspiration from Blake’s Prophecy. She explained that Blake understood what prophecy really meant—that heedlessness can shape reality. With a childhood so grounded in nature, she draws plants and trees to invite her audience members to think about how present ecological developments have the power to shape and affect the future.

Faith is generally interested in the way that generations influence each other. She uses the modes of expression in Blake’s manuscripts and passes them along to younger generations.

While she was teaching art classes, she wanted to be a mentor and resource for her students.

“And what did I learn from my students? Everything,” she said.

Speaking with Faith, her commitment to lifelong learning and sharing is palpable.

Her uniqueness stems from this curiosity and openness. Her artwork makes people think about their lives in all dimensions—gender, sex, environment, politics. +++ After studying Blake in Iowa, Faith moved to California, where she graduated with an MFA in visual art from the California Institute of the Arts in 1973. Here, she became a pioneer of the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 70s.

Faith was a member and founder of the Feminist Art Group and of the “Womanhouse” exhibition—with artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. “We decided to talk about orgasms. That was a time centered around women’s liberation. I was very much into women’s liberation. Growing up on this commune run by men, I was ready. I was so ready,” she said.

Faith said that at the first meeting of the Art Group there were only five people, but that number multiplied. Everyone wanted to talk openly about orgasms in a way they hadn’t before. Women started breaking up with their partners because they weren’t satisfied. This powerful group of women was paving the way, asking themselves why they had remained so submissive about pleasure before. “But it wasn’t only about orgasms,” Faith said. “It was also about women’s desire, women’s freedom, women’s power. We were fledging our wings, trying to figure out why women had been so submissive.”

In her art, Faith combined her interest in plants with her interest in feminism. She worked on the collective art piece Womanhouse (1972), a group installation in a dilapidated mansion that explored and challenged domestic expectations on women: cleanliness, cooking, physical beauty, childbirth. Faith’s drawings of plants took on human qualities. Her drawings were abstract and bold, linking the complex beauty of the natural world to the feminine form. She mixed sketches of torsos, vulvas, and

scrotums with natural imagery—butterflies, fruit, insects.

“A lot of my art is very sexy, in different ways,” she told me.

Faith moved from California to Boston to New York, joining various feminist groups along the way. She taught at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Vermont College, and Norwich University. Her work has been commissioned by museums in New York and Los Angeles, and she has received numerous awards—including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her book—Faith Wilding's Fearful Symmetries— shows the wide range of her abilities: crochet, watercolor, painting, and textiles.

When I asked her what her favorite medium of expression is, she said, “I like to write with a pen and ink. I hate the computer. It’s so complicated. It’s fucking complicated.”

Faith’s inability to use her cellphone and her opposition to computers contrasts with her radical and youthful role as a sexual liberator and political protester. She has always been weary, however, of how technology affects inequity, specifically around feminist issues. Her work addresses the way that nature and technology must work together to enable justice, or “cyberfeminism.” In 1998, for example, she co-founded subRosa, a cyberfeminist organization that explores the intersection of technology and biotechnologies on women’s bodies.

Now, though she’s had solo and group shows all over the world—in Canada, Europe, Mexico, and Southeast Asia—she told me that she’ll probably never travel again. She has no desire to get on a plane. She’s almost 80 years old, and she’s chosen to stay in Rhode Island— living in a quieter way. She has family close by, and Brown University allows her to sit in on seminars without paying. “I love it. I chose to move here because it’s small. I’ve lived in all the big cities—Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, London. I needed some quiet,” she told me.

She’s still drawing, but no longer has shows at the pace she used to. When I asked her about how feminism and the environment impact her art now, she diverted my question. “I do like mysteries too, mmmm,” she said. “Detective stories, mmmm. Pretty into those. I read them over and over. Especially ones by women.

They’re the best.”

I like to imagine her sitting at her home in Providence, reading detective novels written by talented women. +++ At the end of our two-hour lunch, we closed our takeout containers and admired the trees. Faith told me that she was inspired by them. She said that because they didn’t have any leaves, they looked almost prehistoric. “I like to rub my hands over them, because it’s very rough. It’s very tingly. It makes my hands tingle. Which is good, because I’m pretty old and my hands are beginning to shrivel up and I’m trying to keep them sensitive, so that they can sense things.”

I appreciated the level of nuance and detail Faith felt comfortable enough to share with me.

She was open about sex and her romantic life, lamenting the fact that those on the commune never got a chance to experience the same openness. “I hope they had some fun, you know? Did they even know about orgasms? I don’t know,” she said.

Faith is talented and accomplished, but she has a mischievous smile and a comforting demeanor. I found that I had a lot in common with her and was able to open up about my personal life and my worries. We talked about our romantic histories, about falling in love with multiple people at once. I told Faith that one of my seven female roommates at school is writing her thesis about sex. “Oh is she? Good!” she said. “We set the table for you guys to come to the feast.”

Right now, Faith is focusing on drawing trees, harkening back to her days in Paraguay.

Throughout our conversation, she drank a mango Odwalla, remembering how she used to climb and sit in mango trees on the commune.

I asked her if she had any advice for me.

“Be curious, read a lot, meet people, and be open. Most importantly, surround yourself with some really close girlfriends.”

NELL SALZMAN B’22 thinks everyone should talk about orgasms with strangers over quesadillas.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 07

12

Dogs, Droids, and Drones

TEXT SACHA SLOAN

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON

METRO

Rhode Island considers legislation aimed at curbing police use of novel technology

13

They may seem like props from an old sci-fi flick: doglike automatons, flying machines that rain down bullets from the skies, networks of all-seeing cameras that remember your car and track its every move. But technological progress outpaces our imaginations: police departments across Rhode Island are quietly beginning to consider, and in some cases deploy, such tools.

“We’re behind the power curve when it comes to this technology. We’re just trying to keep up,” Republican House Rep. David Place told me.

In response, a bipartisan coalition of Rhode Island legislators have introduced several bills seeking to shine a light on law enforcement’s plans and stem this technological tide. One bill in the House, H7507, would require an advertised public hearing before Rhode Island police can buy or use a next-generation form of license plate reading cameras. Another House bill, H7505, would prevent police from using robots capable of violence in the line of duty. The state Senate is considering an identical companion bill, S2515.

“The clandestine use of this technology is very concerning,” Hannah Stern, a Policy Associate at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Rhode Island, told me. “These are parts of police work that the public should know about.”

has a decent chance of becoming law, legislators say, due to its powerful sponsors and diverse, spectrum-crossing base. But some of its

critics argue it doesn’t go far enough.

The technology “will make it hard to sleep at night,” Michael A. DiLauro, director of legislative initiatives for the Rhode Island Public Defender’s office, told me. Though it isn’t named in the bill, the surveillance tech that spurred the legislation is an ALPR street camera made by the Atlanta-based company Flock Safety, according to the ACLU’s Stern. On the company’s website, Flock Safety claims its cameras reduce crime in a community by “up to 70%.”

Unlike already-ubiquitous red light cameras, Flock Safety’s technology can capture and collate audio and unique aesthetic details of

+++ Early in the morning on Thursday, February 10th, Providence police responded to a domestic violence call at a home on Denison Street. They successfully evacuated everyone from the home except for the instigator, a 61-year-old man named Scott Maclean, who officers were told possessed upwards of a dozen firearms.

At around 6 a.m., Maclean started shooting.

Providence police relied on a robotic device called a Throwbot to spy on Maclean’s movements in the house, WPRI reported. After firing hundreds of rounds at police, Maclean shot himself, according to the Rhode Island medical examiner’s office. Providence Police Commissioner Steven Paré stressed the precarity of the situation—Maclean’s “high-powered rifles could penetrate the sides of homes and hurt innocent people”—and lauded the Throwbot technology.

“If not for that tech we used,” he told me, “it would have been more challenging and dangerous for the police officers and the community.”

The shootout with Maclean was the first time the Throwbot’s use was publicly reported.

But Paré said his department has used Throwbots and other robots before. The state police, who also responded to the Maclean incident, “have some as well,” he added. “I know they have some capability. I wouldn’t disclose to the fullest extent what the capability is. We’d like to keep it from the public domain.” +++ H7507, introduced on February 16th by Democratic Rep. Joseph J. Solomon, would require public city council proceedings before law enforcement can use a new class of automated license plate reader technology (ALPR). The bill

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“Instead of giving money to police departments to further futuristically militarize themselves, we should instead be exploring more funding for crisis intervention units, and better standards for how police respond to those kinds of calls.” vehicles. The cameras can even cross-reference that data with Flock Safety systems in other municipalities, creating a state-wide web of surveillance. Compared to the robot bill, Stern said the ALPR bill “is maybe more urgent, because we know this technology is being deployed. I don’t want to say one is more important than the other. But we already know [Flock cameras] are being used.”

Last August, the ACLU of Rhode Island learned that police departments in several cities, including Cranston, Woonsocket and Pawtucket, had begun using Flock Safety. “What we found out,” Stern said, “was that police departments were putting all these cameras in communities that no one knew about. The cameras were not as advertised. Police said they were, but that’s just not true. Imagine if police were

able to track everybody with a specific bumper sticker, candidate sticker, on their car. That would have huge First Amendment implications.”

In testimony submitted to a March 10th House Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill, the ACLU of Rhode Island expressed the aforementioned concerns and tied the issue to historical U.S. police surveillance of marginalized communities. “Communities of color in particular have most disproportionately experienced the egregious effects of limitless surveillance,” the testimony read. “The abuse of surveillance technology is not hypothetical.” On March 17th, the RI ACLU released a statement calling on the Providence City Council to “reject” the Providence police department’s use of Flock Safety, saying that the agency is “actively pursuing” its installation.

Harrison Tuttle, Executive Director of the Black Lives Matter Rhode Island PAC, agreed with the ACLU. “I think when it comes to cars that have possibly been involved in crime, we should want to identify someone in the best way possible, but that shouldn’t be at the expense of the public,” he told me. “I would lean toward standing with the ACLU.” Commissioner Paré downplayed the novelty of the ALPR technology. “We have red light and speed cameras that are recording license plates of violators,” he said. “I don’t think use of the technology should be prohibited or limited… license plate readers are common in use across the country. Though we have not used them here, we have looked at them the past couple years. As long as there’s a balance as to how it’s used, it’s appropriate. It’s something that will be used in the future.”

Another opponent brought up the possibility of private sector liability. Corporate use of ALPR technology isn’t addressed in the legislation. The American Financial Services Association, in written testimony for the bill’s hearing, expressed worry that the bill may inadvertently prevent their industry’s use of ALPR technology, despite its intended target being law enforcement. If private companies are compelled to share ALPR data with police, AFSA said, the bill could still prevent the private sector from using ALPR. Some lawmakers, like Rep. Place, are also unenthusiastic about Solomon’s ALPR bill—but for different reasons. “I think the legislation doesn’t go far enough,” Place said. “I personally believe the technology should be banned. I support [the bill] because it’s better than nothing.”

According to Place, the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Solomon, also believes the camera technology should be banned, “but understands that is not realistic.”

METRO

Democratic Rep. John Lombardi told me he agrees with Place, but opposes the ALPR bill because it allows ALPR surveillance at all. “There’s a feeling that it invades a reasonable expectation of privacy,” he said. He highlighted the relatively conservative makeup of the bill’s Democratic sponsors. “Other than [Rep.] Ajello, it’s the more conservative wing of the Democrats,” he said. Regardless, he thinks neither the ALPR nor the robot bill will pass. “Biggest fish is the budget and how to spend 1.7 billion dollars,” he said, referring to federal funding Rhode Island received from the American Rescue Plan last year. It’s also an election year, so most legislators will hesitate to vote on controversial bills for fear of handing ammunition to a primary rival, he added: “I don’t see this bill as being important in the scheme of things.”

For her part, Stern stressed the importance of the oversight the bill would provide. “It is not unusual for these technologies to be regulated,” she said. “There are state laws governing red light cameras use. [The bill] would require a public city council hearing, a record of public approval.” +++ H7505, introduced on February 16th by Democratic Rep. David Morales, would forbid police from purchasing or using three types of robotic technology: dog robots, other automatons capable of violence, and armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), also called drones. To support Morales’s effort, on March 1st Democratic House Rep. Jonathon Acosta introduced S2515, a companion bill to H7505 that comprises the same text.

Robot dogs have not been used in Providence yet, according to Paré. In states like Massachusetts and New York, though, police have showcased futuristic canine droids in city streets, drawing media attention and swift backlash (even then-New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio called the machines “creepy.”) The NYPD scrapped the initiative just months after unveiling it. However, in late March, New York media outlets reported that current mayor Eric Adams is considering incorporating drones into the city’s law enforcement.

H7505 wouldn’t ban non-lethal tools like the Throwbot, only “use of robots to kill or attempt to kill somebody,” Rep. Place said.

“It’s all about lethal force and the arming of the technology.” However, any machine that is “substantially likely” to cause injury or death would be prohibited, the bill reads, “regardless of whether or not the robot or UAV is armed with a weapon.”

When it comes to police oversight, H7505 is an example of a “proactive” bill, the ACLU’s Stern said. “This bill fits very neatly in limiting police technology and surveillance technology.”

As with the ALPR legislation, Stern framed her support for the bill in terms of its potential to rein in law enforcement: “There’s a lot of opportunity that police have to test and use these tools without any statutory or policy limitations, which is obviously very concerning because they could have bad impacts on communities, they could promote police overreach.”

Tuttle said he supported the bill because it may prevent police from spending money on expensive new technologies. “We support it, because look, we’ve seen calls to reallocate money [from police] in order to have the needs of everyday Rhode Islanders met,” he said. “Money should be put in housing, mental and behavioral health, or even in nonviolent responses to nonviolent causes. This bill offers an opportunity for this.”

Jordan Goyette, legislative director for the progressive political organization Reclaim RI, expressed a similar vein of support in testimony

for a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill. “Instead of giving money to police departments to further futuristically militarize themselves,” he wrote, “we should instead be exploring more funding for crisis intervention units, and better standards for how police respond to those kinds of calls.” And, he added, how would a wronged citizen pursue legal recourse against a robot?

In response to the New York City robot dog, Rep. Morales introduced a similar piece of legislation last May, saying on Twitter that it would “ensure that Rhode Island never becomes home to ‘Robot Police Dogs’ that further militarize police while using public tax-dollars.” Morales’s original bill was more ambitious in scope, seeking to ban robots and drones regardless of their capacity for violence. “Police wouldn’t have been able to use the Throwbot, or drones for search and rescue,” said Rep. Place, who is the bill’s co-sponsor. “So I helped moderate the legislation, ensuring it was not so broad.”

Place expressed concern about what he described as the dehumanizing nature of robot policing. “I did 10 years in the military. I understand what it means to have to pull a trigger on another human being,” he said. “When there’s not a person on the other end of that trigger, it dehumanizes them, it’s playing a video game.

You lose the human piece, the morality.” He also sought to reconcile conventional Republican support for the police with a Democratic-led police oversight bill. “Regardless of how you look at police now,” he said, “there is a human being standing between an order and the execution of that order.” With robots, “the risk of undue harm coming to civilians is not worth it.” In spite of his support, Place doesn’t see a bright future for the bill’s passage, at least right now.

Commissioner Paré called Morales’s robot bill a “huge mistake.” “As technology develops, I think it’s also important that police utilize that technology,” he said. “The right to privacy—we can’t just throw a robot or a camera in a house, unless there is imminent threat and exigent circumstances.” In written testimony for the House hearing, the Rhode Island Department of Corrections and the International Brotherhood of Police Officers echoed Paré’s arguments that the bill would hinder criminal justice. “Although I don’t believe that any of these machines are armed today,” IBPO Legislative Director Tony Capezza wrote, “as you can see the prohibition only applies to law enforcement officers, nowhere does it point to the general public, mainly criminals from possessing robot dogs, armed robots, armed UAV’s.”

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha sounded a similar note, while also acknowledging the technology’s downsides. The robots “could be helpful… in hostage situations” or incidents like the recent shootout on Denison Street, he said, adding that “we have to weigh surveillance versus public safety.” For his part, the Public Defender’s Office’s DiLauro hasn’t thrown his support behind the bill because it doesn’t include anything about privacy rights. “And, if this is a great new technology,” DiLauro joked, “Rhode Island being Rhode Island, we’ll be the last to get it.”

The Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation (DBR) also objected to the bill in written testimony, but were concerned only about the impact it may have on the State Fire Marshal’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit.

The bill, DBR Director Elizabeth M. Tanner wrote, could prevent the Unit from using normally unarmed robots that can “detonate an explosive device… to breach a barricaded doorway.” Tanner wrote that the department would be happy to collaborate “on language that would allow the [Unit] to carry out its duties, safely.”

Paré said he’s not familiar with police robot

dog technology, including the examples from Massachusetts and New York City. “We do have a robot for the identification of bombs,” he said.

And unmanned aerial vehicles? “We don’t use drones often,” he said, “but in the past couple of years we’ve developed our abilities to use drones. Sometimes it happens so quickly that we’re not able to deploy a drone for an active police emergency.” Paré said his department’s use of drones was for “visibility.” “I don’t see us deploying military-style drones—I don’t think,” he concluded. +++ The sponsor lists of the two House bills include both Democrats and Republicans, signaling an emerging bipartisan front on police oversight in Rhode Island, legislators said.

“What I think it comes down to is you’re starting to see a shift in perspectives,” said Rep. Place, a Republican. “Someone like Rep. Morales definitely comes from a different community than I do. I think what you’re seeing is, while his community fears and mistrusts government because of what it has done to his community, from our perspective, we’re coming around to the idea of fearing government because of what it could do to us. So you’re starting to see an alignment of views on criminal justice reform,” he said. “We’re starting to wake up to it now, and as far as I’m concerned, I can speak for any number of Republicans that believe we need to start to curtail the police state.”

Rep. Lombardi, a Democrat, agreed. “Some of the Republican representatives are concerned about invasion of people’s liberties. They have a conservative view of looking at this,” he said.

He located the bills within a “cornucopia of ideas and bills that would address BLM’s concerns, people with disabilities’ concerns.”

Legislators and advocates alike stressed the growing importance of regulation around police technology—and how this endeavor has only just begun. “The Supreme Court has acknowledged that technology is moving more rapidly than the legal system,” Place said. “Their stance is, government must catch up. They’re not going to intervene… they’re not going to create case law about new technology.”

An unaccountable, rapidly expanding police technology apparatus could exacerbate the effects of systemic racism on Rhode Islanders of color. “I don’t want to see this technology used to further criminalize Black and brown people,” Tuttle said.

Whatever happens with these bills, “this will be one of the critical issues,” Stern said.

“Advancements in technology are happening faster than any of us can imagine. So these bills are also important to tell the public what is being used by police right now. They also say that there have to be limits.”

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 fears the mechanized overlords of our future.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 07

14

X MICK CHIVERS ANGLES OF JUDGEMENT

Mick Chivers B’24 “Angles of Judgement,” plaster & steel, 9’x4’x3’.

15

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

S+T

Episodic Memories: Tylenols, Tremors, and Turbulence

assuring them I will be fine. The familiar words ring like bells in my head.

October 2015

TW: graphic imagery of hospitalization, suicidal ideation, trauma October 2014

March 2018

FAIZA CHOWDHURY ‘22.5 is probably making chai for all ten of her housemates.

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

1

My most recent grand mal seizure happened a month ago, in the home I share with my roommates, some of my closest friends at Brown. I woke up on our couch in our living room, to familiar faces and a headache I knew all too well. There were no EMS cars, no stretchers or neck braces, no strangers to bombard me with questions on current global affairs. Instead, my friends handed me two Tylenols and helped me into bed. They helped me navigate nausea, pain, and confusion. A few days and a handful of painkillers later, I had recovered completely without pitiful glances or forced trips to hospitals.

There is a lot I have learned since my diagnosis of chronic illness seven years ago. My hands shake uncontrollably when I make chai in the mornings, and my friends regularly braid my hair and remind me to take pills. I have long since accepted that mornings will always be difficult, and have learned to manage tremors adequately. I know that I will likely not drive or study applied mathematics anytime soon, and that I will probably need medication forever. I have learned to relinquish control over what is constant, and instead have redefined what care means to me. I rely on radical communities that understand my needs, ones that know not to call a hospital every time I have a convulsion. In the shakier moments, I trust them, to respect my agency, and offer me Tylenol when I need it.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

The treatment regimen seemed to be working. After years I could finally hold a hairbrush without my arms flailing every morning, even though over time, there was less hair to comb.

Doctors insisted that no side-effects could possibly be worse than my condition itself, and that I needed to do whatever I could to prevent the seizures from coming. I was made to take my medication even as my hair fell out in clumps, avoid morning classes and switch out my concentration, because doctors were convinced STEM fields would exacerbate my stress levels.

I was given vague suggestions to “stress less”, along with never-ending lists of restrictions that were imposed on my diet and lifestyle.

In college I struggled to strike a balance between these rigid rules and my hectic schedule. Stressful caffeine-fueled all-nighters inevitably brought on seizures in crowded lecture halls. The concern from my family had been replaced by pitiful glances from strangers—EMS personnel, professors, and peers in my classes.

Emergency responders asked me the same questions every time: What is the date today, who is the president, where are you? My inability to verbally articulate my needs limited my control over the outcome of these situations. In those moments of confusion and post-seizure fogginess, I could barely convey that all I wanted was to go home and take my two Tylenols.

Regardless of my wishes, I found myself in different hospital beds, waiting for hours to be told the same words I had heard so many times before.

Doctors recommended my medication be doubled, then quadrupled, then switched to a stronger anti-epileptic

Present

TEXT FAIZA CHOWDHURY

Most mornings before school are the same.

Uncontrollable tremors through my fingers and toes make mundane tasks incredibly difficult. I cannot comfortably grab a spoon or a comb, and I’ve dropped and broken two bowls this month.

My sister holds me as I shakily brush my teeth.

My mother feeds me cereal and braids my hair.

This morning feels similar. I grit my teeth and take deep breaths to cope with the embarrassment, to avoid drawing attention to myself, to urge my body to cooperate. Some days it helps the tremors slow down, but not today. Today, the tremors are stronger than my ability to resist. The world around me goes dark.

I wake up dazed in my parent’s bedroom, surrounded by a crowd. My sister and parents and grandparents tower over me. The concerned look on their faces is all I can process before I feel the headache coming. I close my eyes and hear voices around me, praying silently. We’re taking her to the hospital this time, do you understand?

My mother hands me two Tylenols and rubs ointment on my forehead. She tilts my head back and inspects the cuts on the sides of my tongue. Then suddenly, it is dark again.

I wake up again, this time in a room with the familiar stench of disinfectant and offensively fluorescent lighting. A familiar nurse brings me painkillers and wakes my parents, who are asleep on the couch next to me. She administers the medication and helps me into the clean hospital uniform. Fluid from the familiar IV bag drips rhythmically into the tubes in my arm, and the steady sound puts me back to sleep. In the morning, my doctor arrives to explain lab results to my parents. I am prescribed calcium, iron and zinc, and vitamins A through D. There are no irregularities, he says. It’s probably just an iron deficiency, common in most young girls her age.

She will be fine.

For a while, I am fine. But every once in a while, the tremors return, and I find myself waking up dazed, surrounded by a crowd. They speak and pray quietly enough that I cannot hear them over the pounding noise in my skull. They tsk tsk over my blistered tongue and my split-open forehead, my memory loss and incontinence. I wait patiently for headaches to fade and for that dazed feeling to pass. I wait patiently in familiar hospital waiting rooms, as doctors prescribe medication for diagnoses that range from vitamin deficiencies to schizophrenia and explain away medical jargon to my parents,

In another hospital, a nurse instructs me to lie down, attaching wires onto my head with adhesive. My father sits down on a chair next to me and carefully unwraps the newspaper that will keep him company as I sleep. My medication makes me drowsy, and I fall asleep to the sounds of crinkling paper and beeping monitors. After almost six hours, I am awakened by a doctor, who arrives to discuss test results.

EEG scans indicate irregularities typical of Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy (JME). Patient overview confirms a history of generalized tonic-clonic seizures.

Grand mal seizures may cause memory loss, permanent brain damage, and in some cases, SUDEP.1 Patient must avoid stress, must sleep regularly, must not drive or swim or cook alone. 200mg of sodium valproate and 10mg folic acid is prescribed —dosage may be increased if seizures persist.

drug, one that traded in the prior side-effects of chronic hair loss for fatigue, irritability and suicidal ideation. My experience of chronic illness came to be controlled by healthcare systems, and I felt more exhausted by these treatments than by my epilepsy itself. There was little regard for my needs, and the lack of agency in decision-making regarding myself made me feel frustrated. I knew by now that I wanted not to wake up dazed in front of strangers who insisted they knew my condition better than I did, to be heard when I said that I did not want to be hospitalized, and to be believed when I said I knew my needs best. More than a cure, I wanted care that made me feel safe and comfortable.

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 07

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EPHEMERA ISAAC MCKENNA “MONSTERS” Isaac McKenna B'24 “Monsters” Single-channel video (2:28) Exploration of micromovements in the eyes, with additional focus on themes of anxiety, existentialism, and screen as boundary. Includes audio track with voice-over.

17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY

TEXT CECILIA BARRON

I’ve worked SO hard to get over my exes, and it’s like none of you even care. When was the last time you asked me how I’m doing? Instead, all you do is ask me whether you should go back to your ex from your first year, your high school ex, the Dear ex you never had but wish you did. I NEVER went back to mine. Don’t I get some credit? The Ex has come to take Indie , on its own meaning for some of you, ascending corporeal form. I’m not even sure whether you’re referring I’m a to someone you dated or just a time you wish you could get back. Either way, it’s a bit passé, s e c on litera and it’s certainly not cute. lly, n d semest think e o So raise your right hand and repeat after me: I, [NAME], rebuke ing a thing. I r junior, want and bout I hav the Ex. I banish all Ex and all Ex related energies starting m s o y m first

e e year thing, b n’t had on this day, [DATE]. This includes [ANY EX OR u a g

t n irlfri end. because y roman EX-RELATED THING, LIKE YOUR SEVENTH ti I Shou ld I r have not c success GRADE CRUSH WHO DIDN’T LIKE YOU h each f out t ing else t or three BACK]. I, [NAME], promise to be flirty and y o her o ? Or look ba ears. Lik fun in all my future dealings. c e am I k , just to, I kee Congratulations. You’re now ex-less. desp Love erate p , ?

The Sexl Dear Sexless Sentimental, ess S entim enta l In my experience, if you have to ask whether something is desperate, it usually is. But why run from your desperation? Run toward it. Desperation is sexy, it’s hot, it’s provocative. Desperation gets things moving; it shakes you up and spits you out. It necessitates an action. And you, my friend, seem to be getting no action. So don’t shy away from it. Desperation is the new black.

Being needy, though? That’s never in. There’s a fine line between neediness and desperation, but going back to your ex might fall under the category of the former, while slipping someone your number would be considered the latter. Old, comfortable sex is needy. New, sweatier sex is desperate.

We need things we once wanted, but we’re desperate for things we currently want. oing I’m g . d n e So what do you want? Spare me the physical details, write whatever it is i m nd I’ boyfr ious person, a ny tips you desire in the margins of this page, and then, go get it. I mean r e s this ex. A really this literally. Go up to that person, or those people, or the ad a eally like im to my h I hen .Ir entire party, and speak! your! truth! It’s scary, I know. ng h ool, w ext week compari h c s , n h p e But what do you have to lose, no offense? One of g Indi then ce hi end u Dear e sin one since I’ll just p my friends once paraded around the dining hall n o y an at me ung-U h o d t s H e t d y h a e l t proclaiming her desperation. A night later, she i , s te wi worr en’t d Love Hopeles I hav st real da so really had a boyfriend. It can work! y fir m al But if, after a few attempts at this, you on m . BUT I’ oment? d m e still come up with nothing, then we can excit ng in the i v revisit the ex. You can come crawling back on li to her on your pathetic, needy little kness.

Dear Hopelessly Hung-Up, Until then, reek of desperation. We can

smell it on you, and we think it’s hot.

What’s your ex’s name? WRONG. It’s Steve. All exes are Steve from now on, forever and always Steve. You’re going to compare the person you’re going on a date with to Steve?

They’re worse than Steve? They don’t turn you on like Steve did? You’d rather go home with Steve? I didn’t think so.

All comparisons are destined to win against Steve. So enjoy your date, and think about how grateful you are that the person you’re sitting across from is named something like Scarlett or Romeo—two of the sexiest names according to MadeforMums.com—and not anyDear Indie, thing close to Steve.

(If your new date happens to be named I have never had a serious romantic relationship. I’ve only hooked up with people once or Is Steve, that’s lovely! I love that name. You can twice, and I’ve been on maybe three dates, if any of those counted as dates. Is this normal? instead use Mark. Or Francis. Whatever you something wrong with me? Do I smell bad? prefer.)

Love,

Our Naive Normie

Dear Our Naive Normie

DESIGN SAM STEWART

I feel most comfortable in a relationship where I never have to see the other person. One of my friends only dates girls with names close to Julia/ Julie/Juliette. Another friend only hooks up with people she’s known for less than an hour. And another met his boyfriend at orientation and has all but put down a deposit on the ring. Are any of these normal? I don’t really think so. Obviously, the Julie/Julia fetish is the weirdest. But, honestly, maybe we’d all have better luck if we just picked a name and stuck to it. (Dibs on the John/Jack/Joe trio—it covers a lot of ground.)

I don’t think you smell bad. I think you smell great. Your relationship status or lack thereof doesn’t have to do with you at all. Relationships, sadly, require that there be at least two parties. I’ve tried to figure out ways around it, but alas, you can’t really cuddle yourself.

I’ve given enough advice about putting yourself out there (see my responses above). So, in the meantime, try to shift your perspective. I think most insecurities about being perpetually single stem from the basic misconception that people are having sex all the time. They’re not! Very few people indeed are getting laid at all. And, sadder than that, even fewer people are going on dates! There will always be some (very loud) people who seem to be Carrie Bradshaw-ing their way through the Providence dating scene, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Most of us are spending Thursdays with our friends, not at some restaurant where the music is too loud. We’re leaving parties empty handed, and going back to rooms alone. We’re talking to a lot of Jacks and Joes and Francises and Steves on Tinder and forgetting who is who. That, to me, seems pretty normal. It might be boring, but that wasn’t your question ;)

, VOLUME 44 ISSUE 07

18

A message from the Rhode Island Chapter of the Communist Party of the United States:

U B LLETIN BULLETIN

Upcoming Actions & Community Events Friday 4/8 @ 9 PM: Support DARE’s Community Court Debt Fund at Revival Brewery!

Come see DJ Peezy vs DJ Natty B at this DJ battle! Part of the proceeds will go to the court debt fund, and two other organizations. You can also donate to the fund at tiny.url.com/community-court-debt-fund Location: Revival Brewery, 50 Sims Ave Sundays in April @ 3-5PM: Queer Knitting Circle at Small Format Queer knitting circle is back! Want to learn how to knit or refresh your knowledge? Looking for more queer community? Bring needles and yarn for a lesson! The group will meet every Sunday through April, Location: 335 Wickenden St. Sunday 4/17 @ 12 - 3 PM: Queer Archive Work Open Library Hours The QAW’s Open Library Hours are back. The library is free and open to anyone for drop in browsing, reading, chatting, resting, etc etc etc. Open every other Sunday this Spring!

Location: 400 Harris Ave, Unit F, Providence, RI

...We maintain that while capitalism has had over three hundred years to trial-and-error at the expense of countless human lives and suffering, existing socialism has had only a fraction of that time. If we consider the countless bodies rendered lifeless from American Imperialism at home and abroad, any atrocities committed by Communist Parties in the past pale in comparison. From chattel slavery to the extermination and internment of indigenous North Americans, to countless wars waged in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South/Central America, the body count of American Imperialism, reaching as high as 14 million people per year, exceeds that of any historical or existing world order. The continuance of these wars through proxy and military aid are a manifestation of capitalism’s utter reliance on Imperialism through financial capital. We maintain that a system that relies on exporting and strengthening its military industrial complex at the expense of its people is a failed system.

Communism is derived from the economic and political theory of Karl Marx, expanded upon by a host of theorists around the world.

Simply put, the system entails the abolition of class society by the workers and a seizure of the means of production (not to be confused with personal property). To get there, a political revolution must occur to overthrow the existing system of capitalist wage labor, which will liberate the impoverished classes and allow them to begin constructing an equitable society. This system calls for the abolition of all classes, and over time creates the conditions for the withering away of the state apparatus. Far from a pipe dream, this is a very real goal that we’ve seen occur the world over, and it is possible here.

Read the full message here:

Saturday 4/30 @ 8 - 2AM: Ocean State A$$ Birthday Fundraiser Celebrate O$A’s 2nd birthday and spend some cash on your local sex worker organizing group. Featuring local DJs, a dance party, and hot merch. Studio 54 theme - dress to impress!

Location: The Salon, 57 Eddy St

Mutual aid* & Community fundraisers *Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities. +

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATOR JULIAN E. LINARES

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19

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Community Support Needed Donate at https://givebutter.com/amor4sol AMOR is fundraising for Sulayman, “Sol”, a Gambian father to an 8-year old boy from Providence. Sol was detained by ICE in late 2018, and ultimately deported to Gambia in March of 2019. Now, his family are beginning the process of getting Sol back to the US to reunite with his wife and son. Any help would be appreciated.

Support a Black mom who is grieving Donate at tinyurl.com/Black-mom-grieving This fundraiser is intended to raise money for a Providence community member who has faced several trials this past year: assaults on her family at the hands of police, traumatizing DCYF raids, and the passing of close family members and friends, including her father. While battling cancer, she is also the primary caretaker of several grandchildren, and needs the funds to provide for them and pay for her father’s service.

Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There are currently 16 outstanding requests for aid, equal to $1600. Help QTMA fill this need!

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

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Railroad Fund PVD Venmo: theorytakespraxis The railroad fund provides sustainable support to people currently incarcerated in Rhode Island. Please donate and help Railroad support a friend who is in need of continued survival and support this winter.

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Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund 2022 Venmo: OSA-funds Support local sex workers by donating to the venmo above and consider buying an Ocean State A$$ calendar, on sale at Fortnight Wine Bar, Hungry Ghost Press, Symposium Books, Mister Sister Erotica, and RiffRaff.

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COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new or used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Fundamentals of Political Economy Reading Group Every first and third Tuesday from May 3rd to August 2nd, 6:00 P.M. at Red Ink Community Library. This event is hosted by the RI CPUSA and Red Ink Community Library.

RSVP at: https://www.eventcreate.com/e/fundamentals-of-political-e This is an opportunity for free education, networking with fellow leftists in the area, and acquiring the intellectual tools needed to build a better world. This reading group will focus on achieving fluency in the debates of political economy. We will begin by laying out the definitions provided by liberal economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Then, we will see how Marx and subsequent political economists challenged the liberal tradition. From there, we will branch off into a number of views of what drives nations, how societies rise and fall, and how power is taken and maintained.

Please RSVP if you plan on attending, and let us know if you plan on purchasing or borrowing the books. If you cannot do either, we will supply you with copies. In most cases, we will not be reading entire books, but rather pre-circulated chapters and excerpts.

We also have no preference for how you consume the readings. Traditional reading, official audiobooks, and text-to-voice are all acceptable.

1. Introductions (May 3rd) 2. Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) (May 17) 3. David Ricardo (On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation) (May 17) 4. Karl Marx (Capital Vol. 1) (June 7) 5. Freidrich Engels (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific ) (June 7) 6. Karl Kautsky (Socialism and Colonial Policy) (June 21) 7. Vladimir Lenin (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism) (June 21) 8. Rosa Luxemburg (Reform or Revolution?) (July 5) 9. Eduard Bernstein (Evolutionary Socialism) (July 5) 10. Emil Durkheim (The Division of Labor in Society) (July 19) 11. Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation) (July 19) 12. Political Economy Today (Piketty and Harvey) (August 2)

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page?

Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!