The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 8

THE INDY*

03 SEVEN ON THE STRIKE LINE 07 I NEVER FEEL SO MUCH MYSELF 09 MYCORRHIZAL MISSIVES

Volume 43 Issue 08 19 November 2021

THE ATMOSPHERIC ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY*

Volume 43 Issue 08 19 November 2021

This Issue

Masthead*

00 “APRIL SHOWERS”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

02 WEEK IN WARDROBE

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

Joey Han

Alisa Caira & Asher White

03 THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN ON THE STRIKE LINE Ricardo Gomez, Deborah Marini, & Peder Schaefer

05 ON “SEVEN METHODS OF KILLING KYLIE JENNER” Osayuwamen “Uwa” Ede-Osifo

07 I NEVER FEEL SO MUCH MYSELF

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss ARTS Jenna Cooley Nell Salzman EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee METRO Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer

Rachel Carlson

08 “OTTOWA, CA”

SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff

09 MYCORRHIZAL MISSIVES

BULLETIN BOARD Lily Pickett

11 “REGRET”

X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer

Asher White

Mariana Fajnzylber & Ella Spungen Lily Chahine

12 THE SILENT WAY

DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

13 INEQUALITY IN MEMORY

LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan

Janek Schaller

Adrian Oteiza

15 MAO, CONFUCIANISM, & ANTICONFUCIANIST REVOLUTION Tianyu Zhou

17 TORNADO AT THE STATE HOUSE

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain MVP Gala Prudent

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

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

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

18 DEAR INDY

Mission Statement

Amelia Anthony

19 THE BULLETIN

From the Editors I write about pretty things too. Like the moon on the nights when my mom texts me “olha a lua!” or the potted flowers in our garden that had drooped, completely limp, but then revived. “Look at them now!” my dad calls. “They’re back! Can you believe it? Isn’t it incredible?”

Pretty things like the way my friend zig zags unsteadily on her bike because she’s distracted by her own laughter, like borrowed books with annotations, like sitting on the windowsill and watching the rice and beans on the stove, like being told that when I dance I look like I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing, like my grandma’s cursive letters, always on beautiful stationery, like finding bits of myself in you, knowing that I have spilled outside of my borders and you have cupped your hands and caught me.

-MC

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

COVER COORDINATOR Iman Husain

MANAGING EDITORS Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deborah Marini

Peder Schaefer

01

DESIGN EDITORS Isaac McKenna Gala Prudent

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

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

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

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Wardrobe Pants 1. Corduroys: You have a great laugh but there are crumbs in your bed.

2. Yoga pants: You like “all music except country.”

3. High-waisted jeans: You have a Pinterest board for “bangs inspo.”

4. Low-rise jeans: You have a Pinterest board for “ponytail inspo.”

5. Velvet leggings: I have a crush on you.

6. Linen trousers: You clumsily brought potato salad to a Veteran’s Day event.

7. Those patterned boho flare pants that you can buy at Spectrum India: can I borrow your salt lamp?

Shirts 1. Oversized sweater: You have run out of Netflix shows to binge and are debating a Disney+ subscription to fill the void.

2. Harley-Davidson t-shirt: Did you thrift it, or did you spend $30 at the Vault?

3. Highschool sweatshirt: You’ll never date someone as hot as the varsity quarterback from junior year. Also, you may have thrown up in the Louis’ bathroom.

4. Band t-shirt: Woah! I love that album!

5. Spaghetti strap tank top: School dress code enforcers hated you, and the global economy came to a grinding halt because the rest of the world couldn’t stop staring at your shoulders.

6. Turtlenecks: I do not have a crush on you.

7. Button-up: You’re my middle school Vice Principal Mr. Schliesser, and your sweat stains are showing through your undershirt.

Skirts 1. Denim mini-skirt: You eat red meat.

And it’s so hot.

2. Schoolgirl: You are holding onto 2014 desperately, or you’re Scottish.

3. Prairie: You aspire to have a garden but have killed every plant on your bedside table thus far.

4. Leather: Ideally, you’re a bit kinky. Likely, you’re doing too much for 9 am.

5. Bodycon: I am not looking at your butt, but I would like to, if that’s okay with you.

Patterns 1. Plaid: you’re sensitive but can take command of a room when necessary; you have a good sense of humor and slightly tousled hair.

2. Argyle: you are excited about your graduate MCM degree because it will present you with ample opportunities to teach.

TEXT ALISA CAIRA & ASHER WHITE DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK

Patterns cont.

3. Paisley: you play bass guitar for the Prince hologram.

4. Gingham: you go to bed at a reasonable hour, floss, and also churn your own butter.

5. Houndstooth: you are reading Mark Fisher and listening to breakcore.

6. Checker: you have a mustardy smell but people like you because you’re energetic.

7. Stripes: you should remember to Venmo request people more.

Footwear 1. Clogs: You have IKEA furniture and download pirated PDFs of cookbooks.

2. Doc Martens: Mom won’t leave you alone!

3. Sneakers: What was your name again?

4. Rain boots: You will soon have a broken ankle.

5. Uggs: Who do you think Gossip Girl could be?

6. Platforms: You or someone very close to you is transgender.

7. Dress shoes: You “like podcasts.”

8. Tevas: You’re from Colorado or something and have a real chip on your shoulder about it.

9. Blue suede shoes: You’re gonna tear it up on the Ed Sullivan show!

Jackets 1. Fleece: You’ve ordered soup at a restaurant within the last week and perhaps also carry around a Burt’s Bees balm.

2. Denim jacket: You speak in a sexy, low voice and eat a nice, filling breakfast every morning.

3. Large, patchy, quilted jacket: You are finishing your BFA in Ceramics.

4. Brown suede jacket: You are in a Bob Dylan album cover but have never been paid royalties.

5. Trench coat: You’re either a detective or a person the detective is looking for.

6. None: You are a 13-year-old boy on the middle school basketball team at the bus stop.

7. Weird old thrifted blazer: You are failing to finish your BFA in Ceramics.

8. Leather: Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize I was watching The Matrix.

Jackets cont.

9. Puffy, brightly-colored coat: Your hair is dry and you often crave juice boxes.

10. Carhartt Jacket: You’re the child of an oligarch and you haven’t accepted it.

11. Canada Goose: You’re the child of an oligarch and you have accepted it.

12. Reflective vest: You are a Safe Walker.

13. Non-reflective vest: Have you considered a career as a Safe Walker?

14. Camouflage: They’re catching up to you! Run! Hats 1. Beanie: You are a member of Bolt Coffee’s Rewards program.

2. Knit winter hat: You are cute or you are bald.

3. Bucket hat: Your cigarette box is slick with Chicken McNugget grease.

4. Cowboy hat: You may not make it to Oregon due to cholera.

5. Beret: You are cute, but more importantly, insufferable.

6. Red hunting hat: You are fearful and alone at the precipice of adulthood.

7. Floppy sun hat: You are about to throw a tantrum because 105.1 didn’t start playing Christmas music on November 1st.

8. Baseball hat: You played little league as a kid and are out of my league as an adult.

9. Leopard-skin pillbox hat: See Jackets, #4.

Accessories 1. Infinity scarf: You escaped from an Anthropologie stock photo.

2. Arm warmers: You lack human touch.

3. Apple watch: You smell of Old Spice and airport terminals.

4. New Yorker Tote bag: You pay for an n+1 subscription.

5. Indy Tote bag: Your mom pays for your n+1 subscription.

6. Fjallraven backpack: Your mom pays for your Rookie Mag subscription.

7. Fingerless gloves: You are a member of The Strokes. And you have chapped knuckles.

8. Scrunchie: You’re the camp counselor who smelled like incense at Bible camp.

9. Claw clip with tight bun: You yell too much at the kids you’re supposed to be substituting for.

10. Claw clip with messy bun: You flirt too much with the kids you’re supposed to be substituting for.

Underwear 1. Hanes Briefs 3-Pack Tightey Whities: No one is going to believe your fake ID. 2. Fruit of the Loom: You mistakenly bought a chili dog at a baseball game.

3. Richer Poorer: Your aunt loves you!

4. PARADE: The algorithm has you figured out.

5. Long johns: Stop asking me to go to Acadia.

6. Granny panties: Your eczema is bound to get better sometime.

7. G-string: The GCB re-opened!

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

02

TEXT RICARDO GOMEZ, DEBORAH MARINI, & PEDER SCHAEFER

DESIGN/ ILLUSTRATION DEBORAH MARINI

METRO

SEVEN ON THE STRIKE LINE

03

Teamsters 251 calls for better working conditions On May 26, 2021, truck drivers working at Johnson Brothers Distribution in North Kingstown, Rhode Island went on strike, calling for better wages, working conditions, healthcare benefits, and pensions. The strikers—Charles Reid, Stephen Silva, Steve Vinacco, Rosendo Ochoa, Nathaniel Babalato, William Duran, and Alex Pelaez—are affiliated with Teamsters 251, the RI chapter of the nation-wide Teamsters union that has represented American truckers since 1903.

November 17 marks the 25th week of the Johnson Brothers strike, a period marked by daily picketing of the distribution facility and targeted strikes at liquor stores when trucks driven by strikebreakers do deliveries. Together, the strikers have had to navigate harassment from police, harsh weather conditions, and harsh exchanges with strikebreakers.

Johnson Brothers is a national liquor distributor with 16 distribution centers across the country, and it is the largest distributor of wine in Rhode Island. With the help of Teamsters 251 organizers, all seven of the truck drivers at the Rhode Island site unilaterally voted to unionize in September 2020. These organizers told the College Hill Independent that the company has been negotiating with the union in bad faith and has been disregarding the strikers in order to prevent their unionization efforts from spreading to other facilities. Teamsters 251 has supported the seven unionized Johnson Brothers workers throughout the strike by offering strike pay and work at a unionized facility nearby.

The Indy spoke with an organizer and four of the strikers at the Johnson Brothers facility in North Kingstown. Their stories speak to the everyday struggle for socioeconomic justice.

- PS, DM, RG

Matthew Maini is a business agent from the Teamsters Local 251 that helped organize the strike.

Indy: How did you first get involved with union organizing and this strike in particular?

Matthew Maini: Sure. So my name is Matthew Maini. I’m the business agent from Teamsters local 251. I’ve been a Teamster for 31 years…

I started out as a steward and worked my way up to the ranks. These guys came to us in September of 2020 and voted unanimously to have union representation. And we started to negotiate with the company in January of 2021, after the certification came in, and then from there, we’ve been at the table since May 26 of 2021. We walked out on strike because the company was engaging in what we would call surface bargaining—bad faith bargaining. They

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

had made unilateral changes to the working conditions without bargaining in good faith.

They didn’t want to talk about wages, they didn’t want to talk about health care, and they didn’t want to talk about pensions.

Health care was a big issue here. These guys are making an average pay of about 15 to 16 bucks an hour. The health care had a deductible of about $20,000 out of pocket, which is unaffordable for these workers. So a lot of these workers were going through the exchange, which was subsidized through the state, and they were being subsidized through the state for medical care, and that’s why we’re here and we’re fighting… I mean, we’ve been here 161 days. Yeah. So we’ve been out here fighting and this local is committed to them.

We represent other beverage companies where we have a large presence in the beverage industry as a union. We represent Centrex McLaughlin Moran, Horizon Beverage, Northeast Beverage so we have a lot of contracts with unionized companies that pay for health care and they give a living wage. The area standard in this industry for starting pay is about $22 and change. The top rate is probably around $30, plus pension plus health and welfare... which is a fully funded socialized medical plan through the [union] local…

Indy: The strike has been going on 161 days out here. What have been some of the obstacles you all have faced? What personal obstacles have there been and how have y’all been making it through?

Maini: The guys are out here anywhere between 10 to 11 hours a day, five days a week. We were doing overnights in the summer, which was the busiest time. We’ve been dealing with an oppressive police force, no matter where we go.

The police have been the traditional long arm of corporate America where they try to suppress our constitutional rights. We have the right to picket. We have the right to chant. We have the right to pass out flyers. Every step of the way the police have really hindered us.

We’ve dealt with the weather. We’ve dealt with economic issues: late bills and things. The local provides a strike benefit, which is roughly $375 a week for each worker out here. We have assistance from United Way for paying bills and food. We’ve been doing our best to make sure that they’re fed, that they’re getting medical treatment, that they got some money in their pocket…

And I’ve never met a group of people so dedicated to social economic justice ’till I met these guys. We call them the “Magnificent Seven.”

That’s a Clash [the band] term in case anybody was wondering. We call them the “Magnificent Seven” because they really are the Magnificent

Seven. They stick together, they are their tight crew… They want a fair wage, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay and their employer who makes $4.5 billion a year in revenue has decided they’re going to crush these seven men…

Indy: You’ve spoken to how this is a community effort and the toll it can take, what has community support been like, outside of the folks here?

Maini: Absolutely. We’ve gotten support from politicians like Sam Bell. We’ve gotten support from the Democratic Socialists of America.

Other unions... Joint Council 10. All the locals within New England have helped. So yes, there’s been tremendous community support. There’s been tremendous support when we go to the stores and we’re bantering and leafleting, a lot of customers have stood by our side. Even store owners like Marty’s, Lucas and Warren, and Muldowney in Downtown [Providence] had a fundraiser for us. So there’s been a lot of community support who get the battle in the fight for such social economic justice, and that’s good they are standing with us. Rhode Island has a long history of good union families and good values when it comes to unionism. So we’re very fortunate in that.

Indy: We just saw an exchange between the “replacement workers” and the strikers. Ideally, they would be receptive to your organizing message, but what kinds of strategies do you have in mind when talking with the replacement workers?

Maini: We make it very clear that these people that came in to take these jobs are scabs. They came in to take your job and replace you, and anybody in their right mind that crosses a picket line, whether you’re union or non-union, has committed an injustice to all workers of the world. And when there’s a picket line, whether you’re non-union or union, you honor that because that particular picket line symbolizes social economic justice.

Charles Reid, of Central Falls, has been working with Johnson Brothers for eight years as of November 11.

Indy: What led you to go on strike?

Charles Reid: I’ve come from a union background. My father was union, and my mother wound up working in the unions too. When I

METRO first started here, it was good, it was alright, so I didn’t really pay attention to being in a union so much… But later on down the line I started to see minimum wages going up, and people coming in at higher rates, and our pay basically staying at a [certain] level… And the fact that we started working by ourselves a lot more with ten times more work on the truck, and basically haven’t been paid for health care—everything just started boiling, boiling, and boiling.

[Unionizing] was not just something that happened overnight. It was something that came up across through the years of working here.

And once Alex [Pelaez, interviewing below] said, you know, I’m thinking about [unionizing], I was like, I’m with it. Because I was tired feeling like I was slave labor. We all got tired of it. You know what I mean? And we all said, “we’re down,” and we did it.

Indy: What happened when the Johnson brothers found out that y’all were unionizing?

Reid: Yeah, they didn’t like it too much. They wanted to spit their rhetoric about why unions are bad and stuff like that. And what would happen if the union were to join the company, and how bad it would be for us, and paying union dues when we all knew what the truth was to begin with. So we knew it was all lies when they were spitting it at us… So, they just wanted to frown upon us becoming union and try to influence us to not go through with it, even though we already made up our minds.

Indy: What’s it been like striking for these past 23 weeks?

Reid: It’s been tough, it’s been tough. In the beginning, we had overnights. It was tough… you know, staying here all day and overnight and having to go in the next morning...Then you wake up early at home, just to come here earlier than we would to come into work. We braved the hot summer days, following trucks and picketing, [and] right now we’re going to be braving the cold you know, and they say rain, and then the snow’s coming. It’s tough, you know what I mean? But anything worth having is worth going through hard times for... We want to keep fighting because we know that it’s all going to be worth it.

Indy: What do you think of the scabs?

Reid: They can go kick rocks. That’s what I think… They’re misguided people. They don’t really understand what we’re doing. They say they do. They say they know what we’re fighting for. But they don’t care, because they’re making a paycheck. They don’t realize that money is not everything, and when it comes down to it, your self-respect is worth more than money. They don’t get that. Some of them are young, conceited, hot headed, you know, and want to prove themselves but the thing is, that’s not the way you do it.

You don’t do it like a scab, saying ‘Oh, I’m here to beat you,’ when in the long run, we were out here fighting so you could have a better chance at having a better life if you choose to. But you choose to be a scab. And that’s honestly, to me, worse than making the decision to be your own person… One way or another my life is going to be better, while they’ll be stalling and stalemating sitting there trying to make ends meet.

Indy: What’s the impact of the strike on you and your family?

Reid: It’s made me stronger, actually. It’s made me more aware of myself. I’m seeing what I have in me, and family-wise, some people get it, some people don’t. But the ones that do understand that I’m fighting for something that’s actually worth fighting for instead of sitting back and letting things happen. For instance, one liquor store one time told me, you guys should just be happy with whatever they give you, and then fight for more later. Why, when I’m fighting now? Why would I accept defeat now? And then try to win again later? And that’s the impact [the strike] has had on me, is knowing what kind of strength that me and my brothers have to go through. That’s the impact.

Indy: What are your hopes for the end of this strike? What do you hope comes out of it?

Reid: Well ultimately when you go on strike you hope that you get the things that you deserve.

You get the contract, you get your benefits, your good pay, your better working conditions and stuff like that. But ultimately, the one thing I want the most is for all of us to be able to live a better life, whether it be here or somewhere else.

And I already know that’s going to happen so it’s not even a hope anymore. I mean, it’s definite.

So that’s my hope for what happens at the end of this. And we already proved [to] ourselves that we could do it, so I’m not worried about that hope anymore.

Alex Pelaez had worked the longest for Johnson Brothers before the strike, and is the de facto strike leader.

Indy: What has the experience of striking out here for so long been like for you?

Pelaez: Very stressful. I never imagined when I was telling these guys that we would go on strike, that [we would be here so long]. I told them the most we will be out here is probably three months. It’s already been six months.

So I don’t know if they’re mad at me at that or not, but lucky for me, they’re still out here and they’re gonna continue to be out. So I guess I lucked out on that. But I did tell them that it was gonna last no more than three months and we never expected—not even the union guys—to be out here this long. So that’s the most stressful part. The fact it’s just been this freaking long.

We don’t even know how much longer it’s gonna be.

schedule, and are better about knowing how to do everything, but it was very mentally challenging at first because we didn’t know when we were gonna get back. All seven of us didn’t start attending the negotiations until [this] September. That’s when we found out how the company really is, how they really want to “negotiate,” if you want to call it negotiating... In my eyes, that’s not even negotiating, that’s just them being stubborn and not wanting the union in.

Indy: How have you all been building community and supporting each other?

Babalato: As a team we have been strong throughout. We always talk when it’s downtime like this, when we’re just waiting for trucks, or something like that. We talk about our interests, hobbies, outside life, or just stories and stuff like that.

Indy: What are the interactions with cops like?

Babalato: The North Kingston police actually told us that we cannot picket the trucks—which is illegal to say—and they told us that we only had two minutes to picket each truck which is unheard of. And then they tried to backtrack...

Then there was one incident in North Kingstown that we were using the horns and they tried to tell us that we couldn’t. But that was just them trying to force their position on us so we were like ‘Alright fine, we won’t use the bull horns but we can be just as loud with our voices.’

Steve Vinacco is a truck driver with Johnson Brothers on strike.

Indy: What’s the relationship been like between all the strikers?

Indy: What has made this feel sustainable and like something you can keep doing for like a long time?

Pelaez: We’re standing strong. We’re like family at this point. We’re here all the time together.

We’re fighting, we’re suffering together. Like they say, misery loves company. It’s through misery and pain and hardship that people become stronger and bond more… But when you’re suffering together you stick together more, because you’re all feeling the same thing at the same [time]… It’s actually made us closer, it makes us want to fight harder. So I think in that sense the company is losing, because the longer it goes on the stronger we become and the tighter we become.

Steve: We know that the contract will definitely keep us here long term. So we know what [we’re] fighting for, we definitely know we need to do this. We definitely feel that they’re trying to wait us out. Because that’s what happened in Minnesota. I want to say it was like ten years ago. They went on strike for 14 weeks and they got tired of it, and they walked back into work, and they got a bad contract. It’s not very good.

They don’t have union security. So we’re not going to do that—we’re strong...We’re not going to walk back into work without the contract that we have on the table, which is a fair contract.

Indy: Are there some things that you feel aren’t getting through to the public?

Nathaniel Babalato started working as a truck driver in 2020 and has been working at Johnson Brothers for a total of three years.

Babalato: I started as a warehouse worker, then I worked my way up to helper, and then they basically forced me to be a driver during Covid.

They told me that they were going to furlough me if I didn’t become a driver. I had no choice, and I needed this job, so I took the driver position. During Covid they cut our hours and they didn’t want to give us helpers. So that was just the tipping scale of why we decided to unionize.

Indy: How has the unionization process affected you personally?

Babalato: Personally, I’ve adjusted to everything, but at first everything was very mentally challenging. Also, physically challenging because we would be out bannering in the blazing heat.

We would be doing overnights, and then we would be either in the sleeper truck or in our cars doing overnights, and it was either hot or cold. But now everything has settled down a little bit with the strike lines. We have a better

Steve: When people see us they say “why?” and “why hasn’t this made the news?” And I’m like, I don’t know, it’s been going on almost six months! It would have to be something really bad, like violence would have to happen, to get the news to pay attention—Channel 12, Channel Six...Something would have to happen to trucks, you know, stolen truck, fire to a truck, fire to the building, to get attention to the news. They haven’t reached out, I mean, it was big that the Providence Journal reached out to us. That’s the biggest so far. But it’s been months and people still don’t know. They’re like, “Oh, we didn’t know you’re striking.” Like really? Salespeople aren’t telling people. We try to tell folks. We were going around for a while to the accounts and talking to them: “Hey, we’re on strike please,” “don’t buy the products,” “substitute and buy from another company.”

After interviewing the Marvelous Seven, RICARDO GOMEZ ’22, DEBORAH MARINI ’22.5, and PEDER SCHAEFER ’22.5 stopped their tradition of taking a shot of Amsterdam Gin after finishing each Indy article.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

04

ON “SEVEN METHODS OF KILLING KYLIE JENNER”

ARTS

A conversation with the director

TEXT OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION CAMILLE GROS

Jasmine-Lee Jones’ Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner opens with Cleo, a young British Black woman, reading a tweet congratulating celebrity Kylie Jenner on being a “self-made billionaire.” Cleo is angered by the phrase “self-made,” given that Jenner’s image and fame are predicated on the appropriation of Black culture. She sends out a tweet proposing to kill Jenner, sparking a viral Twitter thread. From this premise, the play balloons into a broader dialogue about cultural appropriation, colorism, homophobia, and the distinctly marked ways in which Black women navigate the world. In transporting the audience between the omnipresent “Twittersphere”—particularly the world of Black Twitter— and the “IRL”—the real world—the play blurs the lines between social media and reality.

05

Seven Methods debuted at Brown’s Leeds Theatre on November 4, selling out its first and closing nights. Sock & Buskin—a student/faculty board that selects shows to perform—chose the play as one work in its upcoming season. It contains a multitude of intersecting narratives: tensions within the Black femme leads Cleo and Kara’s friendships, what invoking Kylie Jenner is emblematic of, alternative spiritual figures such as Saartjie Baartman, and more. The College Hill Independent spoke with director Jessica Natalie Smith, a third-year MFA Brown/Trinity Rep student, over Zoom.

OE: When you first read the play, what did you take away from it? What were you feeling?

JS: It was a lot. I remember reading it and feeling that I need to read this again and again because there’s so many conversations that are put into this one piece. These are community-based, trust-based, and love-based conversations. I got a taste of the expression of Black femalehood, and that experience on its own is so layered and not singularly defined.

OE: Did you have any hesitations or worries during the production of the play?

JS: Not a worry or anything I was hesitant towards, but something that I was aware of, from reading it, was that this play is not what it seems like on the surface. It’s not like Greek theater, where there is no subtext. It’s not like Shakespeare, where it takes people pages and pages of soliloquies to flesh out their thoughts. It’s a world where people are saying the thing that they mean, but what they mean has millions of interpretations. There’s pulling on cultural context clues through GIFs, through moments of pop culture. The playwright pulls on collective memory, collective experience, and cultural norms of vernacular. When someone says, “I said what I said,” yes, they’re saying that “I said what I meant,” but they’re also saying, “I said, what I said,” with the power and confidence of Mimi Leaks. You can feel lifetimes of experience behind what people are saying. That’s what makes it really exciting.

OE: On that note of collective memory and meme culture, the play uses meme references, not only in speech, but also projected around the black box. What do you think would have been lost if the memes weren’t projected as the characters were speaking?

JS: So much! Lines like “And I—oop,” are not written out, [instead there] is a screenshot of the GIF [in the script]. It’s not enough to just say the words. The reference of the moment is the conversation. If we don’t show it, I think we’ll leave people out. That’s something that I was also very aware of—like, there are some people that don’t know what “reclaiming my time is.” And that’s fine. There’s people that don’t know—I didn’t know—“Get out of my Caucasian house.”

OE: Who is that from again?

JS: That’s from Joane the Scammer. There’s little moments where you can be a part of this world and not know all of these references.

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OE: Some of the Black Twitter lingo wasn’t spelled out. Following this conversation of what the audience knows and does not know, what do you think of dialogue not having to cater to white audiences?

JS: This play was born out of fierce advocacy of the Black students at Sock and Buskin. Our design team is all Black or mostly Black. This play, to me, was so clearly written for Black people, Black femmes, and Black folk. So as far as making the choice of speaking some of the slang that’s usually abbreviated, that had to do more with the fact that, like, Black Americans don’t know what “Big Man Tings” [means]. So I’m like, maybe we can train people. If they hear “Big Man Tings,” then when you say BMT, they’re like, oh, that’s probably Big Man Ting, you know. There could have been another choice of literally offering the lingo visually, but that felt like catering to an audience outside of who it was made for.

OE: People before viewing the play may wonder when they read the title, why Kylie Jenner? I mean, even after viewing the play, that question may still linger. What do you think about her being the entry point to all of the different themes explored in the play?

JS: Why not Kylie Jenner? Her fame is a direct result of all that she steals from Black women and Black people. Her family is the direct result of appropriating Blackness. We couldn’t say “Seven Methods of Praising Saartjie Baartman.” People wouldn’t show up to that. Why not use the popularity of who she is to open up a conversation of the harm that she causes? You know, she’s not going to use her name to amplify Black voices. So why can’t we use her name to amplify our own? Right?

OE: The title of the play references seven ways to kill Kylie Jenner, which are proposed by the tweets of lead character, Cleo. There’s displacement, disgrace, drowning, immolation, shooting, skinning, and poison. Which one did you find most striking?

JS: There’s some real poetry behind those methods. If we look at the methods, death by poison” is the first one. [Jones, the playwright] talks about the poison of plastic surgery, specifically this plastic surgery that makes [Jenner’s] family famous. There is a legacy of poison in the Black community. Our people are literally tested on. French doctors were saying, “let’s take these vaccines we don’t know about, give them to people in Africa, and if they work, we’ll distribute them everywhere else.” Flint does not have clean water. This is something that is very tangible for our community. And the next one is death by shooting. Come on now.

If there was one that knocked me out, it would have to be death by displacement. That’s a death that Black people are experiencing on a daily basis—living and existing in places that are not built for you, that certainly don’t cater to your existence, and may not even really want you to be here. We see from other mammals in the wild, animals can die from being displaced. Taking someone out of home and out of comfort is a horrible thing to do, and that’s a trauma that we all share and continue to experience.

Then, in death by disgrace, [Jones] references blackface. Black performers were not allowed to perform unless they were participating in blackface and black minstrelsy for a long time during the Jim Crow era. And something that I think about a lot as a performer, as a theatre practitioner, I have ancestors that were not allowed to show up to be because the idea of who they were was so much more desired than who they actually were. There’s a lot of Black people that are asked to disgrace themselves to get the things that they deserve. It’s a conundrum that we have not yet been able to outlive.

OE: I want to pivot for a second to some of the scenes between Kara and Cleo. White feminism is often criticized for lack of intersectionality and for exclusions of women of color and trans women. But, this play explores this untouched area of the privilege that cisgender, heterosexual Black women have. Can you talk about these tensions that arise between Kara and Cleo?

ARTS

of Alice Walker’s daughter, Rebecca Walker, who wrote a book called Black Cool. In it, she talks about remnants of cultural memory and how there are things that are a part of Black American culture that have traces and roots back to things that are culturally nuclear. She talks about the way spirits operate, and how your ancestors are always around you, and they’re always with you. She traces remnants of that belief, to things like, how your grandmama has a table that no one can sit at, right? That table is just for show, but [Walker] believes if you go back in our history, that comes from this belief that your ancestors are here. They are visiting you and you need to leave space for them. You need to leave places for them to be, so they can protect you, and be with you.

[Walker] names all these different ways in which things that Black people do that we view just as a part of our swag, as a part of our culture, have these deep spiritual and historical meanings that we are generations removed from and we have lost awareness of. And I say all that to say, I’m feeling a really strong reemergence of that in a lot of these new Black plays.

So when there was this moment [in Seven Methods] where the world stops, so we can praise an ancestor, I was like this is it.

JS: Absolutely. Black lives can’t matter until all Black lives do. The deeper you go into history—not just Black or Afro history, but to the global history of different people, like indigenous groups or groups of people that have not been displaced—the commonality you’ll find this is the mark of holiness that is placed on queer bodies. There was a reverence.

Colonization has brought us really far away from that. It is the work of colonization to make people most ashamed of their culture. It’s that conditioning that leads to that tension and that unawareness of privilege.

OE: Towards the end of the play, Cleo and Kara praise Saartjie, a South African woman branded as a “freakshow” for her curvaceous body. This scene calls upon concepts of alternative and African spirituality. Cleo and Kara speak about reclaiming their autonomy, their bodies, and sexuality. Let’s talk more about this.

JS: Years ago, I had the privilege of living in Washington, D.C. There’s a local restaurant chain called Busboys and Poets, and it’s a restaurant that is inspired by the life of Langston Hughes. He lived in D.C. and he used to be a busboy, and the story is that how he became Langston, as we know, is that he was working and saw someone who was high up in the literary and art world, and put his poetry under the glass on their table. Anyway, all that to say, at Busboys and Poets, I came to a reading

The images [of characters’ monologues projected around the theater] are actually out of a session that we had where we paid tribute [to Black ancestors]. I loved the reframing of [Saartjie] that Jasmine offers. She’s the emblem of Black beauty. We called upon her in this play. I want her to see love. I want to undo the spectacle that she was created into. This is the way that she should have been shown if she was going to be brought around the world like she was. It should have been so people can see how beautiful she is, not that she’s unhuman or some scientific mystery, but that she’s this gorgeous woman who stands tall.

OE: This is a bit speculative in nature. I’m curious, where do you think the play leaves us? What happens after the play?

JS: Cleo and Kara are fine, them having the spiritual experience kind of heals the hurt. Or at least it kills it in a way for them to be able to move forward in a productive way, in a healthy and loving way. As far as the audience, hopefully they got a lot of shit to think about.

OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO B’22 is looking forward to watching more of Sock & Buskin’s plays in their upcoming season.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

06

I Never Feel So Much Myself Four Walls, A Corner

TEXT RACHEL CARLSON

DESIGN ERICA YUN

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

LIT

Your body hitting the smooth edges of the bathtub reminds you of your boundaries, rain pelting the roof above your head, being nested within the wooden frame of an open window, pushing your bed into a corner.

These are all the places in which you are touched by the rest of the world.

This image should remain comforting as you get older, even when you have to pull your legs into the creases on your stomach just to fit inside.

Showers will always be acceptable, but you may discover that everything happens too fast. A bath is permission to idle: in water against flesh, in flesh against every place you have been that day. And sometimes idling means contending with the thoughts inside of your head, so sometimes you try not to do it, because you are already thinking too much about everything else. But it can still be comforting, you think, if only because the bathtub really does represent a boundary––contained, guarded, restrained, but unrestrictive.

07

Rosewater Roses are beautiful, even when they are watered with blood. At least, they are until you have spent too long in front of the shiny silver faucet, staring at that thing that lines the places where the tub meets the corners and edges of the bathroom walls that you only just now learned is not actually called grout.

Sometimes your eyes get heavy, but there’s a knocking sound outside the circular window next to the bathtub where a tree has been growing there since you were a kid. Its thick branches have never stopped beating on the glass windowpane. As a child, they reminded you of a fairytale witch’s fingers covered in boils and dripping with poison. Every time you sat down on the toilet next to the bathtub, you took deep breaths and closed your eyes to shut out that metronomic sound, just so you could pee in the middle of the night.

Sometimes that woman’s knocking gets so loud you don’t believe your brain could ever turn it down. And sometimes you’ve wondered if this woman outside your window might look a little bit like you, and if maybe the constant tapping is her way of telling you this, or her way of telling you that you are not the same, or her way of telling you that you are.

In your head, she didn’t have ears, in the same way that half-imagined stick figures and kids’ drawings of other people never do. She doesn’t need to hear. The feeling of her voice will always be her most salient feature. Her breath is sharp like your crocheted pink baby blanket against your cartilage when she whispers in your ear, but today it smells so much like rusty razor blades that you forget how to focus on anything she says.

All you can see are the dead-ends of your hair hanging into the bathwater, floating into kelp-like silhouettes until your eyes get blurry and you feel the uneven branches of her nails drum against your scalp.

She combs every single strand of hair away from the next, and the next.

There must be thousands, but she is patient, meticulously undoing the tangles the water has made.

You wonder what it would be like if she starts to hand you clumps of your own hair as she picks endlessly across the roof of your head. For a long time, your hair had fallen out like this, and for a long time after that, you had dreams about losing the rest of it. Some internet psychoanalysts told you that meant fear of death, loss of control, others told you it meant feeling unattractive.

But maybe with each strand of hair she pulls, your head will float upwards––as if the disappearing weight of a single strand of hair could really make you feel that much lighter. If you roll cobwebs of hair between your thumb and ring finger, you can press them against the side of the tub so they look like flowers. Clinging to the cold porcelain, those webs kind of look like flowers. Maybe you could grow a garden. You already have the faucet for water and the circular window in the wall for sunlight. A fairytale witch to watch it flower.

You press a strand into a coil on the bathtub wall and see the root of it expand as the suction from the tiny crack between the drain and its plug tries to draw it in.

“It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it” You think your garden needs a ladybug. Or something to distract from the burning dream-residue saying, your scalp is bleeding.

Then again, one time you walked into the post office in the middle of someone else’s 242-person Northeastern town. Had you not seen the road sign indicating that it was the post office, you would have mistaken it for a small wooden house, nested by trees in front of a lake. When you pulled open the screen door, you saw a ladybug and smiled, thinking it might mean your day had no choice but to get a little better. You pointed it out to your roommate. You looked up only to realize that your bug was not really special at all, that the ceiling turned out to be covered in open wounds. Ladybugs oozed from cracks, pouring out where corners met corners in the walls.

And then there was that feeling in your stomach that you recognized so well, almost dread but not quite; the first second you realize you

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

might have disappointed somebody, and you feel clammy and alone and all you can see when you look into that other person’s pupils is a figure born from branches, rooted in dirt.

Your twin brother likes to say that God hits you with one hand and heals you with the other. Maybe that is what happened here.

Neither of you had ever thought to wonder if ladybugs travelled in groups.

Mirror Stage Your third grade teacher had once told you, “You’ll know you have a fever if your eyes burn behind your lids as they close,” but you never understood how that was supposed to feel. Shivering in the tub one night, you thought you might know what he had meant.

It was that time in fifth grade you got so sick at sleepaway camp that you had to come home. The nurse said you could come back when your fever went down, and you nodded. You didn’t really want to go back. When you heard your mom’s car pull into the camp’s dirt-paved driveway, you felt relieved. You got into the backseat and saw your baby blanket waiting for you, like the foggy breath of that woman outside your bathtub window. You slept with it every night, and sometimes, when you were away from home, you even thought you smelled it when the wind blew the air past your nose. This time, though, you’d decided bringing it with you wasn’t worth more snarky comments from cabinmates. Smelling home, you clutched it in one hand, and fell asleep against the car window laminated in nighttime air.

It was past midnight when the car pulled up to your house, and you sleepwalked straight to your bathroom. You got into a hot bath, if only to displace the screaming sounds of funhouse cackles from every morning your counselors had lined up in front of the cabin’s “skinny mirrors.''

As you closed your eyes again below the water, you realized that your friends thought you were still at camp and would continue to think so for another week. While half of you wondered if any other campers would realize you had left, the other half sunk deeper into this feeling–– as close to the fault line of invisibility as you have ever been.

Leaky Faucet You have always been plastered in someone else’s skin. When you wrinkle your nose, you feel it loosen its grip, and wonder if you could peel it all off at once, hang it up to dry and save it for later. But something about the way it settles back into you as soon as you relax the muscles in your face makes you think it would be better to let it stay.

The feeling is ugliest in the bath, where your skin would inevitably feel foreign once it began to prune. You aim for distraction, contort yourself to meet the places where the water is still warm. When your right hand dips into the warm water, you jolt to the left and feel that the cool patch you’d tried to avoid is icier than it had been before.

And your head really does feel like it’s leaking, but not with blood. If you had to describe it, you might try to find a word that mimics the texture of something like the last drops of gas coming out from the pump–– something you can tell you were never really supposed to be smelling in the first place.

At another moment, you might laugh at yourself. People always make fun of baths because you’re just soaking in your own filth. That has never made sense because you were pretty sure you were doing the same thing inside your skin anyway. At least here there was soap and water involved, and you had a moment to think.

Now you start to wonder if you’ve ever understood the difference between feeling contained and feeling confined. The cocoon of the bathtub could easily feel like a coffin, but you’re pretty sure you’ve always liked small spaces. You swear there’s a sense of safety in having to curl your legs into your chest when you get too tall to lay out horizontally in the water.

Flood Surface tension is one of your favorite feelings, which seems ridiculous because you mostly hate tension and if you’re being honest, can’t really handle it without feeling like you’re on the verge of tears. Still, it feels so good when the water has filled the tub to the very top, laughing at the tub’s rounded edges for ever thinking they could keep it all inside.

You suppose it could feel better if one day everything spilled over onto the wooden panels of your floor, no longer allowing itself to be held within the boundary of the bath. Maybe it would seep into the ground, depositing itself like dirt––another kind of tapping to keep you up at night, another kind of window through which you’d watch yourself soak.

RACHEL CARLSON B’23 wants to take a bath.

ASHER WHITE “OTTOWA, CA”

X

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

08

MYCORRHIZAL MISSIVES Dearest Mari,

Sweet Ella!

You were my first and only true pen pal. (This feels wrong, somehow; as a child I longed to trade letters with someone mysterious and far away, would tuck notes into the crooks of trees and inside public library desk drawers.) I didn’t know you wrote that letter, nor did I know you, really, but I clung to your note across state lines. I drafted and scrapped multiple replies before finally attempting, from quarantine, to send one long, existential letter back—I bought frog stamps, both for the occasion and because stamp buying was the thing to do at the time.

The letter was—unsurprisingly and unceremoniously—sent back with R.T.S. scrawled in red ink across my carefully penned non-address. I held onto that rejected reply long enough to hand it to you, in person, a year later, having matched my new friend’s handwriting to that of the owner of Box #6285. But I never did mail you a letter—the ultimate failure of a pen pal. So, here, far too late and many in-between communications later, is my letter back.

I return to your first letter often, to the question you posed to me that I couldn’t seem to answer: what do you do to make yourself feel human? I wrote something about stars making me feel my smallness, but I feel like I failed to address what you had asked. I was stumped by the fundamental premise of what you asked—what did it mean, exactly, to feel human? Why did you know the feeling while I couldn’t figure it out? I was one step behind, couldn’t conjure the thing that induced a sensation without knowing the sensation in question. I couldn’t unravel what it meant to be human.

Maybe I need to start much smaller. In a tent, by flashlight, a year and a half after I first got your anonymous note about sumo oranges and head scarves and humanness, we talked about approaching the question from belowground.

We were in the woods together when we learned about Monotropa uniflora, or ghost pipe. At this point in the year, the plants have mostly dried and turned a shriveled brown-black, emerging straight from the ground so quietly I would have mistaken them for a handful of twigs.

When alive, though, the plant is stark white (thus the spooky name!) heads bowing in ghostly prayer. Without chlorophyll, the plant cannot absorb sunlight for photosynthesis. So how—our botany professor Becky offered—does the plant survive? The answer: the fungal network lacing through the soil and the nutrients running through it; the word parasitism was thrown around to describe how the ghost pipe gets its food from mycorrhizal fungi (who themselves get those nutrients in a trade with a tree). You bristled at the word, coming over to me and whispering an objection. I think I responded defensively, deferring back to the science—whatever that means—as the final arbiter of that fungal relationship, reifying the cold labels that define consent and exchange and reciprocity in the soil. But I’ve been thinking about that moment since. Why are we so quick to label that relationship we know so little about as parasitism, a name that carries such a moral judgement with it? Might there be nuances to that exchange that we don’t know about, can’t know about? What does it mean to be a parasite anyway?

I know we have more important things to arrive at, but I can’t escape this image in my head, of this little version of you running away from the tree trunk where you left your written gift, letting out that same cackle you release when you’ve done something either sneaky or silly or both. I’ve been so fortunate to hear plenty of that laugh in such a short amount of time and in a surprising wealth of places: exchanging confidences under the cover of both harsh dorm lighting and vast coastal stars, driving down some stretch of the New Hampshire interstate, trailing behind Becky as we whack away at the Phragmites australis. As I’ve struggled to locate myself in my old life these past six months, I’ve learned to locate that sound that starts at the bottom of your throat. It’s been a thread. One that has fed me, sustained me. Does that make me a parasite?

You’re right, I was put off by Becky’s characterization of the ghost pipe. Science—whomever that word refers to—tells us that parasitism involves an association between two different organisms, wherein one benefits at the expense of the other. But science, or at least one study by Krasylenko et al., also tells us that all organisms engage in these relations, that many species play both parasite and host, and even benefit from it. Doesn’t seem so one-sided after all.

No matter how much I try to decode the ways in which scholars make sense of parasitism, I can’t divorce myself from the sour feeling that word produces. My mind conjures the visage of an otherworldly insect, its prickers stretching out towards me. The word evokes a cruelty, a callousness (one that is most definitely unfair of me to impose upon this hypothetical bug just trying to get his hypothetical grub). How could we ascribe it to organisms simply involved in an effort to sustain themselves, to survive? Why do we think so-called host organisms are entitled to these resources, nutrients they would otherwise hold hostage?

Clearly, I take issue with how the scientific community thinks about organismal relationships. I just wonder what chipped at their biotic vision, shaving away the beautiful breadth of the natural world. What if they could look beyond the edges of such binary thinking, stray from this limiting idea of reciprocity and towards a more collective view of these biological processes? I imagine they would use a label other than parasite for the Monotropa uniflora, the ghost pipe: they’d call it an archive.

The ghost pipe taps into the mycelium—the mass of fungal networks submerged in the soil—where it meets a tree’s root, the juncture between fungus and flora. The mycelium has no nucleus, no center where information can be processed or stored. Instead, knowledge travels horizontally, stretching across a vast web of nerve-like filaments.

Trees, in contrast, store information centrally, stacking memories of fire and rainfall and drought.

With love, Ella

TEXT ELLA SPUNGEN AND MARI FAJNZYLBER

DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

ILLUSTRATION SAGE JENNINGS

S+T

Four letters from the forest floor

09

Herbalists love to liken ghost pipes—with their bowing heads, as you so beautifully describe—to a human brainstem. And I have to say, I’m fond of the image myself. The ghost pipe, in the process of acquiring sustenance, harvests knowledge from both the underground network of mycorrhizae and its surrounding trees. They file away the forest’s histories, parsing through seemingly incompatible sources, storing them in their ever-growing genetic makeup. Each spring these white, phantasmic plants reappear, bearing within them codes in triples, their inheritance of the earth.

Perhaps it’s flawed to refer to the ghost pipe as an archive; it lacks both the process of selection inherent to historical archiving as well as the delineated, oft-impenetrable physical boundaries. But is that not what the archive is becoming? Is that not the archive we want? I digress!

Regardless of what title you bestow upon the ghost pipe, does it not provide our ecosystem with a service? Or even better, is it not just this beautiful, alive thing?

How would you characterize the ghost pipe, our dear Monotropa uniflora?

Ella, I hope you can forgive me for my own parasitism. It might be that my aversion to this word runs a little deeper than the fungal networks in the dirt below us, that it starts somewhere around this seed of guilt in my stomach. Ella, I hope that all that you gave me this summer, feeding me from below—and across the hall—was hopefully met with my own provision of a treat.

With deep love and appreciation, Mari

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S+T Oh, Mari, Of all the metaphors the fungal kingdom provides me to describe you and what passes between us, parasitism would most certainly be the last. It feeds me to know I fed you: could that not be the answer to the ghost pipe conundrum? I’d like to imagine that the so-called parasite does not steal nor take nor (in your words) harvest, but is rather given, gifted.

What does the mycelium lose while the ghost pipe lives? I ask this metaphorically, but perhaps this is quantified somewhere. I’m not sure I want to know—my point is that maybe quantifying this connection obscures the nuance of relationship. It would horrify me to even attempt to weigh the balance of giving and receiving in this friendship; it upsets me that I feel so relatively comfortable reducing this interspecies relationship to such a flat plane.

Maybe the mycorrhizae long to share what they carry within, maybe they are just waiting to be tapped, maybe their motivations can extend beyond survival and replication. The ghost pipe does provide a service: they allow us to gather close, shoulders bumping, to wonder at the plant that should not be. It feels miraculous that this exchange—call it what you will—allows the plant to overcome what we are taught are the rules of the game and explode them outwards.

There are some, surely, who would balk at my characterization of the exchange of nutrients as a relationship, at the suggestion of mycelial choice or motivation. Maybe you are cringing away from the page now, fearing anthropomorphizing as much as the next obedient science student. It’s been tricky for me to even write this, the stern rejections of my biology professor of the language of choice and desire ringing in my ears. But what exactly is the danger in assigning slightly more agency to this fungus we know so little of/about? I don’t think anthropomorphizing is more risky than taking away all life, soul, spirit. Mari, you don’t believe the soil is devoid of feeling, do you?

The mycelial network takes in information—location of food, physical barriers, other organisms in the soil—and responds, sending resources in the right direction, branching and spreading and pulling back.

That sounds like decision-making to me. Who’s to say that desire isn’t involved? Respool our own hopes and attractions to their root and you find little more than the same mechanic survival-based motivations. But we don’t do that; we leave space for the in-between, for the unspoken.

There’s a bigger point here: when considering a class of life that so regularly upends our straight-laced, neatly-penned ways of knowing, why must our guesses always tilt toward coldness?

For better or for worse, this speculative realm is a place I feel comfortable in with you. You make me wonder, look closer for the turkey tails in my path and commit scientific indecencies on the way. So, for the sake of speculation, for the care I have for you and this unquantifiable friendship, I’d like to play around in the dirt a little longer. I’d like to hold, for now, the belief that the ghost pipe is a friend in need, that more transpires in that relationship than we can currently imagine.

I’ve gotten no closer to answering my (actually, your) initial question about humanness. I think I’ve complicated it, instead, finding myself closer to the more-than-human than before. My edges bleed away.

(Maybe this is where the fear of anthropomorphizing comes from.) If I’m being honest, I’ve felt unsettled in myself for some time now, uncertain where my boundaries lie and if I lie between them. But what you labeled as parasitism on your part I found grounding, a link to something solid. I frame myself in no small part in relation to others, perhaps because my own self is so tough to pin down.

I’ve been thinking about lichens—that ancient protist, that creeping greenish crust on rocks and trees that crumble them back to soil—how they are themselves and many selves all at once. An alga and a fungus partner up to create something new, something that is neither/both a plant and a fungus, greater in partnership than its parts. The lichen has (emergent) properties neither partner has on its own. The meaning of the self blurs, becomes hazy. I’ve been thinking about how their boundaries overlap, or maybe don’t exist at all. I’ve been thinking about fractals and the complicated beauty that comes from a millennia of partnership. I’ve been thinking about the intimacy of becoming more than the sum of two parts. And I’ve been finding comfort in knowing I’m not alone in wondering where I end and where everything else starts.

The lichen kind of negates the parasitism issue, doesn’t it? When we do away with the self, nutrients are nutrients, fed is fed is fed, it all amasses in one tangled knot of life: there can be no hoarding or giving or taking. Talk about a collective view of biological processes.

Maybe I’m going too far. You tell me (though this thinking is as much yours as it is mine, my thoughts are an accumulation of everything I’ve ever absorbed from everything else).

Ever fracturing, Ella

Dear Ella, How silly of you to think I would disprove of such anthropomorphization. Have you not seen me hold multiple conversations with the fungal and floral friends that line the trails we’ve tread together? If anything, I cringe at the term itself, that the attribution of a certain complexity could only be associated with humanness.

Anthropomorphism might be the only proxy we have for that spirit in the soil, in everything it contains. Stuck within the limited lexicon that Western science has allotted us, our understanding of the relationships—yes, relationships—of the species underneath is similarly confined. While our vocabulary may smother the conceptual expanse of the mycelium, it, thankfully, can cause no disruption to its physical spread, the all-embracing fungal quilt that ties root to root. The mycelium’s role as this intermediary, suggests to me a confirmation of your theory of mycorrhizal choice, and thus of a bent towards kindness.

A few years ago, the scientific community reverberated around this word we seem to love, relationships. Although she first suggested its existence in the late 1990s, Suzanne Simard’s work regarding the network of inter-plant communication—or its twee moniker, the ‘wood wide web’—was finally sung its deserved chorus of praise. And two books, one work of nonfiction, The Hidden Life of Trees, and one of fiction, The Overstory, allowed this body of research to reach an entirely new audience. One including us. (Do you remember our discussion of the latter title our freshman fall? Our shared disdain for the novel’s last section?)

As the names of both works suggest, the broader layman’s discussion of this ecological interconnectedness seemed to be centered around the species above ground, above us: the trees. The care of the mother oak, feeding its young saplings. The neighborly firs, warning each other of danger. The mycelium hid behind the green curtain (or perhaps more accurately, beneath it), without affect, without agency.

Yet this fungal web of knowledge is far too intricate to be cast aside as a simple henchman. It’s like the highway system back home: unlike the clear-cut American interstate, the amalgam of paved and unpaved roadways connecting Brazilian states are near unnavigable without the presence of a seasoned traveller. There’s no such thing as mindless maneuvering. There must be an intention there, something to drive mycorrhizal transport from mother to sapling, some measure of magnanimity.

Right?

The mycelium speaks the language of the lichen, interpreting its companion subsoil components as mutuals, friends, self. Suzanne Simard is fluent too. She describes feeling similarly settled by the blur in taxonomic boundaries after her breast cancer diagnosis, when she learned that the life-saving treatment she was going to be administered was the same chemical that the mycelia doses to dying trees.

I don’t know what to make of this anecdote entirely, but it satiates me, like the mycelia feeds the oak, the lichen, the ghost pipe, you, and me. Fed is fed is fed. Like the fractals in the filaments.

Love, Mari MARIANA FAJNZYLBER B’23.5 AND ELLA SPUNGEN B’23.5 need a foraging buddy.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

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EPHEMERA LILY CHAHINE “REGRET” 11

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LIT

The Silent Way It is late. The culmination of yet another day, but I don’t feel as if I’ve earned sleep. Eyes rusted red from hours of screen time. Attention not paid but somehow still spent, and I don’t feel as if I’ve earned sleep. I don’t feel and I’m somehow still spent. I haven’t been idle, I think, in looking back on the day that was, with readings—read; meals—eaten; cello—practiced. But it is nearly eleven, and I don’t feel as if I’ve earned sleep. I paid no attention, but the lo-fi playlist I selected with reckless abandon hours ago is still dripping from my speaker or was dripping is pouring and now I’m spent and the beat (readings-eaten-cello-read-eyes-rustred-earn-sleep) is all I hear. It consumes me. The evening wore on culminated wore down. Now the beat is all I hear no attention paid rust consumes. Hours of time spent and paid but still not earned and somehow still spent. It’s lifeless and tiresome and it needs to stop at the end of the day but I’m worn and don’t feel and haven’t earned and readings rusted red but I press pause.

The silence starts to twist something in me—not a painful sensation, not yet, but it is undeniable. It flattens me against the back of my chair and dilates my defenseless eyes until the laptop swims in front of me. I could, I might just, I simply have to recede from view, because I’m much too riddled with holes to keep the quiet away from me. There’s an urge to press play, to plug the empty spaces inside me with noise. But I don’t.

My resistance, miraculously, is just to remain as I am, and allow the silence to inundate me. I wait for the veins in my forearm to melt back into my skin, for my fists to unclench, for my breath to catch. And then, I find myself at rest.

A rarity, really. Sound has always secretively infiltrated my mouth, often at my own expense. I crave the words that have yet to pass through my lips, so I force out their unworthy predecessors with callous disregard for elocution, quickening my pace past the point of comprehension, goading some poor sap into asking me to repeat myself.

Appalled by my utter lack of empathy, my mother has intervened, time and again, to remind me of the importance of absence when dealing with substance. For every phrase, breath to shape it, and deliberate space within and around it. I practiced in front of my bedroom mirror under her watchful gaze, gritting my teeth every time she corrected a transgression. She is too finely-tuned to overlook a corrupted silence or wasted breath, and I was never quite able to match her reverence for empty space. Even tonight, I drown in sound.

Still, I remember my drills in stillness, and the vestiges of those exercises remain stuck in the craw of my mind: the alphabet book she gifted me ages ago, no mere instructional manual for the average child, but rather a study in music and silence. Jazz ABZ, études from Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie; each letter, a poem, and a testament to the value of emptiness within wholes.

M was for Miles.

A column that spanned the length of the page, two words wide: one M, one D one M, one D “My, Didn’t Midas Dream Madly?”

I dream, too, but not with enough madness to remember the rest.

So it’s Davis that replaces the vacant spaces in my night, And I begin to unfurl. to remember to rest) Ba da, ba da da, da, ba da dat da, da.

TEXT JANEK SCHALLER

Ba da, ba da da, da, ba da dat da, da.

(With enough madness

John McLaughlin was only able to procure that distant, imprecise sound when Davis asked him to play his guitar as if he’d never laid eyes on the instrument before. The novice’s hesitation, welcomed back onto the stage—indecision made intention. Silence, prioritized.

My cousin, in bed, in July’s twilight, playing his broken heart on repeat.

Then moving the lyrics towards him, and away from her.

My mother, at the piano, singing.

Then losing her voice, closing her eyes, and confronting the quiet.

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

Presence in emptiness, momentum while at rest.

It’s something I remember her harping on while I sat, confounded, at the piano.

Unhelpful and frustrating in the moment, sure. But having given it some thought, some time, and some silence,

I don’t feel quite as hollow.

JANEK SCHALLER B‘24 speaks quickly, so he won’t be mad if you didn’t quite catch all of that.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

12

Inequality in Memory

Graveyards, remembrance, and forgotten histories in Providence

The flowers slowly disappear, as do the flags.

Potter’s Field is derived from Matthew 27:3-89, These graves are the oldest. The only person to and they offer a chance for those “forgotten” be seen is a maintenance worker sleeping under by society, either due to their poverty or lack of an oak. In a burial ground so tightly packed From atop Prospect Terrace, the statue of Roger family, to be remembered10. A state park sign 1 with graves, it’s hard to find room for trees. The Williams points toward the sun setting behind explains the history of the North Burial Ground few oaks were planted in the middle of the 19th the city below. To the statue’s left is a small Potter’s Field. The most recent burial was in century in an effort to beautify the burial ground. boulder bearing a sign: 2013, but free burials date back to the 1700s.

However, largely due to changing thoughts about North Burial Ground signage calls it “the most death, North Burial Ground is no longer interIsaac Hale2 egalitarian section,” however none of Rhode ested in being beautiful. One plot to the left has 1807-1890 Island’s celebrated governors, mayors, or revoluWith the vision and efforts of local merchant and fallen into disrepair. The stone lies askew, the tionary leaders are buried here. Potter’s Field is watchmaker Isaac Hale, this propname on the gravestone has worn off, and moss reserved for people who couldn’t afford a plot of 1Roger erty was acquired and donated crawls through the lettering. It’s painfully bright land. The little Moshassuck—barely more than a Williams’ body is buried to the city in 1867 for a small here at the top of the hill. The sun is hot and stream—is still gurgling, albeit dammed further beneath the public park where “generations of direct and the groundskeeper is under the only upstream. The people buried in this overgrown statue.

Providence residents might look tree nearby. To the left4, another grave lies shatland have no named headstones to mark their out with increasing pride upon the splendid view of tered. The name: Eliza Vinton. Another stone: lives. their city”. born in 1776. No other information is easily In 1875, an expansion to the Potter’s Field John Williams Haley3 available, either in the cemetery or on the web was needed. The North Burial Ground commiswhen googling her name. Public record keeping sion recommended that “valuable land [in the Following Roger Williams’ finger, Maple trees wasn’t done with uniformity until the middle of center of the ground] should not be used to bury release their leaves, burning orange in the afterthe 19th century making it incredibly difficult to the poor” despite much still remaining. The noon’s last light. Despite Hale’s learn about colonial residents. entire field, along with the remains, was moved 2 Isaac was an influential force in the Providence wishes, residents can’t see Walking further there’s a west. This occurred multiple times throughout community and especially in the Baptist much of “their city” from here. familiar name: Brown. John the 19th century as the burial ground grew, Church. Politically progressive, he actively supported female preachers and was an Just a few skyscrapers rising Brown, a “practioner and each time pushing the Potter’s Field to the back outspoken abolitionist. His daughter, Alice above the foliage. defender of the slave trade,” of the burial ground. When Route 1 was built (1840–1908) would later create the first free kindergarten system in the state of Colorado Down, down, down. The hill according to the 2006 Brown in the 1960s, it cut through the western half and lead the women’s suffrage movement. is steep. Reaching North Main Slavery and Justice Report, of the Potter’s Field. Those bodies have been 3 1897-1963 Former Vice President of the Street, it flattens out. It’s busy is buried beneath a grace moved to the northern corner, cordoned off by Narragansett brewing company, best known and loud here with speeding ledger—a large rectangular the river. Care was not always taken with these for his weekly radio program “Rhode Island Historian” (1927-1953) cars. The flow of traffic north stone, roughly the size of a bodies. One section within the segregated free leads past the liquor store, past body5. The carved writing is ground was moved without any stones. Instead, the assisted living facility, past the KFC, to the nearly all worn away, leaving bodies were stacked in piles of 4 It was common during the colonial era for all open gates of the North Burial Ground. The flow just the name under the glare ten to consolidate the space. tombstones to face west. This also makes it of gravity follows the cars to the graveyard. of the sun. The granite must It was difficult to tell whose best to visit a colonial burial ground sometime after noon. have been split in two by ice bones belonged to whom and 5 +++ many years ago. Up College were often tossed in randomly.

See the Brown University Slavery and Justice Report for a more complete story of exactly Hill is Brown University, At the same time, many of what John Brown’s link to the practice of “The only place where you can find equality is in the funded by John Brown and Providence’s elite were reinenslavement was. cemetery.” named after his brother terning their own relatives -Evan Esar, American Humorist Nicholas. His stone is small, but his malignant out of the North Burial Ground entirely and legacy has defined the city. moving them over to the much fancier Swan Tombstones are small—even the biggest barely It’s hot in North Burial Ground during the Point Cemetery. For many throughout the 19th fit a paragraph of information, while each life is summer. In the colonial era, many Puritans century, there was no final resting place as their long, with enough information to fill a library. believed that they were bound to go to hell and bodies were dug up and moved around. Since Gravestones commemorate life, though written a fancy tombstone was a sign of sin. It’s hard 1848, the state of Rhode Island has, by law, in stone. Yet, the stones also tell broader tales of enough for a camel to try and slip through an eye required North Burial Ground to keep records of inequality. of a needle6, let alone carry a tombstone through. its burials. But before then, due to poor colonial Standing in the North Burial Ground, Thoughts of death, the overwhelming heat, and record keeping, it was impossible to know who between Route 1 and I-95, the noise of speeding the snaking roads lead visitors out, down the hill. was buried where. The sign outside the field trucks rattles over the tombstones, and there are Still, a fall down the steep hill heads further into offers no information on this process of reinterfew trees inside the gates to shelter the graves the cemetery, deeper into the archives, drifting ment as if to say that these bodies have always from the noise and the sun. Ahead, up the hill, toward I-95 and the Moshassuck River. Here, the been here. As if to say this history is set in stone. are the oldest tombstones, dating back to the highway is even louder. It’s difficult to think over Each burial site in this northern section of colonial era. Few still stand and even fewer are the sound of speeding 18 wheelers delivering the Potter’s field is marked by a slab of weathlegible. Old moss-ridden rock piles mark where goods out of the city. As the noise increases, ered gray granite, barely taller than the unmown there once was a stone. tombstones shrink. First box tombs then ledgers grass. The edges are chipped and moss crawls In 1700, Rhode Island founded North Burial then headstones and lecterns. up the tiny stone. It’s barely larger than a single Ground as the first public state cemetery. Before, In the shadow of the highway, a small creek brick. The Moshassuck makes the ground here people were often buried in small family plots flows separating the soft and the stones lie 6 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for in their backyard. However, as Providence grew, tombstones from a askew. Many cling to the someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:24 a public burial ground was considered a needed small clearing—about earth at strange 45-degree 7 Rhode Island General Laws § 23-18.1-1 “If no [relative or friend] is addition for those without large farms or family 4 acres large: Potter’s angles. Others lie face found within twenty-four (24) hours after death, the person having custody of the dead body shall notify the director of the departplots to be buried in. The North Burial Ground Field. The field is down in the mud. None ment of human services...who shall arrange for the removal of the continues today to offer burial services to all of mostly mud with of the stones have names. unclaimed body. If the body is not claimed at or before the expiration of thirty (30) hours thereafter, the director of the department Providence’s many residents for a modest fee. As tufts of uncut grass Instead, each is labeled of human services or his or her designee shall give public notice is common across the United States, the burial growing haphazardly with a somber number. of its finding and a description of the unclaimed body, and within a reasonable time thereafter cause the body to be decently buried.” The sign outside the plot fee pays for continual upkeep of the grounds. over the ground. Like Plots of earth are open, awaiting a casket. many places in the says it was created in 2017 8 The average cost of a burial in Rhode Island is $7,612 and cremation costs $5,447.

Currently, there are 40,000 people buried in the valley of Providence, by a team of Rhode Island 110 acre graveyard, with over 200 added every the ground is always College freshmen. It 9 This section tells the story of how a group of priests took the money Judas offered in recompense and used it to buy a potter’s year. Sunday services are common: a green tent is soggy. Potter’s details some of the stories field (where clay was harvested from) to be used as a common pitched over an open hole, the plastic chairs are Fields are a common the students unearthed burial plot. sagging from overuse. Looking around, plastic sight across the based on North Burial 10 In Matthew 27:7 those buried in the field are labeled “strangers” flowers and American flags adorn the newer US. They hold both Ground Records: or “foreigners.” stones, still shining and unweathered. unclaimed7 bodies Walking up the hill on the northwest side, and the bodies relaKazar Markarian (#5779) more and more of the graves appear forgotten. tives can’t afford to bury or cremate8. The name was born in 1882 in what today is central Turkey.

TEXT ADRIAN OTEIZA

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION CLAIRE CHASSE

METRO

All true stories begin and end in a cemetery - The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

13

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

He immigrated to the US in 1909 via Ellis Island.

Markarian registered for the draft during World War 2 but was denied citizenship until 1948. He spent most of his life working as an ironworker, but never escaped poverty.

Frank Cote (#6366) was born in 1922 in Providence. From the age of 18, he worked all 52 weeks of the year as a baker. His annual salary was $900 (around $17,600 today). Cote never improved his economic position and died at the age of 58.

Chin Ting (#5736) immigrated to the US in 1896 where he gained employment at a small Chinese restaurant downtown on Weybosset Street. In 1923, Ting was convicted for the murder of his boss, Chin Moon. Moon was found on the floor of the restaurant with 34 knife wounds on his body, the blade still lodged in his neck. Ting died in the Rhode Island State Prison at the age of 91.

Their stones are dragged down into the dirt, slowly entombed in weeds. However, the stories dredge up the stories where the stones lie askew.

Unfortunately, the archival project is an incomplete one focused on each person’s last moments.

The records leave no mention of the flowers. The paragraph is but an epitaph, too large for small graves, but still, so much is missing.

Those buried to the south are older. The two acre field is filled with bodies from the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries. Most don’t have numbers to remember their lives. The field looks empty except for a few baby trees, just beginning to grow. The young oaks seem hopeful. Maybe they can protect the field from the screeching traffic directly to the west. However, the trees to the north foretell an ominous future. They grew naturally around the Moshassuck, but, without proper care, they have grown out of control. Garbage is stuck in their branches, and they crowd the field. The new young trees may bring grace to the free ground, but they may also bring yet another reminder of inequality. There is a sign between two of the baby trees. The same group of RIC freshman also uncovered the stories of a few of the plot’s residents:

city. After the death of her husband12 and worsening health, Christiana was forced to live in the Home. After only eight days, she was transferred to the Howard Asylum13. She was likely afflicted with dementia. She died in 1902 and was buried beside her husband.

Her tomb is 500 feet away from her body. It’s tucked away in the corner of the field, but it still draws the eye. There is no information on when or why the obelisk was added, but it seems to suggest a story about those that protect the poor.

As a philanthropist and wealthy Providence citizen, Christiana protected the poor. She was inducted into the Rhode Island Hall of Fame in 2003. The following explains why: “Christiana Bannister’s significance is that she rose above the constraints that her era placed upon women and minorities and moved with facility and effectiveness among all levels of society from runaway slaves to Providence’s artistic community.”

Not only does this fail to acknowledge the advantages of class, but it further entrenches a story of the societal woman who was admired for her social grace. Moreover, she died destitute and was buried without a tombstone. It is wrong to unflinchingly say that she rose above the constraints of her era when she ultimately died constrained by Howard Asylum, her race, her gender, and her class.

At her toes is Amanda Robinson of the Narragansett tribe. She has one of the few stones in the field. The footstone14 is broken in half, making it difficult to read the dates, and moss gnaws at the edges. It’s white despite its decrepit state in the mud. It doesn’t look like it’s been Tim Morris made a career of minstrelsy performing cleaned recently, but rather, the marble refuses in blackface across the country. He spent much to let the grass cover it up. There is no other of his life in Richmond and was drafted by the information available about Confederacy. He tried to dodge Amanda Robinson’s life or how the draft by claiming he 11 Christiana made her fortune as a hairdresser in Massachusetts. the carved granite tombstone was 46 and ineligible before was purchased. fleeing to Baltimore. When 12 Edward Mitchell Bannister was an oil painter famed for his intricate pastoral landscapes.

Morris was actually 46, +++ he died here in Providence 13 Alternately known as the: Asylum for the Pauper Insane, State Asylum for the Incurable without a penny to his name.

Insane, Hospital for the Insane, or the Institute Anytime someone is celebrating Some claim his business of Mental Health. the dead it’s not really about the partner stole everything. past—it’s about how we imagine the future.

Further to the south stands a lone obelisk: - Vincent Brown, Professor of African and AfricanAmerican Studies at Harvard Christiana Bannister, entrepreneur11 and abolitionist, born to African American and The cemetery is not dead. In addition to the Narragansett parents. During her lifetime, she plastic flowers, plants naturally grow in the rich established the Home for Aged Colored Women. It soil. A 2019 meta-analysis found 140 unique sheltered many of the aged domestic workers of the

biological lifeforms whose preservation is directly linked to burial sites. People still walk and jog around the grounds. It is common to see people mourning and meandering through the cemetery. Sometimes, near dusk, coyotes wander around the graves. There is a great wealth of life in the land of the dead, and new stories to be told. All people buried in the graveyard must be accounted for in the burial ground records.

The archives of the cemetery are some of the most complete documentation of Providence citizens available. Historically, this has been mostly used for family genealogical records, but in the past few years, North Burial Ground has begun to make use of this power in new radical ways. From the diligent work of the North Burial Ground staff, the city website now offers self-guided tours like the Rhode Island Politics Tour, the Black Heritage Tour, and the Relocated Cemeteries Tour with the promise of more to come. Each one offers a new way to navigate the space. Much like the RIC student signs, these maps offer short—and often incomplete—descriptions of individual burial sites that hint to the richness of human life buried here. In the 19th century, bodies were constantly moved, but now, it’s the stories instead that are being unearthed and shared. It’s easy to imagine the graveyard as a static place, one where people are condemned to be remembered by their last moments and by the inevitable forces that constrained their life. However, it doesn’t have to A flat small stone, like a ledger but smaller. This one is about two feet by one foot. It likely was moved around as Robinson was repeatedly reinterred.

14

be static. The possibility to tell new stories and to reshape the land and local narratives is still very much alive in North Burial Ground.

ADRIAN OTEIZA B’24 wants to take you for a walk in the graveyard.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

14

TEXT TIANYU ZHOU

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION QUINN ERICKSON

NEWS

Socialism with(out) Confucianist Characteristics

15

This is the second in a two-part series about the history and contemporary revival of political Confucianism in China.

When Xi Jingping rose to power in 2012, he brought with him an elevated status of Confucianism within China’s national ideology. Since 2017, a blind infusion of Confucianist values has become central to the state’s means of propaganda: the Marxist state is transforming itself into a Marxist-Confucianist one. During the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党第十九次全国代 表大会), in October 2017, President Xi Jinping (习近平) emphasized “safeguarding the core value systems of socialism” (坚持社会主义核心 价值体系) through “constantly strengthening the dominance and agenda-setting power of the realm of ideology” (不断增强意识形态领域主导 权和话语权). He juxtaposed “promoting creative and innovative transformation of Chinese good traditional culture” (推动中华优秀传统文 化创造性转化、创新性发展) with the continued inculcation of “the revolutionary culture of the Chinese people.”

How did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turn from its historically radical anti-Confucianism to embracing Confucianist teaching as a central policy direction? What challenges has this narrative of a revived Confucianist statehood received? I will first describe the anti-Confucianist position of the CCP in it’s early years. I argue that state crackdown during the 1989 Tiananmen Incident put an end to the cultural atmosphere of emulating the West and anti-Confucianism. Since 1991, Confucianism has gone through a popular revival as Chinese society “refamiliarized” itself with Confucianist traditions. Capitalizing on the society-wide Confucianist revival, the current CCP regime attempted to maintain its legitimacy and power by propagating its version of neo-political Confucianism. However, people like Yi Zhongtian continue to contest this appropriation of Confucianism by the state.

Mao, Confucianism, and anti-Confucianist Revolution (砸烂旧世界): The founder and leader of the CCP, Mao Zedong, displayed the anti-Confucianism characteristic of the Chinese cultural-political elite born after 1895, many of whom became leaders of the CCP in its early decades. Though Mao grew up in a traditional Chinese society, he learned to condemn the Confucianist traditions in favor of “new learning.” Mao received ample traditional Confucianist education during his childhood. From 1902 to 1910, his parents sent him to a local sishu where he studied classics like Sanzi Jing, Analects of Confucius, and The Commentary of Zuo on Spring and Autumn Annals.

In 1910, having read On Thoughts of the Nation

by Liang Qichao (梁启超《新民说·论国家思 想》), Mao learned to view Chinese history as “thousands of years of illegitimate plundering by dynasts” who governed an “authoritarian country” (专制之国家). In his notes on the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

reading, he admired Britain and Japan, for they had constitutions legislated by the people.

From here, Mao began to critique the official Confucianism of Chinese Empires and worship aspects of “new learning,” —initially democracy and eventually communism— as the ideal political order.

Since its foundation, the CCP relentlessly pursued anti-Confucianism for two reasons.

First, it’s political legitimacy was founded on the “modernization” and “liberation” of China through a socialist revolution. And second, the CCP achieved its political gains by strategically labeling political opponents as “feudalist.”

Initially, the CCP focused on violent struggles against landlords in villages as it propagandized to peasants on their “privilege” (毛泽东1927《 湖南农民运动考察报告》). After the CCP established the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao and his wife Jiāng Qīng (江青) actively humiliated, demonized, and tyrannized anyone sympathetic to the Official Confucianism of Chinese Empires.

On February 21, 1951, The Life of Wu Xun《武训传》by director Sun Yu (孙瑜) was screened. It told of a hero in the Qing Dynasty who spent 30 years collecting money as a beggar and found a free sishu for children of the poor.

The movie gained nationwide acclaim. However, on May 20, 1951, Mao personally denounced it and wrote that Wu Xun disgraced Chinese history and the Chinese nation because his sishu perpetuated Confucianist traditions that were the source of China’s modern decline. The film was banned, and the filming crew was targeted and humiliated. Fourteen years later, Mao and his secretary (and wife) Jiāng Qīng wrote against the widely acclaimed Beijing opera play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office by Wu Han (吴晗《海瑞罢 官》) that praised a Confucianist official who worked hard for the people throughout his life.

From November 1965 onwards, a nationwide tornado of critique portrayed Wu as a counterrevolutionary who subjugated the people to a feudalist official.

The campaign against Hai Rui started the Cultural Revolution that ended with the destruction of millions of artefacts and remains from China’s Confucianist antiquity and the degradation and murder of millions of people who were proud of Confucianist traditions. In November 1966, hundreds of frenzied university students (and teachers) rushed to the Temple Confucius (孔庙) in Qufu, Shandong. Over the course of 29 days, they destroyed 972 works of calligraphy and paintings, burned more than 2700 ancient books (including those that were the only copies of their kind) and 32232 works of genealogy, smashed 384 ancient ceramic artefacts and more than 1000 ancient stone tablets, and dug out Confucius and his descendants’ graves. Revolutionary anti-confucianism reached its peak with the Cultural Revolution.

Identity Crisis: After the Cultural Revolution ended, so abated the ideological appeal of socialism as Deng

Xiaoping became the center of gravity within the CCP at the end of 1978. Deng downplayed socialist ideological control and called for an epistemic liberation (解放思想). In June 1981, the CCP government issued a Resolution on Several Historical Questions that criticized its past campaigns for being too “leftist” (左倾错 误), including the Campaign against Lin Biao and Confucius (批林批孔). By 1984, interest amongst many CCP members, intellectuals, and students began to shift towards what they saw as “enlightened” Western ideals (新启蒙运动). A year later, these voices coalesced into criticism that aimed to reform China by transforming its culture (文化热). As reforms deepened and economic grievances grew, the cultural critics grew more radical: by 1988, many including the famous activist Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波) proposed that China should “completely Westernize” (全盘西化) and admired Hong Kong’s history of “being colonized” for its modernization and internationalization.

In 16 June, 1988, the China Central Television débuted the River Elegy (苏晓康《河殇》, i.d. Death of the Chinese cultural root, the Yellow River). The documentary stated: “The ‘great’ cultural heritage has become a huge cultural burden; ‘great’ cultural superiority a huge cultural self-guilt. This is indeed a huge psychological hurdle to China’s modernization.”

The documentary interpreted Chinese history using Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism that argued that Chinese traditional history was doomed for despotism due to its need for ‘extensive irrigation.’ Xie Xuanjun (谢选骏) portrayed the Confucianist Emperors as “despots” of the human world (人世间的横暴者) who gained legitimacy by the worship of the Dragon, the “despot” of the natural world. Repeatedly, the narrator said that Chinese civilization has eclipsed (衰落了).

He called for a complete break from China’s the “Yellow Civilization” that was founded on cultivation around the yellow river and land, and to embrace the West, the “Blue Civilization” or the “Christian Civilization” that thrived on oceans, meaning the political and cultural ideals represented by the US and Western Europe.

The critique of China’s Confucianist culture (文化热) reached a climax when the Elegy attained approval from the then Premier Zhao Ziyang, was replayed on state televisions, became a topic of organized study sessions among CCP members, and received public espousal.

However, members of the CCP turned against westernization as students and intellectuals gathered for riots in April 1989. The Chinese government sent a strong signal through its repression during the Tiananmen Incident (六四 事件) on June 4, 1989. When tanks and armed soldiers marched onto the bodies of protestors, the power of the state was established. Following that, people for the first few years of the 1990s were prevented from lauding the West by fear and injunctions. By 1991, people in China moved from “emulating the West” to “finding Chinese spirit and character (精神性格), native cultural resources (本土资源), and cultural

NEWS

roots.” For more and more people, anything “traditional” (传统) was perceived as in need of preservation (保护). From this returning cultural nationalism (国家主义) and historicism (历史主义), many began to see China’s imperial past as a glorious legacy that made the Chinese experience of modernity a unique one. Many supported state efforts to resurrect Confucianist teachings and physical artefacts. With government espousal, educators in China began lobbying for including more Confucianist works in Classical Chinese into primary, secondary, and high school textbooks. Parents began organizing and sending their children to learn Confucianist Classics. More and more people began to see Confucianist moral values as their orientations of life; some even attempted to convert to “Confucianism” (儒教) with religious fervor. The attitudes towards Chinese culture and Confucianist traditions are well-studied by Xu Jilin (许纪霖), Luo Gang (罗岗), and Wang Hui (汪晖).

Fuel for Thought: Since the early 2000s, public and private initiatives in China have led to a wave of “relearning Confucianist traditions” (国学热). In 2004, private actors persuaded the local government of Shandong to reinstate the annual veneration-of-Confucius ritual in Qufu (孔子公祭).

In 2005 and 2006, this ritual grew to involve Chinese people in Taiwan and diasporic communities around the world. Scholars on Confucianism such as Yu Dan sold their commentaries on the Analects of Confucius (于丹2006《〈论语〉 心得》) for millions of copies; some went on television shows such as Yu Dan’s talks on the Lecture Room on exegesis of the Analects (《百家 讲坛》) and received national attention.

Yi Zhongtian (易中天) embodies a post-90s group of scholars who aim to popularize a critical reading of Confucianist traditions. In his interpretation, Confucianism should be inherited as China’s national past and culture, though it should be carefully expunged of its authoritarian and feudalist aspects. Yi was born in 1947, studied in Wuhan University under an important poetics scholar Hu Guorui (胡国瑞), and graduated in 1981 with a master’s degree in literature.

He became a nationally-known public intellectual as he lectured on “great persona from the Han Dynasty” and “close reading of the Three Kingdoms” on the Lecture Room. Zhongtian inherited his patriotism from the socialist era and it became the source of his efforts to educate people on China’s traditions. His experiences of the Maoist campaigns and of the liberal political atmosphere in 1980s confirmed his “full rejection the Cultural Revolution” (彻底否定文革) and reinforced his view on “critical inheritance of China’s past.” He once said in public that the Sanzi Jing (三字经, i.d. Three Character Classic) were “poisonous milk for babies adultered with Melamine” because it taught blind obedience to the state and parents. His books on Chinese imperial history aimed to be social critiques of the present. They praise any historical figure for holding up social ethics, criticize rulers for

authoritarianism, and condemn many members of aristocracy and merchants for their hypocrisy and self-interest.

In contrast, as China’s economic growth became visible, since the early 2000s, many intellectuals began to see China’s Confucianist heritage as a justification for the current political system and beneficial addition to China’s socialist legacy and capitalist market economy.

On March 18, 2004, Joshua Cooper Ramo published The Beijing Consensus, a book that frames China’s economic development model as an alternative to the Washington Consensus of non-interventionist economic policies promoted by the IMF, WB, and U.S. Treasury. Receiving “acknowledgement from Westerners,” much Chinese scholarly and public discourse reacted with euphoria. May 12, 2004, on an international public forum held by Tsinghua University, Gan Yang (甘阳) said that the liberal tradition of freedom and rights and Maoist tradition of egalitarianism and justice are now reconciled with the thousand-year-old “civilizational tradition of China” (文明传统). He fully rejected the anti-Confucianism of the 80s and argued that Chinese Culture is not “external to the West” and an alternative to its model of development.

In a 2007 article, Gan called for a Confucianist Socialist Republic (儒家社会主义共和国).

and Official History Books 《二十四史》 inspire patriotism (爱国情怀) and even selfless sacrifice to the state. Recent reforms of textbooks in contested territories like Xinjiang (November 1, 2017), Inner Mongolia (November 1, 2020), and Hong Kong (November 1, 2021) have featured contents on China’s “glorious” imperial past and Confucianist texts that intended to promote national unity.

A project to compile the History of Qing (《 清史》编纂) began in 2002 under the leadership of Dai Yi (戴逸), a historian of Qing imperial court culture who made his career as a teacher of the history of the Chinese Communist Party (tellingly). According to the Confucianist logic of dynastic succession, the People’s Republic of China succeeds the Qing Dynasty as the only legitimate government of China; only the PRC has the right to tell the story of Qing Dynasty, not the “historical nihilist” Western scholarship (历史虚无主义); all Qing territories, including Taiwan, Tibet, and even Mongolia are within the PRC’s “rightful claims.”

Coming to abandon their revolutionary commitment to anti-Confucianism, has the Socialist State with Confucianist characteristics under the CCP forgotten “its original intention” of liberating China from its authoritarian past (忘掉初心)?

Embracing An Old Enemy: Picking up on the intellectual groundwork scholars on Confucianism have provided, since the leadership of Hu Jintao in 2008 and especially after Xi’s rise to power in 2012, the CCP has recently become confident in reversing its long-held anti-Confucianist position to embrace Confucianism as a key tool to build cultural and political legitimacy.

Confucianism today provides the Chinese state a replacement for the Marxist ideology that previously legitimised its current one-party, absolutist political system (一党制人民民主专 政). In this contemporary narrative, the Chinese state is the most suitable to the nation’s unique situations (国情): it is benevolent to its people with sincerity and effectiveness, just like Chinese Empires in the past that embodied Confucianist political ideals were (仁政德政).

Certain Confucianist values such as loyalty ( 忠), harmony (和), duty (义), social roles (分), and filial piety (孝) serve to justify the state’s repression of political dissents and prescribe for how people should behave in society. According to the government, the Chinese people (中华民 族) have strived towards a unified, prosperous, and strong country for 5000 years and the CCP government has assumed the responsibility of rejuvenating it again. With a distinct cultural identity, they say the Chinese civilization (中华 文明) is not inferior to rivals like the “Western civilization” but even superior to it.

The state’s self-conscious adoption of what was for long an ‘imperial’ ideology (大一统) has allowed it to propagate patriotic ideals. Historical exemplars of “loyal servants to the Emperor” (忠臣) inscribed in Confucianist canons

TIANYOU ZHOU ‘24 wants you to read the Analects of Confucius.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

16

R NADO AT THE STATE HOUSE O T

METRO

The ‘People’s’ house, political metaphors, and wet socks

TEXT PEDER SCHAEFER

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION LUCIA KAN-SPERLING

On November 13, I attended a rally at Rhode Island’s State House, ostensibly as a spectator and supporter, but as the strange course of the evening proceeded, I transitioned into a soaking wet newspaper reporter, ink smudging in my notebook. Here are some notes from this rather fabulous, and politically telling, evening:

17

The rally began at 4:00 PM in front of the Rhode Island State House.

Progressive leaders and activists—mostly aligned with the Rhode Island Political Cooperative (Co-op)—were gathered to try and compel the otherwise stodgy and slow-moving General Assembly to spend the $1.1 billion that they had been sent by the federal government to alleviate the suffering of those impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The conservative leadership of the General Assembly has been sitting on the money for over seven months. During this time, every other New England state has spent its share—that’s Rhode Island for you.

Nearly a dozen candidates and activists affiliated with the Co-op spoke. The speeches were short, and hit the notes that speeches of this sort are bound to hit—a Green New Deal, tax the rich, spend the money, etc. Some of the speeches were a bit repetitive. That is OK—it’s good to agree on things.

Near 5:00 PM a man walked past with the doppler radar showing on his phone: a large green, yellow, and red blob was moving towards Providence. Drops of rain began falling. The rally ended early, the speeches were cut short, and the crowd headed for cover underneath the awning in front of the State House’s grand glass and oak doors. The rain fell harder. Suddenly, at 5:03 PM, a cacophony of phones began to beep and whir, and emergency alerts popped up on glowing screens.

TORNADO WARNING in this area until 5:45 PM EST. Take shelter now… move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris.

People began trying to open the doors of the State House but they wouldn’t budge. The doors of the people’s house were locked to the people.

Harrison Tuttle, the executive director of the Black Lives Matter RI PAC and a new Co-op candidate running for the General Assembly in Cranston, cracked jokes. Mel Dupont, who ran against Smithfield Senator Stephen Archambault in 2020, peered in through the glass. Matt Brown, gubernatorial candidate and lead speaker at the rally, called out above the milling crowd, saying we had to try and get inside the building and out of the storm, somehow.

At 5:12 PM the videographers with Channel 12 news fled with their camera equipment.

Only the progressives were left now. Well, the progressives and Pat Ford, a journalist with the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

libertarian-leaning publication, The Coalition.

Regardless, arrayed outside the State House doors were the outcasts and the oddballs, the ignored and the forgotten—a hodgepodge collection of candidates and elected officials, perhaps a governor and a lieutenant governor-to-be, high school students and octogenarian activists.

A flash of blue thunder lit up the face of Geena Pham—former and future candidate for State Senate District 3—and campaign staff worked to move the big, glowing speaker used for the rally under cover. The doors still wouldn’t open.

Some brave souls ran off into the rain, to their cars, or to the mall.

Senators Cynthia Mendes and Sam Bell— the only sitting senators with entrance to the building—dashed off into the rain just as a huge blast of thunder struck overhead. They passed through the private legislators entrance and came around to the front of the building.

Together, Bell in his yellow rain jacket and Mendes in her neat blue suit, both soaking wet, tried to push open the doors, but they were still locked shut.

At this point Mendes and Bell asked the Capitol Police sergeant on duty in the building to open the front doors to let us in, but they refused to do so. Instead, I later learned, they tried to call up their boss.

AJ Braverman, deputy campaign manager and Co-op stalwart, took pictures of Mendes posing through the glass door. That would be good for a Twitter post later. Steve Ahlquist, local watchdog reporter and founder of UpriseRI, stood by, watching, on the alert for any wrongdoing, trying to keep his precious camera equipment dry as the wind picked up, throwing rain sideways.

Seemingly trapped outside as the storm’s fury increased, most of the RI progressive movement—all of the ‘real’ progressives perhaps— huddled together for mutual support and warmth.

Mendes and Bell ran back through the storm. While we couldn’t go in through the front doors of the State House, the Capitol Police had decided that the private legislators entrance was an option. It was a long walk, or jog, through a torrential downpour, the sea pouring over the capitol building of the ‘Ocean State’: down the granite steps, navigating the puddles in the parking lot, and a final sprint into the crowded room. Some treaded slowly, others sprinted. A long line of stragglers meandered through the wet. Mendes was at the door, making sure each and every person got inside.

It was now 5:22 PM, and legislators and activists, excitable teens and older folks, campaign staff and the gubernatorial candidate’s son, were all huddled together in a low-slung, brick-walled, fan-whirring cloak room, complete with a glass panelled wall behind which a slick looking Capitol Police officer watched us wearily.

“Well!” said Tuttle, with a big grin on his face. “It’s a story to tell!”

At 5:24 PM, Matt Brown walked around shaking hands. A ridiculously large portion of RI’s progressive electoral movement, the very movement that is trying to unseat the conservative Democratic legislators who have held power for decades, were trapped in the State House basement, fleeing a tornado, refused entrance through the front door.

Brown walked over to me and Michael, an anti-war activist from Westerly. He said that “we’re in a good spot here,” but that “it’s no glide path.” He looked around confidently. It wasn’t clear what kind of “good spot” he meant. The campaign for governor? Or fleeing the tornado?

A big flash of lightning struck outside, lighting up Mendes’ face, who sat crouched near the door, recovering from her runs through the rain.

Some crinkled up old Providence Journals— stacked up besides the metal detector—to dry their clothes and hair. They lay scattered on the floor. At 5:26 PM the Capitol Police sergeant sitting behind the glass handed out a pack of

blue masks. A few minutes later, at 5:29 PM, Bell meandered amongst the crowd in his yellow rain jacket, handing them out.

I talked with Michael Neymeyer beside the newspapers at 5:30 PM. Neymeyer is running for State Senate in Westerly, a first-time candidate supported by the Co-op. He said that it was “very fitting that [the rally] ended with us banging on the State House doors.” He was soaking wet, and had a neat blue shirt with a collar. He used the word “heck” and laughed about the situation.

At 5:34 PM Tuttle joked again. “It’s the entire Co-op in a room!” he said. It was clear that he was enjoying the whole affair. Gregory Greco, a friend of Mendes’ who was running for her vacated State Senate seat in District 18, said he was excited for Mendes’ race for Lieutenant Governor. A friend, he wanted to see her use her voice to advocate for people across the state.

At 5:36 PM, Bell brought cans of Coca Cola from his office and handed them out. Ana De Luca Mayne and Camilla Pellucci, two organizers with the Co-op, told me at 5:39 PM that if this wasn’t a sign of the climate crisis, then what was?

Our time together in the basement was soon coming to an end. The rain started to abate.

At 5:41 PM Braverman took a group picture, and Mendes stood before everyone and gave a speech to cap this strange affair. This was her statement to me, and, in large part, her speech to the crowd, at 5:42 PM. We were on the State House steps asking for our grievances to be heard, and this storm came, and the authorities would not let us in for shelter, even though Sam Bell and myself went in and begged to be let in, and everyone’s phones were beeping. And if that’s not a picture of what we are up against, I don’t know what it is… if that’s not a sign of their cruelty then I don’t know what is… I want to be clear… it’s not about the authorities, they’re just doing their job, it’s about the leadership in the General Assembly. They wanted this.

The crowd roared, and the rain stopped.

At 5:55 PM I talked with a Capitol Police officer—badge number 25—who emerged from behind the glass paneled wall as the storm ended. He said that his commanding officer, Captain Donald Suzy—badge number 2—had made the initial decision to not allow the rallygoers into the State House.

Suzy contradicted this a few days later, when I chatted with him on the phone under blue skies. He said that as soon as heard about the tornado warning, he told the officer to “immediately let them in for safety reasons.” He said that there was “some confusion” initially, that he was out of state at the time, and that there were no officers at the front doors, making their prompt and immediate unlocking—say at 5:03 PM when tornado alerts first went out—infeasible.

This strange evening came to an end, and the people streamed out into the night. Bell and Mendes re-entered the State House at 5:49 PM to attend to some government business. I left the building last, at 5:52 PM, and rode my bike home through puddles that soaked my socks. A tornado averted.

The events of the evening of November 13 between the hours of 5:00 and 6:00 PM are but a footnote in the long struggle for progressive electoral power in RI, but they’re a powerful metaphor for how power works in this state. As State Representative District 55 candidate Clara Hardy wrote on Twitter in the middle of the storm, it was a “great metaphor to show how the State ignores the people.”

A tornado averted, but a political storm still brews. That storm is gaining strength, and perhaps, if the winds blow the right way in 2022, the progressives might not be trapped in the basement for too much longer.

PEDER SCHAEFER ’22.5 enjoys crises.

DEAR INDY

This week, Indie’s getting down and dirty with Providence’s horndogs.

There are only a few more weeks left to revel in the post-COVID-coital chaos before cuffing season commences, so study up.

I have a weird k How d o I intro ink. d uce my lov ers out-the to more re idea s?

One of my favorite before or after sex cuddling activities is asking my lovers to tell me about a sexual fantasy of theirs. Maybe they’ve got a weird kink too—you’d be surprised! Weird is subjective, of course, and everyone has their own personal comfort levels with how much they’re willing to experiment and indulge. Be prepared for different reactions and look for healthy ways to explore kink outside of your lovers if they’re not down. There are some fun kinky quizzes online (I’m thinking about www.old.mojoupgrade.com/index) where both partners say what they’re down for and it only shows you the ones you both said “yes” to. It’s great foreplay.

I don’t understand why you must hook up with this person again.* (If you’re going to be a vindictive homie-hopper, you gotta at least be good in the sack.) I’d interrogate why it was so “satisfying” to have them show sexual interest in you again, and try to outsource this. Maybe via sparking a new flame, or, even better, some sort of internal route to feeling accepted and desirable. And if you feel the need to confront them about this transgression, answer their next “u up?” text with something along the lines of “I don’t think we should see each other again because I found out you hooked up with X and am not ok with that.” Or something like that.

*ok to be completely fair, I probably would hook up with them again as I typically answer life’s eternal question—“should I have bad sex with an idiot or not have sex at all?”—incorrectly. But you definitely shouldn’t.

Help!

Now that I am in colle the fact th ge, at I have n e v e r been in a relatio nship and have never kiss ed anyone is filling me with a really inten se, erratic ene rgy that I o ften end up mix ing with m y overwhelm ing hornin ess.

How do I fi nally get s o me much-nee ded action ?

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

tell How to politely at your partner th an le they need to c their ass better?

Shower sex before sexy times and you scrub it for them? I think if you’re in a position where you are encountering the dirty ass of the Other, the time for politeness is perhaps past you. Trying to mince words in this type of conversation just prolongs the inevitable, so you might want to come out and say it. “This is very awkward for both of us but I think you may need to wash your adorable ass a tiny bit more before we do [sexual activity] that I really am excited to do.” (Or ask if they’ve read Dear Indie this week and hope they’ll take the hint.) Indie is cringing for both parties in this situation and is going to take a very thorough shower.

TEXT AMELIA ANTHONY

with an I recently hooked up was overall old flame again—it revisit the really satisfying to felt dynamic because I and absolutely rejected e undesirable when w in ended things. Keep x mind, though, the se e was nothing to writ home about.

We prob ably will hook up the com again ov ing mon er t h s a n d confront I want to this old fl ame on unresolv some ed busin e s s : t h ey hooke up with a d good frie n d of mine after end right ing thing s w it h knowing me— full well it w o uld upse In our ne t me. xt and lik e ly final e what sho ncounte uld I do? r H o w can I lea this situa v tion at p e eace and to move g e t ready on for go od?

Everyone has their own sexual timeline, so go easy on yourself—you’ve probably not missed out on much amazing sex (early lovers aren’t particularly known for their sexual prowess.) Tinder and online dating in general is pretty reliable in terms of getting laid.

I recently painted flames on my car and since then I’ve been a pussy magnet, so I’d recommend that too!

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 8

18

THE BULLETIN #DoesBrownCare formed out of the efforts of a coalition of student organizations, spearheaded by the Brown Democrats, to uplift the issues facing dining hall workers following a Brown Daily Herald article published at the beginning of October.

I want to make clear that #DoesBrownCare is independent of the Brown Democrats and all other student organizations on campus. #DoesBrownCare has a very specific goal: to apply pressure to the administration and student government, in coordination with workers and their union representatives, to achieve the most pro-worker, proBlack, pro-Indigenous, pro-POC contract in this university’s history. To read the demands in their entirety, visit this link: bit.ly/dbcemailadmin.

The demands of #DoesBrownCare range from silent observers during union negotiations to improvement of working conditions to increased transparency over dining services at Brown. It is clear that the student body at Brown has lost confidence in the University’s ability to do right by their employees. Our demands seek to radically transform the relationship between dining workers, their management, the administration, and ultimately the broader Brown community.

The Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS) has remained largely silent on this issue. Nearly 1/6th of the student body has signed the #DoesBrownCare petition, and students have protested publicly. UCS is the student organization on campus with the greatest access to the highest levels of administration. UCS should issue a complete endorsement of the #DoesBrownCare demands, and the student body ought to remember UCS’ lethargic response to this issue when UCS members have to run for re-election or for election to higher office. #DoesBrownCare is in this for the long haul and hopes that relevant stakeholders choose to get involved sooner rather than later. Acts of kindness and appreciation towards dining workers are always valuable and necessary, but true appreciation means standing in solidarity with workers as they fight for a better contract and better workplace. During a crisis of confidence in the administration, in management, and in the University, appreciation is the bare minimum; action and progress are mandatory. #DoesBrownCare is looking for people who want to take on a more formalized role to sign up (not apply, sign up!) at bit.ly/ getinvolveddoesbrowncare. All are welcome, and there are different roles for different levels of commitment.

-MATT RAUSCHENBACH

DESIGN OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

Upcoming Actions and Community Events Friday, Nov. 19th @ 6-11PM: Community Court Debt Fundraiser The Behind the Walls Committee at DARE is throwing a party at Revival Brewing Company to raise money for our Community Court Debt fund.

All of the proceeds will go towards paying off community member’s debt. Come through to enjoy art and music, and support DARE’s efforts!

Location: 50 Sims Ave

TEXT LILY PICKETT

ILLUSTRATION JOEY HAN

Updates and Clarity from #DoesBrownCare

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

Location: 335 Wickenden St.

Saturday, Nov. 20th @2-5PM—Transgender Day of Remembrance Vigil Join organizers at Youth Price INC. for National Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) for a vigil to honor the memory of transgender lives lost. Food, games, artists, and speakers will be present.

Location: 743 Westminster St. Sunday, Nov. 21st @4-8pm—Intro to Workplace Organizing with Providence DSA Want to learn about labor organizing strategies? Looking to build power and solidarity in your workplace? Join ProvDSA, Counter Power and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at Red Ink this Sunday to connect with other workers to learn organizing skills and techniques.

Location: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress St.

Tuesdays, 6-8PM: Queer Gourmet at YPI Each week, YPI staff will teach a new recipe along with foundational cooking skills! Register at www.bit.ly/ypiqueergourmet Location: 743 Westminster 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.

Kitchen Supplies Drive (by Youth Pride RI) Looking for kitchen supplies donations, including: knives (chef and butcher), cutting boards, stainless steel cooking utensils, medium sized pots, sauce pans, skillets, spatulas, mixing bowls, baking supplies, other cookware that is stainless steel and NOT teflon based.

If you have something to donate, email info@youthprideri.org.

Community Cares: Sponsor a Family for the Holidays (by DARE) bit.ly/DareCC Fill out this Google Form to sponsor a family for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

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.

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

Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Support the weekly survival drive at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in Providence who need them.

Venmo WideAwakes-PVD, Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays GoFundMe for tents for people experiencing homelessness (by Andrea Smith) All donations go towards buying tents for people currently living in inhospitable places, to be distributed by service providers and street outreach teams. There are currently over 1,000 people on waiting lists for individual and family shelter, while the state has only 608 year-round shelter beds, all of which are currently full. tinyurl.com/tentsri Support RailRoad emergency fund RailRoad is currently supporiting a formely incarcerated person with housing and warm winter clothes. Donate to their emergency fund: Venmo @theorytakespraxis, Instagram: @railroadpvd

A Message from Teamster Local 521. For more information, see an interview with strikers inside on page 4.

If you shop at stores that are currently carrying Barefoot Wine, High Noon Seltzers, Carlo Rossi, and other Gallo brand wines and liquors, be aware that the presence of this merchandise means that these stores are NOT supporting local workers and our families, who are currently organizing for better wages and conditions.

Let Johnson Brothers know about your concerns at 651-649-5800 (Corporate) or 401-583-0050 (Rhode Island).

DON’T BUY:

Barefoot • Apothic • Carlo Rossi • Carnivor • Chateau Souverain • Columbia Winery • Ecco Domani • Edna Valley Vineyard • J Vineyards & Winery • Louis M. Martini • MacMurray Estate Vineyards • Mirassou Orin Swift • Talbott Vineyards • William Hill Estate

IMPORTS: Alamos, Brancaia • La Marca • Las Rocas • Martín Códax • Whitehaven • Allegrini • Argiano • Jermann • Pieropan • Renato Ratti OTHER: High Noon Seltzers • New Amsterdam Vodka and Gin • Familia Camarena Tequila • RumHaven • E&J Brandy • Diplomático Rum • Scotch Whiskeys from Whyte & Mackay

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!