The College Hill Independent Volume 41 Issue 8

VOLUME 41 ISSUE 08 13 NOVE MBE R 2020

PLAYTIME!

THE POWER MOVE

GET YOUR BRITS OUT

The games we play and why we play them

The case for line-item veto in Rhode Island

Irish rap and the language of revolution

Indy Cover

Sundial Anna Kerber

Week in Review 02

WEEK IN 21+ Alexander Valenti & Lucas Gelfond

Nation + World 07

Get Your Brits Out Alina Kulman

Metro 05

The Power Move Peder Schaefer & Leo Gordon

03

Out of Reach Ruthie Cohen, Lauren Fung, Emmie Lau & Gabe Mernoff

13

This Is My Home Nell Salzman

From The Editors We waited. We counted ballots, counted sheep, counted on each other. And now, taking stock of the wasteland, we catch our breath and prepare for what comes next. There! Among the manure, the smallest seedling sprouts. “The mountain goddess, if she is still there, will marvel at a world so changed,” said chairman Mao Zedong. We remember that our presumed future president accidentally may agree. (Again.)

As the weather in Providence remains sunny and temperate, we consider another slogan of the chairman that our President-elect may yet parrot: “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” Mark your territory so that the gardener from Four Seasons Total Landscaping cannot take a weed wacker to it.

See you on the green.

Features 09

Forget Me Not Amelia Wyckoff

17

Playtime!

Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña

Arts + Culture 06

Pretty Infographics Justin Scheer

14

Starved Touch Tammuz Frankel

Science + Tech 15

The Rise of King Ivory Gaya Gupta

Literary 04

Something Beyond Reality Isabelle Yang

Ephemera 11

A Landing Victoria Xu

X 12

HOW TO PRETEND TO BE DEAD (A MANUAL) Yukti Agarwal

List 19

Tara Sharma, Sara Van Horn, & Mehek Vohra

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

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

13 NOVEMBER 2020 VOLUME 41 ISSUE 08

STAFF Week in Review Amelia Anthony Nick Roblee-Strauss | Nation + World Emily Rust Leela Berman Giacomo Sartorelli Anchita Dasgupta | Metro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini Peder Schaefer | Arts + Culture Seamus Flynn Alana Baer | Features Alina Kulman Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger | Science & Tech Gemma Sack Anabelle Johnston Thomas Patti | Literary Kate Ok Bowen Chen | Ephemera Sindura Sriram Anna Kerber | X Maia Chiu Ethan Murakami | List Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn | List Designer Mehek Vohra | Staff Writers Uwa Ede-Osifo Mara Cavallaro Muram Ibrahim Justin Han Izzi Olive Bilal Memon Seth Israel Nell Salzman Victoria Caruso Zach Ngin Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Ella Spungen Sarah Goldman Alisa Caira Laila Gamaleldin Drake Rebman Morgan Awner Elana Hausknecht Rhythm Rastogi Nicole Kim Lucas Gelfond Rose Houglet Joss Liao Nicholas Michael Belinda Hu Leo Gordon CJ Gan Vicky Phan Tammuz Frankel Amelia Wyckoff Auria Zhang Olivia Mayeda Justin Scheer Gaya Gupta Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Marina Hunt Issra Said | Copy Editors Christine Huynh Grace Berg Jacqueline Jia Elaine Chen Sarah Ryan Jasmine Li Nina Fletcher Madison Lease Alyscia Batista | Design Editor Daniel Navratil | Designers Anna Brinkhuis Katherine Sang Isaac McKenna Miya Lohmeier Clara Epstein | Illustration Editor Sylvia Atwood | Illustrators Sandra Moore Katrina Wardhana Floria Tsui Mara Jovanović Hannah Park Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Yukti Agarwal Sage Jennings Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Joyce Tullis Charlotte Silverman Simone Zhao | Business Isabelle Yang Lauren Brown Evan Lincoln | Web Designer Sindura Sriram | Social Media Christina Ofori | Alumni Relations Jerry Chen | Spanish Translation Felipe Félix Méndez | Senior Editors Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn Cal Turner | Managing Editors Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Ivy Scott | Managing Designer XingXing Shou *** The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts. @INDYCOLLEGEHILL WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN 21+

BY Alexander Valenti & Lucas Gelfond ILLUSTRATION Anna Kerber DESIGN XingXing Shou

COVID-23 IS COMING Banana bread be damned, Michael Bay is here to make things just a bit less bearable. The Transformers director, notorious for his big-budget visions of cataclysm, has decided to give the same treatment to the very real global disaster that is the COVID-19 pandemic. Songbird, an upcoming Bay-produced film for which a first trailer was released at the end of October, takes as its premise, “What if this all got wayyyy worse?”

The movie (yet to be given a release date) promises to project us into a fourth year of worldwide lockdown, at which point the “COVID-23” virus has mutated into an even deadlier pathogen, turning America into a YA-novel-esque dystopia. Martial law has been established and the infected are being forced into quarantine camps, or “Q-Zones.” Thankfully, the movie’s description tells us, “a few brave souls fight back against the forces of oppression.” (Intentionally or not, this film seems likely to be a favorite among anti-mask conspiracy theorists). These brave souls include young courier Nico, played by Riverdale heartthrob KJ Apa, whose ‘quarantine gf ’ Sara faces expulsion to a Q-Zone when she is believed to have contracted the virus. The trailer suggests the prototypical contemporary disaster movie—replete with loud droning noises, glitchy visuals, and hot people, dripping in sweat, darting around—except for the fact, of course, that much of it takes place over video call.

The question of “does anyone really want to watch this right now?” was apparently of no concern to director Adam Mason, who started working on the script with co-writer Simon Boyes in March soon after the pandemic began to shut down the United States. Nor was the consideration “is it safe to make a movie right now?” a particular worry: shooting began in July, halting only after the production received a “Do Not Work” order (eventually rescinded) from SAG-AFTRA when producers were reportedly not so transparent about safety protocols. Songbird is now proudly declaring itself “the first feature film to be made during COVID-19 in Los Angeles.”

Hollywood perseveres!

Unsurprisingly, online backlash to the trailer was swift. Many have called the film out as tone-deaf exploitation of a tragedy which continues to claim thousands of lives each day. Though the film’s creators likely imagine Songbird as inspiring in some way, its framing as a spectacular thriller is primarily an invitation to be entertained.

The story appears to take wholesale the conditions of our present, unimaginatively exaggerate them, and throw in an attractive forced-apart couple for a dollop of emotion.

Who knows, maybe there’s more than meets the eye. But with a premise so unabashedly clickbait-y (and Michael Bay at the reigns), this Indy writer is doubtful.

Bay and company are not the first in the entertainment industry to fictionalize the upheavals of 2020. Coronavirus television has included Netflix’s Social Distance, NBC’s Connecting…, and Freeform’s Love in the Time of Corona, all of which attempt to reflect actual day-to-day experiences from the pandemic, treating their subject matter with decidedly more sensitivity than Songbird (though receiving mixed reviews).

More pandemic content is likely to come soon, whether we want it or not. With the apocalyptic action movie territory now staked out

by Songbird, one wonders what other genres Hollywood might mine for COVID-inspired tales: contact-tracing mysteries? Coronavirus in space? Teens finding love and discovering themselves in the virtual halls of Zoom high school?

In any case, hopefully future productions can at least come up with details more creative than “COVID-23.” —AV

THE $224 MILLION FIGHT FOR YOUR THAI FOOD “Liberals are going to end this year by naming ‘essential service workers’ Time’s people of the year but do nothing to improve their material conditions,” @melstonemusic tweeted on April 6. The tweet proved prophetic; less than a week later Time published an issue titled “SPECIAL REPORT: HEROES ON THE FRONT LINES.” Despite the yard signs and status updates for those keeping the country running, on Election Day, California voters passed Proposition 22 to erode the rights of app-based delivery drivers with a 58 percent majority. The proposition classified gig workers as independent contractors rather than employees, a win for companies like Lyft and Postmates and devastating loss for all of their drivers. It made a nice magazine cover, at least.

The proposition’s passage overrides the 2019 California Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5), which extended employee classification to janitors, nail salon workers, construction workers, and gig-economy drivers, among others. The bill prompted predictable tantrums from Uber and Lyft, who, like any good union buster or petulant child, swiftly threatened service suspension, increased prices and wait times, and a loss of flexibility for drivers.

In reality, the threat of lost flexibility is nonsensical: worker schedules are wholly independent of their status as employees, and 70 percent of drivers work more than 30 hours per week, the equivalent of full time in California. Proposition 22 simply opens a backdoor for these companies to avoid complying with what the Mercury News aptly termed “the fundamental employment laws that apply to all other industries.” As Californians slip into poverty and are forced to work despite COVID-19, this exemption denies workers key employment benefits such as, I don’t know, unemployment insurance, access to safety equipment, and paid sick leave. A study from the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley found a variety of loopholes in the proposition suggesting worker earnings could be reduced to a meager $5.64 per hour after Prop 22’s passage, a far cry from the minimum wage of $14 per hour that will begin in California this January. For good measure, the initiative also requires an unprecedented 7/8ths vote in both the state Assembly and Senate to amend it in any way.

Corporate supporters of the measure, including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, and B-list YouTuber GloZell Green, outspent their opponents with a $204 million campaign that dwarfed the $20 million efforts of Prop 22 opponents, who were supported mostly by labor unions. The result? The most expensive ballot measure campaign in California history. The Prop 22 fight has also served as a sandbox for new corporate political tactics as these companies seized the opportunity to reinvent the pass-something-clearly-not-in-the-public-interest playbook. Uber’s app displayed a menu to drivers which read “Prop 22 is progress” with two options to dismiss the notification, “Yes on Prop 22” and “OK.” DoorDash distributed 150,000 takeout bags emblazoned with “Yes on Prop 22” to restaurants free of charge. Instacart prompted drivers in one grocery store to “retrieve one Prop 22 sticker and insert and place it in your customer’s order.” Public relations firms working for the campaign even distributed voter guides from fake progressive voting organizations with names like “Feel the Bern, Progressive Voter Guide,” “Council of Concerned Women Voters Guide,” and “Our Voice, Latino Voter Guide,” according to KQED. Meanwhile, ads published by the campaign claimed 4 out of 5 drivers favor prop 22, a number produced from a study of merely 718 drivers. How convenient.

The proposition placates drivers with a series of surface level benefits like a wage floor and healthcare voucher based on number of hours worked, notably only applied to “engaged” driving time, which excludes time waiting for rides or deliveries. It’s difficult to praise a proposition that enshrines corporate profitability from unpaid labor derived primarily from marginalized communities (78 percent of drivers are from communities of color). This Indy writer is left wondering why Californians continue to trust obviously self-motivated tech companies to have even the most basic regard for their drivers. Et tu, DoorDash? — LG

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WIR

02

OUT OF REACH

METRO

+++ The path to ending SOI discrimination is inextricably linked to a larger overhaul of the housing system in the United States. While SOI discrimination is inherently unjust, larger systemic injustices including scarce housing stock and a lack of renter-centered policy cause significant material consequences. The dearth of affordable housing in Rhode Island creates a dangerous power imbalance: property owners, property managers, and landlords hold a product—housing— for which there is far greater demand than supply. This allows landlords to engage in exclusionary rental practices such as SOI discrimination.

Unlike neighboring states, Rhode Island lacks a line item in its state budget for affordable housing and thus lags far behind other states in per-capita housing investment.

According to HousingWorksRI, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine all spend more on housing than Rhode Island does, with Massachusetts spending around $100 per person, Connecticut about $95, Vermont about $77, and Rhode Island only roughly $21. This underinvestment has consequences: there is currently a deficit of about 22,000 affordable housing units in Rhode Island. The lack of sufficient units makes the vacancy rate extremely low, thus handing landlords the reins of power over tenants in the negotiating process. Governer Gina Raimondo’s proposed 2020 state budget did include a line item (direct funding) for affordable housing construction, with the proposal still under consideration in budget talks.

Without a fundamental restructuring toward renter-centered housing, the problems of discrimination and displacement will remain entrenched in Rhode Island cities, regardless of SOI laws. As Megan Smith told the Indy, “unless we work on the culture change as we’re working on the policy change, [the discrimination] is just going to switch to a new proxy.” SOI discrimination is just one manifestation of the racism and classism that pervade the housing system.

The United States has a bitter history of forced removal and disinvestment in communities of color, an ethos that persists today. American housing policy consistently prioritizes profits instead of people and communities. But as Justice Gaines (B’16), an organizer with the Providence Youth Student Movement, contends: “The city is not its profit margin or its debt or its business ranking, the city is the people who live in the city.” In concert with the efforts of people like Malchus Mills, we can create a society that reflects Gaines’s vision. While Mills himself has faced injustice in the housing system, he is also working tirelessly to change it. His experience represents the housing system’s failures but also the hope and change needed to redeem it.

RUTHIE COHEN B’23, LAUREN FUNG B’22, EMMIE LAU B’23, AND GABE MERNOFF B’22 wish they had line items for affordable housing construction in their yearly budgets.

13 NOV 2020

DESIGN Clara Epstein

03

leadership guarantees nothing for this legislation, today its possibility of passing the House is undoubtedly greater than it was before the election.

ILLUSTRATION Hannah Park

House of Hope, calls SOI discrimination “a legal proxy for a lot of other forms of illegal discrimination.”

Kristina Contreras Fox, Senior Policy Analyst for the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, said that some landlords refuse to rent to voucher holders simply because “they think that they’ll be renting to a Black or brown family.”

Even landlords who are not prejudiced against voucher holders might resist renting to them for fear of scaring away other tenants who may have their own biases against those on government assistance. The result is that while voucher holders in Rhode Island can afford more than 33 percent of units, they are rejected from 93 percent of rentals according to a 2018 study by SouthCoast Fair Housing and HOPE (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere).

Not only is SOI discrimination unjust, it also runs counter to the interests of landlords. Despite its negative reputation, the voucher system actually improves the renting experience for both landlords and tenants in several key ways. For one, non-voucher holding tenants are entirely dependent on their own incomes in order to pay rent, which can often be unreliable. Section 8 vouchers provide an incredibly stable source of income, essentially guaranteeing payment to landlords.

The voucher system also ensures accountability for both landlords and tenants. Just as the required inspections place a burden on the landlord to care for and maintain the unit, they commensurately promote responsible tenancy. Voucher holders are aware of the regular inspections and are therefore more inclined to treat their homes well and follow rules +++ set by their landlords. Mills aptly frames the voucher system as an “opportunity” rather than a burden for landlords—it is SOI discrimination has become a common practice among an opportunity to receive reliable rent payments, to invest landlords for two main reasons: first, in order to be approved in the safety and livability of their units, and to have a more for rental to a Section 8 voucher holder, the property must cooperative relationship with tenants. pass a health and safety inspection. While the inspection policy is in place to protect voucher holders and maintain the +++ integrity of the program, it has also become a point of conflict because landlords are averse to paying the costs of keeping One of the solutions Mills has championed as a tenants’ their units up to code. rights activist is legislation banning SOI discrimination.

Dannie Ritchie, a housing activist in the Mount Hope While solidly Democratic, Rhode Island and Providence neighborhood, explained that landlords may discriminate have failed to follow the lead of other states and municipalagainst Section 8 voucher holders because they do not want ities that have successfully banned SOI discrimination. With to be subject to inspections that would reveal the faultiness four successful passages in the Senate subsequently stymied and illegality of their units. While other tenants may accept in the House, the struggle to pass anti-SOI-discrimination the subpar conditions of a property, Section 8 voucher legislation is emblematic of two larger political problems in holders cannot use their subsidies to rent a unit that does not the General Assembly—first, the dictatorial, opaque, loyalmeet government standards. Landlords therefore prefer to ty-based nature of Rhode Island politics and, second, the rent to non-voucher holding tenants who will accept a subpar conservative complexion of Rhode Island’s Democratic Party unit, allowing landlords to save the time and money necesleadership. These faults have major implications for the fate sary to bring the unit up to code. of policy because the House Speaker is the most powerful In addition to the perceived financial benefits of denying politician in the state. rental to tenants using Section 8 vouchers, racist and classist In recent years, Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, a conserstereotypes also contribute to the prevalence of SOI discrimvative Democrat, ensured that progressive legislation never ination. Some landlords embrace popular perceptions of made it to the House floor for a vote. However, Mattiello public assistance recipients as lazy, unreliable, and irrehas lost his 2020 election to a Republican challenger, potensponsible, which can impact their evaluations of prospective tially opening the door for a change of fate for the legislatenants. As Mills told the Indy, landlords often promote “bad tion in next year’s legislative session. Moderate Democrat propaganda” about voucher holders, hurting their ability to Joe Shekarchi is in line to be the next Speaker and, while find housing. According to a 2019 report by the National Low no progressive champion himself, has historically been Income Housing Coalition, 80 percent of Section 8 voucher more open to left-wing causes and changing House rules to holders are Black or Latinx. While discrimination on the make them more fair and transparent. While the change in basis of race is illegal, Megan Smith, a case manager at the

BY Ruthie Cohen, Lauren Fung, Emmie Lau, and Gabe Mernoff

The booming voice of Malchus Mills crackles through the phone as he recounts his experience searching for housing in Providence. Mills, a local tenants’ rights activist, has been part of the Section 8 Voucher Program since 2006. Section 8 is part of a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-sponsored rental subsidy program. Despite having a steady source of rent payments via Section 8, Mills found Providence landlords unwilling to rent to him. “A lot of the landlords were turning people with Section 8 vouchers away,” he told the Indy.

In Rhode Island, it is legal for landlords to deny tenancy on the basis of a renter’s source of income, or SOI. The practice of SOI discrimination is a direct reaction to the stigma of government assistance, but it is also intertwined with larger structural issues such as landlord-tenant power imbalances, the scarcity of affordable housing, and racist and classist notions of what makes an ideal renter.

Section 8 vouchers, also known as Housing Choice Vouchers, help low-income people afford decent, safe housing by subsidizing rent beyond what the recipient can afford with 30 percent of their income. In order to be eligible, an applicant’s income must not exceed 50 percent of the area’s median income (AMI), but the vast majority of vouchers go to families below 30 percent of the AMI. But not everyone who is eligible for a Section 8 voucher receives one—under the current funding structure, around 11 million applicants who should qualify are not covered by the voucher program due to insufficient federal funding. This lack of funding means long waiting lists are the only option for many families seeking housing assistance. Renters like Mills often have no choice but to stay in a shelter or outside while waiting for their vouchers, a process that can take more than two years.

Obtaining a voucher does not even conclude the grueling process of securing a home. After acquiring the voucher, Mills spent an exorbitant amount of time searching for a landlord who would rent to him. The vouchers have an expiration date of 60 days, giving renters about two months to come to a deal with a landlord. Voucher holders often face discrimination from landlords during the housing application process, making it difficult to meet the government’s tight deadline: in HUD’S most recent study, only 69 percent of Section 8 voucher recipients succeeded in leasing units through the program.

“Out of ten options, voucher holders would only be eligible for three with a voucher because of landlords not wanting to participate,” Marijoan Bull, an Urban Studies professor, commented. “Clearly, it is a problem.”

Currently, only 14 states have anti-SOI-discrimination statutes on the books. In most states, including Rhode Island, it is legal for landlords to refuse to rent a unit to someone simply because the renter receives housing or other public assistance.

An examination of injustice in our housing system through the lens of Source of Income discrimination

SOMETHING BEYOND REALITY

BY Isabelle Yang ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou PHOTO Jessica Lehrma DESIGN XingXing Shou

A conversation with writer Ottessa Moshfegh Ottessa Moshfegh is becoming everyone’s favorite author, and it’s not by coincidence. Ever since her first publication in 2014, McGlue, Moshfegh has gone on to write four more novels with no playbook to follow. From murder notes while walking your dog to casual paralysis, any narrative is fair game for her.

Moshfegh is able to provide her readers with a silky combination of danger and delight that can only be produced through attentive recognition of the literary world. With an undergraduate degree from Barnard, an MFA from Brown, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford under her belt, Moshfegh has shown again and again the nuance and sensitivity needed to push contemporary writing forward. This author of Eileen is 39, deliberate, and brilliant.

Moshfegh’s 2018 best-selling novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation taps into her ability to play with devices of genres and personal narrative as she unfolds a story about a gorgeous blonde woman that is determined to sleep for an entire year. The narrator is unapologetically uncouth (“And my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer”) and brutally honest (“She was going to be annoying, I could tell”).

By turning the reader towards a pre-9/11 New York City, Moshfegh captures the environment of a disillusioned society unaware of what is to come. From a modern viewpoint, we are able to fill this absence of anxiety ourselves. As we all go through what feels like a year of attempted rest and relaxation, we can appreciate the irony in how much effort the unnamed protagonist extends to self-isolate.

To read Moshfegh’s writing, we gladly indulge in ‘dislikable’ female characters—their backgrounds, intentions, and attitudes toward life. Moshfegh offers a renewed evaluation of what it means to be repulsed that is both refreshing and shocking. She is direct in her exploration of novels that lie slightly beyond reality and personal convention.

Moshfegh video-calls me from the comfort of her home in Los Angeles. Over Zoom, her expression is soft and attentive. She grabs the kombucha next to her and rolls the sleeves of her oversized grey sweater.

For the next 45 minutes, we discuss her novel in the making, the boring people in our lives, and the significance of everyday inspiration.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The College Hill Independent: Let’s begin. I have to ask, how are you? How has quarantine been?

Ottessa Moshfegh: As an author, I think it has been pretty good. I was supposed to be on a tour for my new book that required travelling across Europe in the UK and in France for a month, and that ended up getting cancelled. I got to have this surprise spring at home, which was good for me as a writer.

And about a month into quarantine, I decided I needed a project that could help me focus on something discreet from the other work that I was doing. So, I started a novel. I have a draft of it at this point.

Other than that, I’ve had a lot of ongoing work. I consider myself a novelist, but I have been working a lot with Scripps screenwriting.

Indy: The current space for artists and creators to continue producing work in the industry seems to be evolving with the pandemic. Some authors are drawing themes influenced by isolation while others abstain from this over-emphasization. Would you say you’ve been participated in such evolution?

OM: Thematically, the plague was pretty inspiring. I knew I didn’t want to write about the contemporary world, so I immediately went to the Middle Ages. The novel will be set in third-person where each character lives in this fictional medieval age. There’s a village that represents a microcosm of current society to a certain extent. I’m not writing about the Black Plague, but it’s an opportunity to look at relationships between different people, classes, and family backgrounds.

The way things get monetized. The way that power works and its influence on the environment. This feels very current to me.

OM: I don’t read reviews. But criticism still gets reflected back when I engage with publicity and go on tours. So I end up generally aware of what critical conversations are circulating about my work. I had no idea that so much of being a professional writer was dealing with shit like that. At the beginning of my career five years ago, there was a sharp and intense learning curve with how to deal with public opinion.

There is a kind of disillusionment that happens with authors when they publish their first novel that has been so painstaking and requires so much sophistication of thinking. So much deliberation. And when things are spoken in a way that looks at the book as a product, independent of the mind that created it or what it’s reflecting, it’s really disappointing. It kind of breaks your heart.

I rely on this kind of separatist arrogance. Most people have no idea what’s valuable in terms of literature. They have no sensitivity.

They are mostly addicted to television, and if a book isn’t giving them what they are addicted to in terms of narrative, they will not be able to understand it. I believe that that’s true and interesting and also… shitty.

I play into the addicted mentality in the way that I structure my illusion and with suspense. I’m rubbing people the wrong way because I try to disabuse them of that addiction. I don’t think about it that much when I’m actually doing it; it’s only in hindsight. I’m not a conformist but I like playing into traditional forms because it’s an opportunity to get onto the inside and start perverting and mutating what is the status quo. When Eileen came out, the reception was like “oh my god, we never heard of a woman with BO.” But now five years later, I think we’re in a different place.

Indy: We are, definitely.

Indy: I noticed your characters, especially those in Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, are quite three-dimensional. You see a bit of non-fiction in them, even though the types of quests they undertake (such as attempting to fall asleep for an entire year through drugs) are out of the ordinary. How do you manage to make them feel so familiar?

OM: If you write into where we are right now, your book is going to be outdated. You have to write for the future reader.

come again. This is the time to explore in ways we haven’t thought about before which is beautiful in a sense. Would you say there are other sources during this time that inspired you in this journey of observation?

OM: Everything has been accumulative. Oftentimes the things I’m interested in as a reader have nothing to do [with what interests me] as a writer. I’m happy since reading other people’s fiction tends to be distracting more than anything.

I live with my husband who is also a writer. Between us, there is this kind of blood circulation of consciousness around writing. There is a lot of sharing going on. He likes to talk about writing; I tend to not like to talk about writing, so we meet somewhere in the middle. That has been a big influence.

As an artist though, Kurt Cobain, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone.

These are the people that have influenced me the most. The music that I listened to when I was in high school was definitely the stuff that helped me tap into a deeper place. That’s where I’m always trying to go.

Indy: You’ve also had a history with Brown, being part of the university’s MFA program. You produced McGlue which can be viewed as the first work of literature that really put your name out there. Has your time at Brown influenced the foundational layers to what makes you a writer?

OM: The program really supported an individual sense of curiosity.

The people in my MFA were all completely different writers and interests. So when we got together to talk, we had to communicate on the highest level we could find on a common ground. This is totally not the case in different communities of writers. I look back at Brown, and think damn, I should have been more appreciative of my time there. There was a kind of radical vibe that was so refreshing. I went to Barnard, you know. Which is a type of radical more buttoned-up.

Indy: Writing for the future reader. In the publishing industry, there will always be a demand that depends, to a certain extent, on Indy: And do you see your novels venturing into the film industry? matters that we deem relevant. Even in our present context with Transforming a piece of written literature meant for print into a OM: If I’m going to dedicate myself and commit to an entire novel, the continued political chaos, many books have been curated as an digital piece of art must require balancing substance. How would you my character has to be interesting to me. I tend to focus on characters answer to it. Writing in this way—is that energizing or exhausting? go about that? that have dimensionality beyond what I am familiar with in terms of knowing another person. While there might be some autobiograph- OM: I really believe in sitting down and just working. I believe in OM: Screenplay adaptations are really their own art. You can’t expect ical influence, I’m mostly trying to create the illusion that I’m writing goal-fulfillment. I believe in showing up for the work and the time to reproduce the novel. You have to conceive the film as the novel’s from the first-person perspective. From my heart. That’s not really a revolving it, even when you don’t have anything to give. cousin, an entity that shares some DNA with the original material but reflection of me, that’s a reflection of my writing style craft.

I was in Wyoming for a writing residency for a month, and I that can stand on its own. I’ve adapted a lot of my books into screenI want there to be a sense of conspiratorial, secret intimacy could work from 7 am till 7 pm. Now when I am home and hanging play, and I find that the hardest adaptation is when a breakthrough in between the narrator and the reader. You have access to the protago- with my husband not working, my concentration goes to shit (laughs). the novel is something internal so you have to figure out how to transnist that the other characters in the book don’t. I think that has been I mean it was election week, too. There are certain things we can late this visually. Cohering that with the plot is really challenging. It’s really consistent throughout my short stories and novels. It’s inter- control and can’t: we can control our effort, not talent. It’s the same a totally different set of narrative skills. esting to move away from that with my current novel. gesture for inspiration: we can control and make a decision to pay In terms of my characters being “crazy,” I mean—is Indiana attention, to have an expectation that inspiration is there.

Indy: And what is next for Ottessa Moshfegh?

Jones crazy? We know they are fiction. I don’t know about you but In the quarantine, when you are usually engaging in society, there are so many boring people in my life that don’t surprise me. If there are abundant opportunities to see things reflected in new ways. OM: I’ve been really getting into movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s I’m creating a book, I want it to be beyond reality.

Creative opportunities in narrative. When you are alone and can’t very funny to watch it in a writer’s perspective because I’m constantly go anywhere, you have to build that universe for yourself. Whether wondering how they come up with dialogue. That’s always a quesIndy: I’ve seen some of your past interviews. The ones with The Cut that’s something inside or an immediate environment. Any kind of tion. How did you do this? and The Guardian come to mind. You said, “I’m the most self-as- creative playfulness, like rearranging objects in your room, can put sured person I’ve ever met, very arrogant at times, sure. I can’t make your mind in that space. You are seeing space in different relationa wrong move. I know what I’m doing.” I can’t help but admire that, ships, but it’s really challenging.

ISABELLE YANG B’22 is also obsessed with Nina Simone and her but I’m sure there have been critics in the past that don’t share this song ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me.’ perspective. What’s it like dealing with that?

Indy: It presents authors with a unique challenge that may never

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the power move

funding. Other states’ constitutions, like Wisconsin’s, go further, allowing their governor to also change the language of appropriations bills, including wording and punctuation. In effect, Wisconsin governors can create entirely new policy at a whim. Last year, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor Tony Evers used this power to increase education funding in the 2019 budget by $65 million, among other changes.

In the case of Wisconsin’s 2019 budget, Evers’ vetoes were modest enough to withstand a two-thirds override from Republican legislators, and the legislature voted to sustain his budget changes. But in Alaska, three-fourths of the legislature must object to override a veto and in the end, the governor and only 21 allied Republican out of 60 state legislators had their way. This is incredibly unrepresentative. In short, the impact of a state’s line-item veto depends

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not only on the specific veto powers granted, but also on the intentions and political allegiances of both the governors who use it and the legislatures that it defies. As we can see from Alaska’s example, this power can have huge consequences. It’s not only a question of if a line-item veto should be implemented, but how.

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When Sam Bell referred to the budget-cut-centric line-item veto “being bandied about in the State House,” he was referring to a 2019 bill introduced by State Senate GOP leader Dennis Algiere. If passed, this bill would give Raimondo a power similar to that of Alaska’s Dunleavey, one that, depending on Raimondo’s definition of wasteful spending, could either be used to cut budgets or reduce corruption. But the bill never even received a hearing, and furthermore, the General Assembly does not have the power to institute a line-item veto alone: were either of the two versions of the bill to pass, the question would be put to the public via referendum.

However, at the start of the 2020 legislative session, Algiere introduced a new bill that would give the governor an alternative to reducing appropriations: the ability to ‘disapprove’ of any item of an appropriations bill. This would allow a governor to express broader ideological complaints to budget items. Most importantly, this new bill also ensures that if appropriations are reduced due to governor disapproval, that money “shall not be reduced but remain as part of the general appropriated funds.” In essence, this new language in the 2020 bill would give the governor the power to make cuts to specific line items and suggest new areas for spending without reducing overall government expenditures. For example, the governor could make cuts to the legislative grant program and suggest putting that money into affordable housing or environmental remediation.

In general, any line-item veto, by taking power away from General Assembly leaders, would shift power back to the governor, cutting down on the crony elitism that has run our state for decades. A line-item veto isn’t only about those tiny legislative grants going to Little Leagues and obscure social clubs. At its core, a line-item veto is about where we want to distribute power in our state—vested in the hands of a few elite legislators, or spread across the branches of our government, in full view of the public eye.

The last time a line-item veto was seriously considered in Rhode Island was during the 1986 Rhode Island Constitutional Convention. Lincoln Chafee, governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015, was one of the constitutional delegates and remembers a line-item veto was one of the items considered. While all the benefits of a lineitem veto were presented to the delegates, the amendment didn’t pass the convention. Leaders of the General Assembly—who benefited greatly from the absence of executive power—controlled many of the delegates, including the chairman of the convention, who was appointed by the Speaker of the House.

“The lesson for me back then was that people who have power want to keep it,” Chafee told the College Hill Independent. “Despite all the evidence of how this was better for the future of the state, the Rhode Island legislative powers kept out the line-item veto.” Decades later, as Rhode Island’s governor, Chafee experienced frustration with the General Assembly that could have been avoided if he had the executive authority offered by a line-item veto.

LEO GORDON B’23 & PEDER SCHAEFER B’22 are “I’m not the only one to say that out of all 50 states, Rhode against a line-item veto for Indy Managing Editors.

Island has the strongest legislative power,” said Chafee.

“With a line-item veto you would be able to exercise more

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DESIGN Clara Epstein

The system of checks and balances between branches has always been crucial to the United States’ system of government. At the national level, when the two Houses of Congress pass a bill, they must send it to the chief executive, the president, for review. The president has two options: they can either sign the bill into law or send it back to Congress, vetoing the bill in full. This veto can be overridden by a two-thirds vote in both houses. To a large extent, the legislative process at the Rhode Island state level mirrors that of the national one. When Rhode Island’s General Assembly passes a bill, they then send it to the governor to sign. If the governor does not sign and sends it back to the Assembly, vetoing the bill, the Assembly can then override the veto with a three-fifths vote.

In some states, however, the governor has more than two choices to make. In contrast to Rhode Island, the constitutions of 44 out of 50 US states give their governor some ability to alter specific items in a bill or budget instead of vetoing that piece of legislation in its entirety. Just like a regular veto, state legislatures have an opportunity to override this ‘line-item’ veto. Different states give different levels of line-item veto power to the governor, and have different vote thresholds that legislatures must reach to override the governor’s veto. In effect, a more powerful line-item veto and a higher veto override threshold give the executive branch of a state more leverage over that state legislature’s budget or legislative decisions. But in states such as Rhode Island, the lack of any line-item veto power means the governor must choose between passing a budget full of extraneous spending and lobbyist favors or vetoing the entire budget, which could be very unpopular with the public.

Most state constitutions, such as Alaska’s, give their governor the ability to change the amounts of specific appropriations. Last year, Alaska’s Republican governor Mike Dunleavy used this to cut an additional $400 million from a budget approved by a then Democrat-controlled legislature, a budget already set to reduce state spending by about $280 million. The University of Alaska was hardest hit, losing $130 million, and Medicaid lost $50 million in

executive control over the direction of the state.”

Chafee added that a key strength of a line-item veto is the ability to bring issues to the public’s attention. Even if a governor’s veto is overturned by the General Assembly, at the very least the public is made aware of that aspect of the budget or legislation and allowed to question why the General Assembly is making that choice. Chafee said the General Assembly’s legislative grant program is a perfect example of this lack of public ‘sunlight’ on an issue. Year after year, General Assembly leaders are able to slip the grants into the annual budget with little the Governor can do to check them.

Some more progressive legislators worry that a lineitem veto will lead to more austere budgets in Rhode Island.

Sam Bell, a progressive Democrat representing Providence in the Rhode Island State Senate said that for this reason, the type of line-item veto being proposed was just as important as the decision to implement one at all.

“The line-item veto that is being bandied about at the State House sucks,” Bell told the Indy. “It’s designed around brutal budget cuts. It’s exclusively a budget-cut-only line-item veto, which doesn’t address the problems that a line-item veto is supposed to address.” Instead of keeping legislative leaders accountable, Bell said, an ill devised lineitem veto could be used to cut millions in social services, like the cuts made in Alaska. But he also opposes a veto allowing the governor to unilaterally change the meaning of bills, like in Wisconsin. With that in mind, Bell thought a line-item veto should be laser-focused on two things: removing extraneous language in legislative bills (often added by corporate lobbyists in last-second amendments) and eliminating specific, but small appropriations—such as the existing legislative grants program—slipped into the budget by the General Assembly.

A line-item veto, if done right, isn’t just a measure to cut services and balance budgets. It’s a way to shift the balance of power at the State House away from General Assembly leaders and towards the executive branch, adding another layer of accountability to the budgeting and legislative process.

BY Leo Gordon and Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Ophelia Duchense-Malone

Paying Little League umpires. Repairing leaky, all-male social club roofs. Buying shuffleboards and installing hair dryers. For decades, members of the Rhode Island General Assembly have doled out “legislative grants” to organizations for missions such as these with little oversight, helping legislators secure the support they need to win reelection year after year. House and Senate leadership—usually conservative Democrats—control the distribution of the grants, allowing them to keep control over their members.

Those who vote with leadership and don’t complain get special favors, while those opposed to leadership—progressive Democrats and Republicans—are left high and dry.

These earmarks are a tiny portion of the state’s $10 billion budget—in 2020, the General Assembly put aside only $2.2 million for the grants—but this style of doling out taxpayer money is indicative of greater dysfunction and imbalance of power within the Rhode Island state government.

The General Assembly can get away with such blatant ‘pork barrel’ spending— that is, spending on budget items that target the districts of individual legislators—because power is concentrated in the hands of House and Senate leadership. The reason? The office of the Governor in Rhode Island is relatively weak, giving the executive branch few ways to shape the budget that forms every year in the General Assembly. In particular, the governor doesn’t have a line-item veto: the ability to veto or change certain appropriations within the budget passed by the General Assembly.

Rhode Island is one of only six states in the country without a line-item veto. Consequently, it has one of the strongest and most corrupt legislative bodies in the nation.

Budget deals are made in back rooms by a ‘good old boys’ club and lobbyist legalese is added via amendment to legislation at the last moment, giving unfair advantage—such as choice legislative language or specific financial handouts—to special interest groups, all without the oversight of the governor.

Thus, the question of a line-item veto is about more than just legislative grants, hair dryers, and Little League funding. It’s about how power fundamentally operates within Rhode Island.

The case for line-item veto in Rhode Island

Activist

Infographics

The competing interests of self and the greater good on Instagram

Activism has never been more convenient than it is now. I can turn on my phone, open Instagram, and a brief scroll reveals a whole slew of cute, eye-catching infographics on a number of salient social-political movements. I tap two buttons and I’ve published an argument or opinion, neatly packaged with decorative font, hip graphic design, and sometimes even floral patterns inside a square frame. No longer is there a need to read nuanced reporting in order to construct one’s own perspective. The Instagram infographic gives me the essential argument in a few sentences or less, perhaps (though not necessarily) substantiated by some statistic on the next slide of the post which, though convincing on its face, often paints a reductive picture of the issue at hand. The infographic does all the work; it makes the argument for me and is a proxy for my opinion. As far as my followers are concerned, it is my whole opinion, and I hardly had to put in any effort to make it known. Infographics, therefore, make participation in social media discourse incredibly easy, though arguably at the expense of some degree of logical and personal integrity.

Perhaps the greatest (and weirdest) advantage, if we can call it that, is that declaring one’s stance on the issues via infographic reposts can actually maintain and advance one’s meticulously curated timeline aesthetics. “Aesthetics” can be thought of as the visual repertoire established through one’s posts: the types of photos they post, the colors used most frequently, the kind of clothes they wear in their pictures, the filters they use, etc.

Consider an Instagram account famous for making these types of infographics: @soyouwanttotalkabout, a page dedicated to “dissecting progressive politics and social issues in graphic slideshow form!”, according to the account’s biography. The account’s posts read like PowerPoint presentations with fun typeface and pastel

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BY Justin Scheer ILLUSTRATION Floria Tsui DESIGN Miya Lohmeier

virtue signaling associated with posting superficial activist material, aestheticized or not, it is increasingly evident that social media—particularly Instagram—has transformed activism, to some extent, into a conceited exercise, placing greater focus on one’s self. Indeed, this seems like an inevitable outcome of social media, whose very design is predicated on a shift of focus to the individual, to the personalization of digital content, and to making the “media” about you.

Thus, we arrive at the fundamental tension embedded in social media activism: the self versus the greater good. Social media platforms, especially Instagram, were designed with an emphasis on the former. Consequently, social media activism—by disrupting the stream of self-interested content which Instagram no doubt encourages with apparently selfless, utilitarian posts—is subversive almost by definition. The infographic itself is subtle evidence of this subversion. Instagram’s image-based format does not lend itself easily to text-based content, so simply by featuring text inside the square frame, the infographic works around—not with—the Instagram platform.

Nonetheless, thanks to heavily aestheticized graphic design, infographics still manage to preserve and advance one’s image in an apparent reconciliation of self-focus and a selfless concern for social justice.

It is precisely when this reconciliation falls short— when an activist post fails to hide the user’s selfish interest in maintaining their image and aesthetic online—that self-centeredness is glaringly obvious and worthy of public censure. As it turns out, infographics walk this line well; they effectively disguise the narcissism laden in their activist content but still manage to advance—albeit subliminally—one’s self interest in image and aesthetic. Perhaps this is why we rarely see infographics or the people who post them being ‘cancelled’.

It is important to recognize that the collective shift of focus inward toward self—though in some sense undermining the fundamental sentiment beneath social justice activism—is an unavoidable reality of many of our lives as they become increasingly dependent on and intertwined with social media, especially in the absence of in-person socialization. So, while the commentary above may read as a cynical critique, infographics may be better understood as a response to, not a manifestation of, narcissism. As long as concern with self-image prevails—as long as we use social media, and Instagram in particular—aestheticized infographics respond to the call for selfless action in a manner compatible with Instagram users’ underlying vanity.

Though this Indy writer may admittedly be overestimating such vanity, few would object to the observation that social media has made its users more conceited to some degree. Moreover, despite the apparent conflict between self-interest and concern for a greater cause, the two are not entirely mutually exclusive: we can care about more than one thing at a time. I don’t doubt that many of those who repost infographics, notwithstanding any personal motivation regarding image, do so with a genuine concern for an issue.

I wish to conclude with one final, cautious note: a potential consequence of Instagram users’ proclivity for infographics is that, in order for an opinion or argument to gain traction in the Instagram landscape, it had better be delivered with the right graphic design. In this sense, the marketplace of ideas has become less democratic because the design-and-illustration-savvy user, or individuals who utilize the work of these designers, have an inherent advantage; no idea or argument on Instagram can rise to any prominence on its own merit alone. Thus, some amount of control of online political discourse has been ceded to the graphic designers and those with the resources to pay for good graphic design.

This presents the age-old problem of activist dialogue being skewed toward ideas favored by those with greater resources and capital. A less visually-oriented social media platform, then, may be better suited for substantive dialogue on the pressing issues of our time.

In a more text-based forum of exchange, perhaps the infographic phenomenon and its strange implications would disappear.

color schemes, congruent with what I can best describe as a soft vintage aesthetic. For example, the @soyouwanttotalkabout’s post on prison labor utilizes a 70’s psychedelic style font on a gentle beige background.

These posts tackle incredibly heavy and salient issues, which makes their choice of graphic design feel mildly inappropriate. I do not necessarily take issue with this— after all, appealing design may, through some subconscious effect on users, produce greater proliferation of the post and the information it contains, even if it appears to trivialize the issue at hand.

Another good example is the account @thinkingabolition, a prison and police abolition advocacy page.

They employ different brands of graphic design in their posts, ranging from cute, floral design – like that in the post titled “Abolition is Creative,” which features an illustration of a police car overgrown with flowers – to modern, minimalist design – like in the post titled “Is Police Abolition Possible?”

Some infographic posts employ the tropes of juvenile artistic style, like the scribbles and messy handwriting in @uniquelyaligned’s slider post on supporting emerging creators. Others use collages to impart a DIY appearance for those so inclined to that aesthetic, like @morecolormedia’s slider post titled “Decolonize Your Mind.”

Many of the infographics reposted and many of those that go ‘viral’ often feature pastel color palettes, minimalist/modernist graphics, or other heavily stylized designs. Thus, the self-conscious Instagram user highly concerned with appearance—which I would guess is most of us— is able to engage in digital activism without compromising or disrupting their profile’s aesthetic, simply by finding a post with the right design. In this sense, we see that activism has become, in part, a narcissistic practice when taken to social media. Considering similar critiques of the JUSTIN SCHEER B’22.5 might follow you back.

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GET YOUR BRITS OUT

BY Alina Kulman ILLUSTRATION Sage Jennings DESIGN XingXing Shou

In 2017, Irish rapper Móglaí Bap (a pseudonym) spraypainted the word cearta (‘right,’ in Irish) on a bus station. Bap was graffitiing his hometown of Belfast during protests over the Irish Language Act, a law that proposed giving the Irish language equal status to English in Northern Ireland. When undercover police pulled up, Bap escaped while his friend was arrested. His friend refused to speak English to the cops, and spent the night in jail waiting for a translator. In the Republic of Ireland, every citizen has the right to engage in government business in either Irish or English. The same right is not granted to people like Bap in Northern Ireland, a province of the United Kingdom, even as Irish republicans have long pushed for the legislative change.

The incident inspired Bap and his bandmate Mo Chara (also not his real name) to write their 2017 hit, “C.E.A.R.T.A”—the same word he had graffitied earlier that year. Bap and Chara, known as KNEECAP (along with their collaborator, the balaclava-clad DJ Próvaí), regularly combine humor, drug references, and antiBritish sentiment in their songs. On “Your Sniffer Dogs are Shite,” they oscillate between mocking the police for unsuccessful drug busts and the simple message of “We want our country back.” Songs on KNEECAP’s

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2018 debut album 3CAG flow seamlessly between Irish (also called Gaeilge, or Gaelic) and English, sometimes within the same lyric. Their song “Incognito” even includes an Irish introduction lesson for beginners: “When you see your mate you say ‘Dé an fucking craic?’ / Nó ‘Cad é mar atá’ if you wanna be polite / You say ‘Maith go leor!’ if you think he’s alright.” One lyric in “C.E.A.R.T.A” seems to perfectly embody their cause: “raithneach dleathach in fuckin’ Éire Aontaithe,” which translates to “legal weed in a fuckin’ United Ireland.”

As Chara explained in an interview with The(091)Show, “The revolution’s fucked until we’re buying fucking gear [drugs] in Irish.”

The band has faced criticism for their controversial subjects and unapologetically nationalist rhetoric.

Members of the Democratic Unionist Party—Northern Ireland’s pro-British party—condemned KNEECAP’S music and concerts as “hate-filled” in 2019. Not even a week later, bouncers for their concert at University College Dublin escorted them offstage for cheering revolutionary slogans. RTÉ, the national Irish radio broadcaster, banned their music in 2018 for its explicit content. KNEECAP joyously responded to the political condemnation with an Instagram video of Mo Chara dancing, middle finger raised, to an EDM remix of a

traditional Irish rebel song, “Come Out Ye Black and Tans.” Bap told i-D magazine that he had expected the pushback: “Everything that came before us in Irish was so radio-friendly, and we’re like nothing that’s come before,” said Bap. “When we first put out music, we had local politicians and stuff sharing it and praising it, going, ‘Oh this is Irish language hip-hop, this is great,’ but they weren’t bothering to actually listen to it or translate what we were actually saying.”

The status of the Irish language in the nationalist movement has been contentious for centuries, especially during the violent sectarian conflict that consumed the island from the 1960s to the 1990s, known as the “Troubles.” KNEECAP’s Irish raps combine a political message with humorous parodic elements, creating a new shared revolutionary vocabulary for Ireland’s young people, who have grown up in relative peace. After attending a KNEECAP performance, Irish photographer James Forde told Vice, “I’d imagine that about 90 percent of the people at the concert didn’t understand the lyrics, or wouldn’t be able to sing along to them. If you don’t speak Gaelic— which most of us don’t—it would be difficult to follow along or understand sentence for sentence. But then you have this pride that they’ve brought out in Irish

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IRISH RAP AND THE LANGUAGE OF REVOLUTION people.” He added, “Now they go to a KNEECAP gig and they wanna speak Irish with their friends.” +++ Bap and Chara, both in their twenties, grew up in West Belfast speaking Irish. Their experience as native speakers, however, is somewhat unusual today. About 40 percent of Irish people speak some Irish, but only two percent speak it on a daily basis. The numbers are even lower in Northern Ireland, where less than 10 percent of the population speak any Irish at all.

The history of the Irish language is entrenched in the history of British colonialism, as Ireland is often referred to as Britain’s “first colony.” The British conquered and confiscated land from Irish kingdoms in the 17th century and encouraged English-speaking and Protestant settlers to move there from England and Scotland. There have been Irish rebellions against British rule since the beginning of this colonization.

In the 19th century, Irish nationalism coalesced as a movement, fueled by the failures of British rule during the Great Famine—known as the Irish Potato Famine outside of Ireland—and by battles for national sovereignty across Europe. Campaigns for “Home Rule” coincided with cultural and linguistic revival efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; a nationalist movement of mainly Catholic republicans, who sought to establish an ‘Irish Ireland’ separate from British rule.

Nationalists at the turn of the 20th century believed resuscitating the Irish language was key to recovering lost national pride and reversing cultural Anglicization.

Irish republicans proclaimed independence for the entire island in 1916, launching the Easter Rising rebellion against British rule. Although the initial insurrection failed, the brutality of the British response—their forces killed civilians and executed 16 Irish republican leaders—contributed to popular support for independence during the ensuing conflict. After the Irish War of Independence, ceasefire agreements in 1921 led to the partitioned Ireland of today: the Republic of Ireland in the south is independent, while Northern Ireland remains a province of the UK. The Irish Republic sought to protect the Irish language by designating Gaeltacht regions, mainly on the country’s western coast, where Irish is the predominant spoken language.

In Northern Ireland, the dominant Protestant unionist party suppressed and banned the Irish language, associating it with “traitors,” as part of their treatment of Catholics as second-class citizens.

Tensions over enfranchisement and British control of Northern Ireland continued throughout the 20th century. However, it wasn’t until the 1969 riots in Belfast and Derry that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) became a powerful guerrilla revolutionary force. From the 1970s onward, the IRA was known for violent tactics, including bombings and murders of British targets, which ultimately killed over 3,000 people. KNEECAP’s name comes from the IRA’s brutal treatment of suspects within their own communities. Vigilantes would ‘kneecap’ people—non-lethally shooting the backs of their knees or other limbs—as punishment for alleged crimes or disloyalty to the nationalist movement.

The Irish language galvanized nationalist unity during the Troubles as thousands of people involved with the IRA and other republican paramilitary groups were arrested and sent to prison. Irish linguist Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost’s book, Jailtacht: The Irish Language, Symbolic Power and Political Violence in Northern

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Ireland, 1972-2008, argued that prisoners’ secret and illegal campaigns to teach each other Irish led to “radicalized” nationalist culture. These prisoners also often adopted ‘Gaelicized’ names, reclaiming their heritage.

Sinn Féin, the political party linked to the IRA, encouraged those who believed in the nationalist cause to learn the language with a clear message: “Learn Irish, speak Irish, be Irish.” +++ For some young Irish people today, the two decades since the end of the Troubles have led to a sense of almost romantic distance from the actual conflict, creating opportunities to reinterpret Irish republicanism. KNEECAP’s members are part of that generation; in an interview with the Irish Times, Chara described himself and Bap as “Good Friday babies,” referring to the 1998 agreement that officially ended the Troubles. Bap noted that their incendiary personas are, to a degree, characters: “We can look at it with a different perspective. We didn’t experience it first hand in the way our parents did. They had a traumatic experience. We can detach ourselves from it and look at it in a more whole context.”

A slightly earlier generation of popular musical groups in Ireland developed a kind of ‘postmodern Irony’ or ‘memeification’ of the IRA. In the Rubberbandits’ 2011 song “Up Da Ra,” they confidently list celebrities, including Quentin Tarantino, Dr. Dre, and Winona Ryder, as official IRA members. The song ends with an insistent statement: “The Rubberbandits are in the IRA / I’m telling you now, we are in the IRA, we are the IRA, you know what I mean, yeah? / Do you know the IRA? That’s us!” The Rubberbandits are, in reality, a comedy duo from Limerick. The lyrics’ jocularity represents a very different approach from songs in the ’80s and ’90s, when the violence of the Troubles was a daily threat. Hits like The Cranberries’ “Zombie,” or U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” lament the emotional and physical wounds inflicted upon both sides during the conflict. In “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Bono cries out, “There’s many lost, but tell me who has won / The trench is dug within our hearts / And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart.”

U2’s mournful tone has faded in the current Irish music landscape. KNEECAP, like the Rubberbandits, are not IRA members. Outside of their rap careers, Chara and Bap are community activists; they’ve hosted Black Panther-inspired free breakfasts and protested for Irish-language rights. And yet their choruses scream “Brits out” and their tour posters depict Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster tied to a rocket.

The violent imagery seems to have a wink and a nudge attached (in fact, Bap and Chara referred to that poster as a piece of “fine art”).

Chara and Bap also direct their mocking tone to satirize some of the IRA’s violent antics. After the ceasefire with the British in the ’90s, a faction of the IRA turned their focus towards limiting the spread of drugs in their community and executing alleged dealers. In the music video for the intro song to 3CAG, “Your All Legitimate Targets,” KNEECAP constructs a fake IRA press statement, threatening drug dealers for their “excessive, hedonistic, toxic lifestyles.” The video then cuts to the album art: an illustration of Bap and Chara smoking joints in the Irish countryside, surrounded by images of a cannabis leaf, a drug baggie, and a Molotov cocktail. Ultimately, Bap and Chara spurn all anti-drug authorities, whether that’s the police, club bouncers, or

the IRA. KNEECAP challenges the narrative of a sorted-out, peaceful Irish political situation, even without current violent conflict. In “H.O.O.D.,” they angrily relay stereotypes of Irish Catholics—“Low life scum, that’s what they say about me”—and reference historic employment discrimination favoring unionist Protestants—“all the best jobs are taken by the doggies.” They shot parts of the music video for their song “Amach Anocht” (“Out Tonight”) at a food bank.

“We’re showing the reality that there are food banks in Belfast,” Bap explained in an Irish-language TV interview. “We come from a working-class culture.” He added, “We use this humor to convey that message in a way that people will hear.”

When KNEECAP rallies their crowds to revolutionary slogans, it is clear that many Irish youth share their views. The band claims to not be aligned with one specific political ideology or group, and once jokingly described their project as “active nihilism.”

Yet it is their young fans’ demographic who are voting in growing numbers for Sinn Féin, the republican party in parliament, due to its left-wing social policies and motivating nationalist message. Sinn Féin has also been a fierce proponent of the Irish Language Act, and caused legislative deadlock from 2017 to January 2020 over the language’s legal status. The party’s efforts drew massive support from Irish-speaking youth activists, who held protests outside of Stormont, the Irish parliament complex. The gridlock was only resolved with a deal that appointed commissioners for both the Irish language and Ulster-Scots, a dialect spoken by descendants of Scottish settlers, which has become increasingly associated with the Protestant cause. +++ Brexit looms over political and cultural tensions in Northern Ireland, as the United Kingdom’s full separation from the European Union is set to take full effect January 1, 2021. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the land border dividing the island of Ireland has remained “invisible,” as checkpoints and security forces were removed. However, the UK has not yet found a mutually satisfactory solution for the Northern Irish border, and political debates continue over whether there will be economic tariffs or border searches. Northern Ireland police chief Simon Byrne argued in late 2019 that a hard border would be a “fueling point” for paramilitary groups and their recruitment. The Irish police have even begun compiling lists of IRA sympathizers in preparation for potential border violence. And now, with COVID-19 travel restrictions, border policing is at its heaviest since the Troubles ended.

In a video with Joe UK in February, Mo Chara said that given the uncertainty of Brexit and the growing popularity of Sinn Féin, “it’s a cocktail of everything.

We’re slowly on our way to a united Ireland, which I think is inevitable.” Bap added, “As long as you leave our country, we’re not gonna be resentful. We might let you come into Ireland, like 200 people per year.

We’re pretty nice, I think.”

ALINA KULMAN B’21 dreams of raithneach dleathach in Éire Aontaithe.

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Forget Me Not

BY Amelia Wyckoff ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker DESIGN Daniel Navratil

My grandma was having an allergic reaction to the incense. Tears streamed down her face while the rest of us surreptitiously scanned the room, trying to calculate our next move. Do we kneel to pray or stand up to sing? It was a 50/50 shot. I kept crossing myself wrong— was it the left or the right shoulder first? My grandma passed me a hymnal, and I stared at the script through the smoke until all the letters turned into U’s. “Sing, Anahid.” The music was beautiful, but I didn’t understand a word.

We only make the 45 minute drive to Armenian church for special occasions: Christenings, deaths, the occasional Easter. My grandparents, although they aren’t Orthodox by faith, go fairly frequently. My grandfather takes Armenian lessons in the church basement from the priest who baptized me. He is the only one who can speak to my grandma in her native language, Western Armenian. My grandmother’s parents fled Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Syria during the genocide in 1915. They raised her and her sister in Washington Heights, New York. My grandmother didn’t teach my mother Armenian, but she did teach her how to make kourabia and pilaf for the Easter table. In fourth grade, we had to reenact the story of how our families came to America. I wrapped a sheet around me in a makeshift taraz and told the class how I hid under dead bodies in the desert, got on a boat to Cairo, and arrived in New York (and, like every “diary of an immigrant” tale we read, stared wistfully at the Statue of Liberty as my boat came to shore).

Armenia was split between two empires in the 1st century, and my grandmother’s country of origin, Western Armenia, is now eastern Turkey. When my grandparents visited Armenia in 2012, my grandmother didn’t understand the Eastern language. The cuisine tasted nothing like the Mediterranean food my grandmother used to cook for Christmas Eve. She expressed her shock and confusion over the phone, but she cried at every genocide memorial they visited. She felt at home in a shared tragic history. Our Armenian identity, therefore, was obsessed with an event that had sought to erase it. Stories of struggle and survival created my sense of ethnicity. My family had assimilated, but we mourned our people and preserved our persecution in hallowed memory.

On July 12, 2020, the Armenian and Azerbaijani armed forces clashed on the state border, near the Tavush Province of Armenia and the Tovuz District of Azerbaijan. The head of the Foreign Policy Department of Azerbaijan’s presidential administration and the Armenian Foreign Minister both claimed that the clashes were an attempt to pressure the other side “on the question of Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Nagorno-Karabakh is a historically contested breakaway state within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan. It is known by 70 percent of its residents and Armenians generally as Artsakh, an ancient name derived from a time when the region was a part of the Armenian Kingdom. I will be referring to it as Artsakh in modern contexts but using its regional name, Karabakh, when discussing its history.

On November 10, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed to end the war, removing Armenian troops from Artsakh. Some Armenians protested, storming parliament and calling for Pashinyan’s resignation. The violence in Artsakh has killed and displaced Armenian civilians, but citizens and diasporans alike grieved the ceasefire.

Artsakh has become a symbol of self-preservation

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for Armenians who remember the 1915 genocide, when 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Young Turks, a revolutionary party in the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish government continues to deny that the slaughter took place, and diasporans have fought for recognition since fleeing their homes. Rhetoric surrounding the current conflict in Artsakh has invoked vast histories of ancient settlement and Armenian persecution. Diasporans have taken to Instagram to document anti-Armenian quotes from Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, and Recep Erdoğan, the Turkish president. For many diasporans, Erdoğan and Aliyev’s rhetoric reopens old wounds. In their eyes, the war in Artsakh is a continuation of a genocide that never really ended. However, modern day Azerbaijan and Turkey are not the direct descendants of the Ottoman Empire: The Soviet Union and its collapse has significantly shaped the geopolitics of the Caucasus region. The USSR assigned NagornoKarabakh to Azerbaijan in 1923. The country has maintained their control of the region throughout history, but the dispute hasn’t ended. In 2020, Azerbaijan and Armenia have once again gone to war. Reducing this war to Pan-Turkism is an oversimplification, but Turkish nationalist language motivates the diaspora to act. At my dinner table, we regularly condemn the same statements that these posts quote. My grandmother is not from Artsakh, but this conflict has illuminated how myself and many members of the diaspora engage with Armenian nationalism. +++ Azerbaijani forces launched an artillery attack against Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh, this September.

An Armenian friend’s Instagram story implored me to “swipe thru!!!!” a slideshow from the New Zealand based, catch-all social justice account @shityoushouldcareabout entitled, “Understanding the conflict between: Armenia and Azerbaijan,” with information provided by the Armenia Support Fund. Its caption read: “It’s a complex situation .” Complex is a vast understatement, and, unsurprisingly, the post didn’t do much to clear it up. For months since then, ArmenianAmericans have flooded Instagram with infographics to publicize what they see as the second genocide of Armenians. I’ve seen posts describing intergenerational trauma and explaining diasporic guilt. There are soldiers and civilians dying, important churches being destroyed, and war crimes being committed— Genocide Watch even issued a Genocide Emergency Alert. The current situation in Artsakh is radically different from that of 1915, and yet many Armenians are experiencing and publicizing it as déjà vu. Born into the words “Never Forget,” those fighting persecution in the 21st century feel like they are fulfilling an ethnic prophecy that began with the desert massacres in Western Armenia over 100 years ago. One Armenian tweeted, “As the great granddaughter of genocide survivors, I never thought I would live to see history repeat itself. Let this post serve as a record.”

Diasporans have taken to the streets, pointed megaphones at the New York Times, and shut down highways in Los Angeles to call for an end to United States aid to Azerbaijan. These demonstrations began after the Black Lives Matter movement mobilized across America, with Armenian diasporans capitalizing on the momentum behind social change. The posts I saw on social media ranged from small businesses donating their proceeds, to personal accounts of family

members in Armenia, to calculated infographics full of social justice buzzwords. I had been thrilled to share posts about Armenian culture, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable as Armenian-American activists began positioning themselves as part of a persecuted minority.

The Indy talked to Sarine Zeitlian, an Armenian activist from New York, about her social media strategy. “I began posting on Instagram about Black Lives Matter during the surge of support this summer.

Posting then almost became a trend, which of course isn’t ideal, but helped to spread awareness,” she said.

“When the conflict in Artsakh got worse, I thought if we used social media like they had, we could get more support than we’ve had before.” Zeitlian’s page now focuses solely on Artsakh. Kooyrigs, an organization and Instagram page with upwards of 20,000 followers dedicated to “providing resources to Armenian women around the world,” seemed to think the same way. On October 3, they posted a red square with the text “TEXT PASSAGE TO 52-886 #PEACEFORARMENIANS” superimposed. The caption read, “An extremely effective red square. Do it now, Armenian existence is at stake.” The square echoed the black square of earlier this summer, which flooded the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and social media with blank images instead of resources. This red square at once attempted to imitate the Black Lives Matter movement and modeled itself on a trend that epitomized performativity. Like the aesthetically pleasing infographics on Artsakh I had read in July, these posts seemed to be getting attention and little else. If you texted the number, you’d be taken to a petition to urge Congress to “denounce Azeri and Turkish aggression.” I signed it without really knowing what that meant.

Several Armenians have further misused social justice rhetoric for their own purposes by appropriating claims to Indigeneity in order to advance their quest for recognition. A post widely circulated by Armenians on Indigenous People’s Day read, “I will always unapologetically declare that Armenians are an Indigenous group from West Asia because the only reason that is doubted today is because of our genocide, removal, occupation, subsequent denial, and historical revisionism. We have lived there since time immemorial.” That post included slides likening the assimilation of Armenian women to the forced conversion of Indigenous people into white settler society in the US. Although the region has changed hands throughout history, claiming the contemporary discourse of Indigeneity allows Armenian activists to unequivocally claim the Karabakh region. Using Indigenous People’s Day to lament Artsakh feels like a convenient play for national attention. For diasporans, the rhetoric of genocide and Indigeneity are strategic tools, problematically feeding off of the momentum created by the Black Lives Matter movement. These claims are rooted in a historic loss of ethnic identity for diasporans in America. Sophia Armen, an Armenian-American activist, writes, “So much of Armenian diasporic literature and political theory is about anti-assimilation as a response to ongoing anxieties about erasure, the driving force of genocide. Our nationalism, it means something different than the nationalism of colonial powers. It quite literally means nation—a body of people of which one is a part, a collective belonging that is a connection to land and community beyond borders, and the struggle of self-determination over our own lives. ”

13 NOV 2020

Nationalism, diaspora, and the war in Artsakh

Armenians who have struggled to gain widespread recognition of the genocideare seizing the moment to garner international attention, hoping to develop a sense of belonging. However, their use of organizing strategies used by Black and Indigenous folks and other people of color is questionable considering Armenians’ historically privileged position in America.

Armenians of the diaspora have benefited from whiteness interpersonally and systemically in America.

After their mass migration to the US in 1915, Armenians struggled for citizenship to avoid returning back home, where genocide raged on. A decision from a circuit judge in Boston afforded four Armenian men citizenship, codifying them as white and distinguishing them from Turkish, Syrian, Chinese, and Korean immigrants. Congress codified that decision a few months later. Aram Ghoogasian, an Armenian writer from Los Angeles, argued in his article “How ArmenianAmericans Became White: A Brief History,” “Today Armenian Americans, on the whole, enjoy high levels of wealth relative to many non-whites, an observable trend more attributable to Armenians’ racial position… than their fabled proclivity for hard work.” Armenians have been positioned as a model minority since they were allowed to naturalize in the 1920s, and assimilation has further complicated how they relate to the American communities they are a part of. +++ In the past few months, I’ve felt more Armenian than ever before, although I am privileged to be far removed from this conflict. Nayri Carman, a Western Armenian from Michigan, explained, “For me, it’s not about getting the land back, it’s about where people are.”

For many like her, this conflict is about protecting the

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Armenian population of Artsakh from harm. Carman and Zeitlian feel the war’s impact personally: Zeitlian’s mother remembers the war in the ’90s, and Carman has friends from her community with family on the front lines. Unlike both of them, I have no Armenian community to turn to outside of the elderly parishioners my grandparents see on Sundays. I visited Glendale, which has the largest concentration of Armenians in the world outside of Armenia, on a trip to Los Angeles two years ago, and I was shocked to see Armenian script on street signs. I bought the few pastries I recognized at a bakery and presented them to my friend, describing their flavors but forgetting their names. In Glendale, Armenian culture felt tangible and immediate. The choreg loaves my family baked at Easter suddenly seemed inadequate.

Throughout the summer, I found and followed Armenian culture accounts I never knew existed. I scrolled and felt moved to call my grandpa, imploring him to teach me Armenian now that my grandmother no longer can. Artsakh has at once drawn me closer to other Armenians while highlighting my distance from this culture. I watch the churches crumble, and I choke up. My emotion doesn’t stem from a fear for my family.

Instead, I regret that my grandmother will never step foot on the land she comes from, whether in Istanbul or Aleppo. Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to extricate myself from the nationalism I am critiquing. I long for some example of Armenian-ness that I can experience and understand. I found faulty symbols throughout my adolescence: At every visit to the American Museum of Natural History, I stared at the tiny glass box that housed mannequins surrounded by ceremonial objects, with the caption, “The powerful role of the work ethic in personal identity places Armenians among the most enterprising Near Eastern people.” Looking back, this exhibit offered me nothing but an opportunity

to exotify my own heritage, diminishing it to handy epithets. That plaque served as a small consolation for something greater that was lost. I experience the benefits of assimilation daily, but I feel empty, disconnected from the traditions that were once so important to my family.

My grandmother’s dementia has progressed, but she holds onto her identity. At Thanksgiving last year, she pointed to each of her grandchildren and asked, “Do YOU speak Armenian?” She couldn’t believe it when not a single one of us could answer yes. She never taught it to us, but she wishes we somehow knew it.

When speaking to the Armenians I interviewed, I found myself struggling to pronounce “Artsakh.” I felt like an impostor. Nayri addressed this feeling, “There’s a lot of impostor syndrome among people who are Western Armenian. You’re not directly impacted, however you relate to your country is how you’re impacted… rather than some of my friends, whose families are fighting on the front lines.” I desperately crave a sense of belonging. I want my Armenian-ness to mean something, to manifest itself in the life I lead away from the dinner table my family shares at Easter. I am certainly not immune to my own critiques: It is quite possible this is nothing but an extended exotification of a heritage I didn’t get to experience first hand, or a problematic effort to feel different from the homogenous white community I grew up in. My grandmother has enjoyed a peaceful life in America, but I wish she could one day visit a country she feels at home in. Three generations later, a home neither she nor I ever saw means so much to me.

AMELIA WYCKOFF B’22 is calling their grandma.

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A Landing If you grow, I hope you also learn how to fall and find a landing.

Scathing, fresh. honey smells of stolen sap.

here comes the singing one, growing pains in our bark, web of veins in our breath–beautiful

The moon displays // shows // reflects // holds my heart. My sun.

Today, I hope I fall knowing that desire is a dream in the present, and love to have in a passing, a home in a landing.

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THIS IS MY HOME

BY Nell Salzman ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Miya Lohmeier

How COVID-19 shed light on the homelessness crisis in Rhode Island

Teisha Miller was without stable housing for nearly two years, but never saw the homeless crisis get as bad as it did this spring. “Living in my car, I got to see first-hand just how many people didn’t have a place to live—staying in cars, in tents, in the woods. This was just different. It’s getting really bad.”

Miller is a single mother with a six-year-old daughter.

She moved from New York to Rhode Island in 2017, but struggled to find an affordable apartment. Due to her fibromyalgia––a chronic pain disorder that makes it difficult to stand or sit for long periods of time––Miller had a hard time finding and keeping a steady source of income and steady childcare.

In 2018, she was fired from her job as an Uber driver because she had her daughter sitting in the third row of the car during a trip.

She recalled the long and arduous days she faced after losing her job. The food stamps that Miller received often weren’t sufficient because she didn’t have a place to cook or store what she could buy, so she relied on a family friend to bring her $20 a day for gas money and extra food. She stayed in the parking lot of Home Depot, along with others who were also experiencing homelessness.

The pandemic only exacerbated her challenges. Before the city shut down, Miller and her daughter used to rely on public facilities at McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts. “I suddenly couldn’t take my baby anywhere to use the bathroom. I ended up having to put a bucket in my car,” she told the Indy. She and her daughter barely left their car due to fear of infection. On warm days, Miller would let her daugher play in the park, but they spent most of their time in her van.

They didn’t even try to get into a shelter because they knew that there likely wasn’t space and that they may have faced greater health risks by living around more people.

Miller is just one of the many folks experiencing homelesseness who have been affected by the pandemic. The state lost a record of 98,100 jobs in March and April, and though the economy has somewhat recovered since then, House of Hope Community Development Corporation reports that shelter demand has quadrupled since March. Due to social-distancing restrictions in shelters, there is even less space available for this growing population. Miller is one of the hundreds able to describe the extra challenges that the housing insecure face daily: finding places to eat or use the bathroom, the isolation, and the fear of getting sick with underlying health conditions and no medical support. +++ Eric Hirsch, an urban sociologist and professor at Providence College, explained that even before COVID-19 hit Rhode Island, rates of homelessness in the state were already getting worse. In 2019, 1,055 people were in shelters, nontraditional housing, or outside, according to a point-in-time count conducted in January. In January 2020, the number increased to 1,104, with 108 of those people living outside.

By March, the situation worsened to an unprecedented degree. Hirsch attributed this to people not being able to pay rent, or having to leave doubled-up situations with friends and family for safety reasons. As COVID-19 cases went up, his first concern was the unsanitary and unsafe living conditions in the homeless shelters themselves. “In Harrington Hall, for example, there were 120 beds in one room. Bunk beds, cots, sometimes people on the floor in very dense conditions. We really needed to move people out of these situations,” he said.

Over 140 permanent shelter beds have been lost across the state due to new COVID-19 safety protocols. In Pawtucket, the seasonal shelter at St. Paul’s has completely closed down, forcing folks to set up tents and makeshift shelters along the Seekonk river.

Hirsch has been looking at homeless rates since 1990 and said that what people are experiencing right now is worse than at any other point in his career. According to data from the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) collected about two weeks ago, there were at least 325 people documented as living outside. The real number is probably at least 100 more than what has been accounted for, explained Hirsch, due to individuals that don’t want to have their names put in a database or that just simply haven’t been seen by service or outreach workers.

This increase isn’t just numerical; it’s visible in the countless homeless encampments that are popping up around the state, like the Home Depot parking lot that Miller lived in. An encampment, as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is a group of people staying in temporary structures or enclosed places that are not intended for long-term continuous occupancy. Sara Melucci, the outreach program manager with House of Hope

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Community Development Corporation, said their outreach team has counted at least 30 alone in the State of Rhode Island. +++ Melucci said that the people she works with commonly question the highly coordinated response to the COVID-19 crisis, but there hasn’t been a coordinated effort to respond to the homeless crisis in Rhode Island for years. “We can change a whole way of life to respond to a very real crisis like COVID, but where was this coordination of care for the homeless before?” she asked. “People are frustrated. They don’t feel heard.” While the state has promised that there will be more shelter beds in the coming months of winter, she said it’s still not forecasted to meet need. With the weather worsening, Melucci hopes that Governor Gina Raimondo will do whatever it takes to get people safe and inside.

Hirsch gave Governor Raimondo credit for opening up three hotels at the beginning of the pandemic to reduce density in homeless shelters. In early July, however, these hotels closed, and folks were moved back into shelters. Now, the state currently only has one hotel reserved for isolating housing insecure folks who are symptomatic. “They certainly stepped up with the hotel program, and they need to step up again,” Hirsch said. Homelessness is always a crisis and shelters are always overwhelmed. So, Hirsch asked, why can’t there be year round state-run hotels?

Melucci said that House of Hope CDC has engaged with homeless shelters and other organizations to organize meal deliveries and extra support during this time. When state bureaucracies don’t step up to the plate to provide relief and support, it’s up to local organizations like House of Hope CDC to do so. But this leaves resources stretched impossibly thin. “Our outreach team is a team of six case-workers. We’re used to dealing with 150 people at a time, and now we have four to five hundred people at a time. It really limits what we can do reasonably for each person,” Melucci said.

These organizations are the glue holding the state homelessness crisis together. Miller, for example, was only able to find affordable housing in September of this year with the guidance of the House of Hope CDC. Personally, she feels let down by the state’s commitment to helping the homeless.

“They tell us they’ll help us and then sit up there with their $1,000 dollar furniture and don’t actually change anything!” she said. In an era filled with disaster, more and more local organizations are providing immediate relief to those that need it most. And though there is power and sovereignty in community support, Miller pointed out that local organizing is tied to state failure to help in a time of need.

Hirsch looks specifically to the state legislature for housing accommodation help, emphasizing the lack of a housing bond on this November’s ballot. He also critiqued Raimondo’s cabinet, pointing out that there’s currently no housing department to oversee the building and rehabilitation of housing. According to Hirsch, community development at the state level is simply buried in the commerce department, and thus beholden to interests of stakeholders that support the growth of the economy over affordable housing solutions.

Prioritizing housing comes down to a shift in budget priorities, Hirsch told the Indy. At a House Finance Committee meeting in July of this year, Rhode Island residents called for a cut in funding for state prisons to move dollars to areas like affordable housing. In letter testimony, people called for the closing of the state’s ACI High Security Center, which costs about $200,000 per inmate. Governor Raimondo estimated

that the state could save $800,000 dollars by reducing high security spending and exchanging high security inmates with other states. A budget that prioritizes affordable housing solutions over criminalization is essential to ending longterm homelessness for both individuals and families. +++ “Homelessness is a lack of housing. That’s what it is at its core,” said Melucci. Right now, House of Hope CDC has had to focus on short-term solutions, given that so many extra shelter beds are needed. But Melucci knows that a lot more advocacy work needs to be done for affordable housing in Rhode Island. She described the immediacy of her day-to-day work: “How do I even think about doing long-term planning when I’m sitting in front of someone who’s going to sleep outside tonight?”

Hirsch advocates for a “Housing First” solution, where people experiencing homelessness are immediately put into an apartment. He pointed to two key things that are needed to help mitigate homelessness—more rental subsidies and more affordable housing units. He firmly believes that if there was a stronger commitment to these goals, there would be less people living on the street. For Hirsch, the stagnancy comes from a political power inbalance. “Landlords and realtors have much more power in the state legislature than homeless people or low-income renters do,” he said.

Publicly-subsidized housing units would lower the cost of rent. For a housing developer or landlord, he noted, this means less profit. “They’re perfectly happy to tolerate homelessness if it keeps their profits up,” he said. “I really think it’s about profits over people.” He believes that a private housing market is ultimately always geared towards individuals who are more well-off. But he pointed out that the housing-first model is actually more cost-effective in the long-term because the money needed to support those on the street or in shelters adds up over time.

In a 2019 report on homelessness in Rhode Island, Hirsch detailed policy recommendations for Rhode Island to transition from being a shelter state to a permanent housing state.

These include doubling rapid re-Housing from $2 million to $4 million (short-term rental assistance), funding 100 low restriction permanent rental subsidies, building or rehabilitating low-income housing units, and creating a cabinet level department of housing.

Right now, Hirsch said it’s not being prioritized: “We’re looking at a situation in which shelters are not only full, but public housing is pretty much full, too. We’re just not building enough new housing options for low-income people and families.” +++ Melucci explained that true governmental action and prioritization will only be spurred by communication and advocacy from Rhode Islanders themselves: “Talk to your neighbors experiencing homelessness. Look them in the eye. Get involved and educate yourself about what’s going on. Call your state representative and senator and tell them to support the housing initiative.”

Miller thinks about all the people she met while experiencing homelessness herself. “You’d be surprised how many people are living in their cars with kids. I know women who are in my exact situation, with one or two children,” she said.

“I know how it is. It’s really hard. It’s really scary.”

NELL SALZMAN B’22 is hopeful for a better future of affordable housing in Rhode Island.

13 NOV 2020

STARVED TOUCH

Sketch or, What’s in a touch?

BY Tammuz Frankel ILLUSTRATION Sylvia Atwood DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Each partner dons a wristband equipped with a pulsating motor and a touchpad; taps on one are registered in real time on the other through vibrations. The website proudly promises to “close the distance” between loved ones, with one quote reading, “Touch your wrist…Touch their heart.”

Released only a month before the United States fully began to feel the brunt of the pandemic, the Bond Touch Bracelet’s timing could not have been better. Whereas many other portable technologies (e.g., smartphones) suffered decreases in sales, smartwatches experienced an unexpected boom. But smartwatch sales were eclipsed by the sales of another vibrating technology— sex toys. In June, the New York Times reported that Adam and Eve, one of the largest online sex retailers, saw 30 percent more sales at the beginning of the pandemic than over the same period the previous year; smaller direct-to-consumer companies, like the Wow Tech Group, saw 200 percent more sales in April 2020 as compared with April 2019.

Even reporting these statistics, I feel a tinge of embarrassment. But I think this goes beyond decorum regarding sex—after all, I find myself constraining even the most mundane forms of self-touch (fixing hair, picking at a scab) to private activity. Perhaps it is because I feel ashamed that I focus on myself when I should instead be focused on others. Or, maybe the real shame comes not from guilt displaced onto others, but my inability to displace myself from myself: faced with the inescapability of my embodiment, flesh on flesh, I often turn the Zoom camera off if I need to scratch an itch.

At their spring 2016 “Worldwide Developers Conference” release event, even Apple seemed skeptical. Nearing the end of his presentation on the new iOS 10, vice president Craig Federighi handed the stage over to Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, a software engineering duo turned married couple.

Their role was to demonstrate features in the updated Messages app—larger emojis, animated message effects, etc. And yet, even before their visuals momentarily crashed, something was off. The demo imagined the two texting with an assortment of fictional friends, but it looked more like they were rehashing a Heartbeat conversation between themselves. The two spoke in or, No touching the merchandise. a tone that vacillated between sarcasm and aloofness, appearing to poke fun at each other for using the very In the first month of stay-at-home orders, I wrote in my features they were there to promote. When Bongiorno Notes app: “Wonder if I’m getting better at watching demonstrated the “gentle” effect (which animates the movies.” Barely leaving my home for weeks at the message as slowly filling the SMS bubble), Chaudhri beginning of the pandemic, films constituted the outer sarcastically chimed, “Sooo great, Bethany”; when limits of my experience. During that period, it really Chaudri used the “slam” effect (a stomping animation did feel as if the images on the screen were richer, the that forces the other SMS bubbles to shake), Bongiorno colors bolder, the narratives more moving. As corny as interjected, “I think you overuse that one a little bit, such constructions have always sounded to me, I felt I’m just going to say it.” These quips read as thinly like I was truly able to escape into the world of cinema. veiled complaints about their intimate lives. It was as And yet, this hyperawareness was not necessarily if, despite their mockery, the grammar of the software a preferable mode of engagement. As focused as I had infiltrated the way in which they articulated their was on small details, so too was I easily distracted by feelings to each other. minutiae. More specifically, I felt that I was attuned Of all the software updates, perhaps the most in a way that I had never been before to proximity significant change was the introduction of Digital between characters. Crowd scenes all of a sudden felt Touch. Designed as a tie-in to the new Apple Watch, like cesspools for viral infection; even dialogue closer Digital Touch promised a new form of communica- than six feet apart seemed risky. Watching Jonathan tion based on six new gestures: sketch, tap, heartbeat, Glazer’s Under the Skin for the first time, I remember fireball, kiss, and broken heart. For each Digital Touch, being more horrified by the scenes in which Glasgow the sent message replays the same series of signs/ locals step into Scarlett Johansson’s car than the scenes vibrations with the same timing, as if to simulate the where she quite literally devours them. I no longer see sender reaching out through the phone and touching movies with the same degree of definition. But I still find myself wincing every time characters touch. the recipient.

When digital touch was first released, I thought it was useless and rather inane; for the most part, I only Fireball sent digital touch messages by accident, my finger or, Touch me! slipping as I went to send a regular text. But as the pandemic began and more of my relationships moved In 1968, VALIE EXPORT unveiled her performance entirely online, I found myself reaching for digital touch art project, “Tap and Touch Cinema.” In the piece, to enhance conversations with friends and family that the Austrian artist wore a Styrofoam box covering her were far away. It is not lost on me that “digital touch” naked upper body, inviting male passersby to touch is also a play on words, coming from the Latin digitus, her breasts through a curtained opening. EXPORT is meaning finger—in this sense, every touch is digital. often identified as having prefigured feminist media In much the same way, Apple’s Digital Touch offers critics who theorize the passivity of women’s bodies in a venue for considering the way in which technology cinema as sites for the projection of fantasy (i.e., the more generally rescripts communication and recon“male gaze”). EXPORT is at once the actor and director figures our relationships to sense. The air of irony that of her “cinema,” hailing the spectator with the provocaaccompanied my first forays into Digital Touch has not tion, “Touch me!” On the most basic level, EXPORT’s disappeared, but increasingly I feel that digital touches performance takes familiar tropes in cinema and accelhave left a mark on the way in which I relate to others. erates them to the point of ridicule. But on a deeper level, the performance subversively redefines the field Tap of desire: whereas cinema’s assumed male viewer or, Where would you like to be touched? could only sit and watch, the performance introduces a new sensory dimension.

The Bond Touch Bracelet enables long distance EXPORT described herself as staging the first couples to touch one another, even when far apart. “immediate women’s film.” Indeed, there is something

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intuitively more “immediate” and trustworthy about the tactile: we perceive images moments later than they are formed, while in touch we are seemingly able to foreshorten any such gap. But in identifying her project as itself a mode of “Cinema,” EXPORT makes a more suggestive phenomenological claim: that every sight is already an act of touch.

Looking at photographs of “Tap and Touch Cinema” for the first time this year, I was just as struck by what felt relevant in the moment (the artwork’s critique of the nonconsensual nature of the gaze) as what seemed altogether disjunct. It is arguably impossible to capture any performance art piece entirely through photography. But even beyond these aspects of the performance degraded through documentation, I was confronted by effects that are more generally unavailable today—the scandalized and confused faces of the crowd, the public space of the street, touch as a medium of artistic transmission. It felt like my sense of touch had been anesthetized.

Kiss or, What happens when the touched touches back?

In a chapter titled “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” of the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible (1968), philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty forwards a theoretical overview of perception. For Merleau-Ponty, there is a certain tangibility to sight: in seeing, one projects outwards and feels the world around them. The word “flesh” comes to refer not just to human bodies, but what emerges between seer and seen. He deploys the metaphor of a handshake to suggest that there is a certain reversibility (what he calls a chiasm) inherent in the perceptive act—that is, in seeing, we imagine ourselves as seen, just as in touching, we feel ourselves being touched.

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeity (a connecting and intertwining of body) should be reassuring during this period of unmooring: it describes the interpersonal as not constituted by gaps, but instead by plenitude and connectivity. But as I drift from day to day, assignment to assignment, text to text, I feel that I am most of all aware of what is lost, what lies outside of flesh, what remains left over of touch.

Broken Heart or, Can you touch something that isn’t there?

There has been a preponderance of thinkpieces about art during the pandemic, most of which center around some sense of mourning or loss. And a lot has been lost, from audiences in theaters to crowds in museums—to say nothing of the loss of lives and jobs. At the same time, there is a tendency to monumentalize loss, as in the case of the photographs of emptied city streets that predominated social media in the beginning of nationwide stay-at-home orders. But as these feelings persist even as we crawl back towards normalcy, I increasingly suspect that the sense of mourning comes not from the feeling of no longer having access to spaces that we once did, but instead to a discomfort that we have never had full possession of these spaces.

The same seems true for touch. In an article published in e-flux in December 2019, Tina Campt defines touch as “the feeling generated by contact of an item /with the exterior of the skin; / to come so close to as to be or come into contact with it.” Under this definition, touch is merely a symptom of the imprecisely defined “contact” (“so close to as to be”). Like Zeno’s dichotomy paradox—to run from point a to point b you have to go halfway between point a and point b, and so forth—it is as if the space between the skin and the item is infinitely divisible and thus intractable.

I had assumed that touch figured so prominently into my existence because it is now more distant than it was before. But maybe touch was never truly available in art, in media, in technology, but now more than ever feels like it ought to be.

TAMMUZ FRANKEL B’22 feels felt.

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How fentanyl became one of the most lethal drugs in

America

BY Gaya Gupta ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN Daniel Navratil

content warning: drug addiction, overdosing Mac Miller thought he was buying “percs,” or oxycodone pills, that Friday in September 2018. A year earlier, two weeks after his 21st birthday, Lil Peep took what he assumed was Xanax backstage. And on April 2, 2016, Prince took a Vicodin to manage pain, alone in his home. None of them intended to overdose the nights they did, but the fentanyl that was laced in each of their drugs killed each of them.

Fentanyl strikes silently. A dose the size of a grain of sand can kill. It’s cheap to make, and some manufacturers lace heroin, meth, cocaine, and even weed with fentanyl to make their product even more addicting and keep their users coming back for more. In recent decades, opioids have overwhelmed America’s drug industry, from both big pharmaceuticals pushing doctor prescriptions and illegal underground markets.

Fentanyl is one of the most dangerous opioids currently in circulation—after a dramatic increase in popularity among dealers and manufacturers in 2013, fentanyl became the most widely used synthetic opioid in medicine by 2017 and contributed to about 70 percent of all overdose deaths in Rhode Island in 2018. Fentanyl’s chemical structure results in intense but short highs, leaving the user craving more and more with each dose. Above all, fentanyl contamination, which occurs when the highly potent drug is unknowingly found in substances, poisons and kills users. Jacqueline Goldman, a research assistant from Brown’s School of Public Health, frames the influx of fentanyl as a “drug poisoning crisis” rather than an “opioid crisis,” as many victims of opioid and fentanyl addiction are not aware of what exactly goes in the drugs they take.

The United Nations reports that although the pandemic has slowed drug production and reduced the number of drugs in circulation, COVID-19 lockdown measures will likely lead to the stockpiling of drugs, making it more likely that users will fatally overdose.

The study also reported that since COVID-19 lockdown measures take effect across borders, users around the world, not just in America, may be more likely to use fentanyl and its derivatives.

Opioid overdoses in Rhode Island have indeed increased during the months following lockdown orders. Many of those who struggle with substance use have found it harder to get the help they need to recover—with support groups and telehealth appointments going online, it’s harder than ever to stay accountable and maintain a regular treatment routine.

According to the Providence Journal, 2020 is on track to be Rhode Island’s worst year for fatal drug overdoses.

And now, as the city starts to open back up, fentanyl shows no signs of slowing down in Providence’s streets. +++

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THE RISE OF KING IVORY Fentanyl is commonly laced in illegal drugs—heroin, cocaine, meth, fake pills—because it’s a quick, cheap way to make them stronger. Heroin is derived from naturally grown opioid poppies, which take 4 months to reach full maturity. Fentanyl, on the other hand, can be made quickly in a lab. While fentanyl and heroin cost similar amounts to produce—about $32,000 and $29,000, respectively—their market values, which are based on the drug’s strength and popularity, are drastically different: $20 million for fentanyl compared to about $58,000 for heroin. The market value of fentanyl is so high because the cost per dose is so much lower than practically any other drug on the market. You also need much less fentanyl to get high: 1.5–2 milligrams will produce an intense high, while anything stronger than that is essentially a guaranteed overdose.

The Fentanyl Working Group, a task force run

by US Law Enforcement, believes that a majority of America’s fentanyl supply comes from labs in China.

Also called Apace, China Girl, China Town, Dance Fever, and King Ivory, fentanyl is typically shipped to the United States through Latin America, where it is also used to “cut,” or dilute heroin to increase profits.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) considers 2014 to be the start of the fentanyl epidemic.

The number of drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl doubled each year between 2013 and 2016, with young adults of the ages 24-36 being the worst affected. The reasons for this sudden rise of fentanyl are manifold.

While some researchers suggest that illegal labs in the US and China making fentanyl became more readily accessible, Jacqueline Goldman believes that national drug programs intended to help those with substance abuse disorders actually harmed them further.

“In the early 2000s, pharmaceutical companies would mass market prescription opioids, increasing the number of people who are heavily addicted to them. A little while after, we also had the crackdown of something called PDMPs, or Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, which led to increased government surveillance of how many pills different providers were providing,” Goldman said. “Suddenly, you had many people who were previously dependent on prescription opioid pills cut off from their medications without being diverted to medications like methadone and buprenorphine, which are used to treat symptoms of withdrawal. Without access to anything else, users turned to heroin and eventually, fentanyl.”

Heroin users are typically aware of fentanyl contamination, said Max Krieger, who works with Goldman at the Brown School of Public Health. But a small amount of fentanyl can be lethal for opioid-naive users, he says, or people who don’t typically use opioids.

Fentanyl is mostly reserved for patients receiving end-of-life care or cancer treatment. In other words, it’s strong––about 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin or morphine. A synthetic compound, fentanyl can be manufactured and chemically manipulated to have a very intense, short effect.

“With fentanyl, the response is immediate,” said Dr. Haass-Koffler, an assistant professor in psychiatry and

human behavior at Brown University. According to the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), it takes as little as 102 seconds for the drug to enter and be distributed in the bloodstream. “It goes immediately to the brain, activates the neurotransmitters, activates the brain region, and goes away,” she says. “You’ll need multiple doses in order to continue having the pleasure effect.”

When you take fentanyl even once, the drug alters the response system of the body’s nerve cells, making it hard to naturally produce dopamine, one of the chemicals that induces feelings of happiness. Every time you take the drug, your brain and nerve cells form adaptations that dysregulate your body and make it harder to achieve the same high as when you first took the drug.

According to Dr. Haass-Koffler, this is why it’s so easy to get addicted—it’s physically impossible to feel the same euphoric high from the very first dosage, but people continue taking the drug over and over to chase that feeling anyway. This is also why people overdose; many times, they’ll take more and more of the drug in order to increase its effects. When someone who is drug dependent stops using the drug, their body goes into withdrawal.

You may remember the concept of “half-lives’’ from your high school chemistry class—a drug’s halflife is the amount of time it takes for 50 percent of the substance to be absorbed by your body. The shorter the half-life, the quicker the high is, and the sooner you experience withdrawal symptoms. Unlike more commonly used drugs such as weed or alcohol, opioids result in severe withdrawal symptoms, even after short periods of use. Fentanyl has a much shorter half-life

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than most opioids: about 4 hours. After the rush of dopamine has left your system, you’re left feeling low; withdrawal also results in physical symptoms such as anxiety, nausea, excessive sweating, and rapid heart rates.

The medications Goldman mentioned that are used to treat opioid addiction—methadone and buprenorphine—are available at varying degrees depending on an individual’s access to health care and the communities they live in. Narcan, an emergency medication used to instantly reverse the effects of an overdose, is also usually found in public places or with emergency personnel. Rhode Island Department of Health data released in October revealed that more people are overdosing indoors, and fewer people are calling 911 for emergency medical help, perhaps suggesting that Narcan, which can be found at any CVS and on any emergency responder, is less readily accessible.

Methadone and buprenorphine are distributed and work in very different ways. Methadone is also an opioid—its half-life is much longer than more addicting drugs like fentanyl—so it stays in the body for almost 48 hours in order to prevent symptoms of withdrawals that could lead to a relapse. Fentanyl can be found in urine between 24 to 72 hours after the last dose and can remain in the bloodstream for up to 48 hours.

Methadone clinics tend to concentrate in lower-income and minority communities, according to Goldman. Additionally, since the dose only lasts a short period of time, they require going into a clinic almost daily. Goldman states that many clinics in Rhode Island are punitive, in that they use urine screenings to

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withhold treatment from users if it comes back as positive, and aren’t flexible about allowing users to come in at times that suit them. If they miss their appointment to receive methadone, they are turned away without much else help. Surveillance tactics, she said, discourage people from accessing treatment.

Buprenorphine, on the other hand, requires a prescription and is most commonly prescribed a week at a time. As access to buprenorphine requires health care, Goldman reports that they’re often concentrated in wealthier communities.

“Though buprenorphine isn’t as accessible in communities in color, several providers in Rhode Island have made it their mission to make the treatment more accessible,” she said.

Newly released data from the Department of Health breaks down overdose deaths by race. The department found that rates of Black Rhode Islanders who died due to an opioid overdose have nearly doubled in the first six months of 2020. While Max Krieger, the data director in charge of publishing these numbers, said that it’s too early to confirm trends based on this data, the numbers clearly show how COVID-19 and lack of accessible health care in minority communities have exacerbated the epidemic in Black communities.

In order to combat accidental fentanyl overdoses that contribute to long-term drug addiction, Krieger and Goldman have been working on rapid-acting fentanyl test strips, which quickly detect whether fentanyl is detected in a drug.

“We found that fentanyl test strips are an effective harm-reduction tool to prevent overdoses,” said Dr.

Brandon Marshall, the lead researcher on their team. A majority of the participants in their study who received a positive test using the fentanyl test strips changed their drug usage behavior, and 95 percent reported they would continue using the strips.

Krieger and Goldman’s research indicates hope that fentanyl poisoning can be reduced with the right education and tools. With that said, they express concern that people who haven’t used drugs for a while during the pandemic are at risk for fatally overdosing.

After not using drugs for a while, their body’s tolerance to the drug goes down, so a small amount that may not have killed them before the pandemic is much more likely to be fatal now. Health providers need to work fast in distributing these preventative tools for at-risk communities. The fentanyl poisoning crisis is far from over, and without proper attention, it will only get worse.

GAYA GUPTA B‘23, believes Narcan should be more widely distributed across the country.

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16

E! PLAYTIME! P The games we play and why we play them.

BY Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Isaac McKenna

T

he circle comes together when the mestre sounds the berimbau, producing a buzzing sound unlike any other percussion instrument.

Para-na-weyyyyy, para-na-wey para-na, by my third capoeira class I had managed the refrains of one of the songs and some basic steps. Our mestre fills in between the students singing, “Parana parana quando eu era menino paraná eu era muito feio paranáaa” (when I was a child I was very ugly). It took me a few lessons to learn that my instructor was, for the most part, improvising; my Portuguese was improving! The atabaque provides the bass to the berimbau’s whiny call, and the game is set.

I took classes in Rio and Salvador and found the language around capoeira interesting. “Jogar” is the verb attached to “capoeira,” meaning play. However, the verb takes on a life of its own and “jogar” becomes the stand in for capoeira—a mixture of martial arts and dance. Most capoeira games are just contactless sparring; however, a takedown is still possible in games, and an unexpected kick that stops inches from the head is essentially a checkmate.

Play enables us to embody different positions and strategies that would not be available to us any other way. When engaging in play, we agree to logics different from those in day-to-day life, new rules that reflect elements of society (such as chess, cards, and royal hierarchy). In social deduction games like mafia, positions such as trickster, angel, or narrator provide the opportunity for people to shine or perish within these roles. I think of play as an experiment

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in creativity. Most play is relatively inexpensive, yet whenever I engage in more formal creative pursuits, I have always been deterred by the cost. I felt that I needed money to buy pigments to paint or a marble block to sculpt. Discouraged, I continued with writing and running, two activities that were facilitated by my school and had few financial deterrents (a pair of shoes, a pen, paper, and a library card are all you need).

While having money could buy me the brush, I would still have to focus on a craft in order to understand the bounds, and to break them. There are rules to writing as well, demonstrated most actively by grammar and punctuation, but those rules are in place as the backbone for expression. In writing, rules are meant to standardize written communication. But rules can also establish boundaries—and from boundaries, play can be made. The sonnet and the haiku have some of the most rigid structures in written language, and yet the challenge of complying with the rules births innovation in imagery: word play.

In other ways, however, rules can restrict creativity.

Before and during high school, so much of my writing seemed governed by the rules of school. I was taught to analyze novels and poems, but not the process of making books and art. I remember being frustrated in my high school English class because other students had learned grammar and punctuation since elementary school, and I thought my lack of knowledge of the written word made me lesser. Later on, I realized that not all college professors are English professors and learned that I could throw specific punctuation

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PLAYTIME! PLA and grammar away until it seemed relevant to me again. At the forefront of my essays in college were my ideas, which made studying those same punctuation and grammar rules much more interesting. Rules and formalities are always there, but it is through engaging with play that we learn how to dismantle the tools we use to express ourselves. By engaging in new mediums (such as a poem, or a novel, or a sport), we agree to both put ourselves in a box and understand that box in order to find its strong and weak sides and, ultimately, escape it. +++ I started therapy in high school and was deeply suspicious of it. I was 17 at the time and I remember being so worried about losing my edge—the source of my ideas and creative output. As a poor kid in private school, I felt that my worth was measured by what I produced, and my attachment to that production soothed the pain of feeling different. My hope was that if I could make things that explained who I was, then others would understand me. Living by this mentality, I believed that I could avoid the catastrophic possibility that someone would dismantle my ideas—and by extension, me. My notions of creativity were bound to my fragile ego.

Learning that I could be creative and not sad was a nice but not completely obvious lesson that I took from therapy. I had looked up to many creatives: Kanye West with a microphone, Albert Camus in his car, Julio Cortazar with cats and a cigarette, and had justified my depressive states with them. Even after joining the Indy, I considered buying clogs and dark clothing to fit in. I felt that my pain was caused by a reason that could not be understood by my classmates, and in search of what to be, the mantra of the tortured artist stuck. My idolization of a superficial image of an artist allowed me to equate the artist's image, represented through their public perceptions and works, with their process.

Unguided prior to therapy, I took their attitudes toward their craft as a prerequisite for the craft. What I later learned is that many of the artists that I love, love play: Nabokov made chess problems, both Toni Morrison and Julio Cortazar have compared writing to puzzles, and, in one of his recorded standups, Dave Chapelle talks about a jar full of punchlines that he pulls from and makes a joke that must end with that punchline.

Play for these artists is used as a situational challenge, similar to the one faced by the poet or the ancient playwright. These artists use play as a way to visualize their mediums, and to exercise their abilities. They are able to understand their own works in different ways and fit play to the needs of their works. +++ My first capoeira class in Rio was in a basement underneath the futsal field at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. After teaching us some basic kicks, the mestre decided it was time to play capoeira. I tried to hold onto my position as an unseen observer, a task impossible in a circle, but conceded that I was expected to participate. I frantically studied the moving bodies, capturing nothing because I did not know what I did not know. Come play they said, no one’s here to embarrass you.

I chose a bit of Jonathan Richman, an artist from Massachusetts. In his song, “Monologue About Bermuda,'' he sings about being in a “stiff” protopunk band until visiting Bermuda and meeting “The Bermuda Strollers”—a group of geezers in dark glasses who have a “fat guitar sound” and employ a looser style.

Richman marks this as the beginning of the end for the Modern Lovers, the band that he founded and led, admitting that The Bermuda Strollers were catchier.

In the seven minute song, he humorously refers to himself in the third person to contemplate the origins

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of his own stiffness. Through his reflection, Richman is able to separate himself from his edgy twentysomething identity in order to follow those inklings of inspiration. My favorite part of the song is that you can hear his mouth curling into a smile as he sings it. He knows his effect on the audience, but more importantly, he genuinely enjoys the unique moment that he shares with his audience. These instances are unique to live performance, but Richman invites the audience into his story and even plays with the structure of the song in order to compare what he saw as artistry before and now. Embodying the opposite of the “stiffness” he sings about, he inverts ideas of what a musical artist is and how one should present oneself when addressing an audience.

I artfully dodge a spin kick to the head, but in my crouching position, I feel the foot that I thought flew over me hinge into my ankle and just like that, I’m on my ass.

My dad recently deleted Farmville from his phone, but he also expressed real concern for his virtual sheep.

These games and forms of entertainment aim not to teach us new things but to temporarily calm our anxieties around our productivity and output. The tasks in the game become an elaborate to-do list and serve as a form of escapism into a world that we are already familiar with. Video games that attempt to recreate the dynamics of play are not seen as “adult games.”

Firewatch and other games serve as “walking simulators” that guide a player through a story coupled with exploration. Play in this sense becomes the solution to productivity and consumption. We are content with the objects already in our possession; we come to play with what we have rather than use play to imagine what we don’t.

The few rules in capoeira leave room for interpretation. Everyone has their own style drawn from a host of inspirations. Some take their lessons from a previous mestre, but inspiration can be found anywhere. In +++ Rio, monkeys scampering on power lines might make their way into a defensive escape in a game. There’s Play is very intense. We engage most in play when no telling if your experimentation is going to work out we are children, still creating order out of the chaos until you face an opponent. of the world. Child’s play can be so intense that it is often mediated by adults and scheduled through play +++ dates. Children need very little to make play—most don’t need anything: they are able to transform sticks Play is very difficult, it requires commitment to a level and chalk into imaginative environments. The games of consciousness, even when it hurts. It’s hard to be they design can be beautifully simple, or a chaotic constantly attentive and attuned to our surroundspiral of you-can’t-do-thats. Most adults in the United ings in order to rearrange them and make new meanStates work for a living and cannot make time for play ings out of them. At 21 years old, I feel as though I am the way babies and children do. However, the adult forced to internalize adulthood at a rapid pace. I am brain still longs for play. Numerous occupations still constantly learning about this world and yet have come require creative brains for the production of goods to few answers. In order to grow up we become numb and services. But most adult playthings serve only to to those things that afflicted us when we were younger: temper this longing, without fully addressing it. Many a parent becoming more attached to our new sibling, a forms of entertainment have long masked as play for middle school rumor. And yet to play in the adult world adults, but the fundamental difference is that enter- requires us to look at those parts of us, the memories, tainment is consumptive and not creative by nature. the stories, and transform something out of it.

The masking of entertainment as play can be There are few things lonelier than marking out our best seen through our phones. We enjoy looking own paths. We spend our entire existence trying to at our phones and the internet not for the funny or understand and rewrite the rules to the game of life. For devastating things we might find on those mediums, most of my life, I’ve felt different, whether it was being but because we are engaged in the search for those Mexican in a hick town or being poor in private school. posts. The refresh swipe can immediately create I would keep my ideas to myself so that they, and subsea new perspective, suited for us, that is glanced at quently I, would not shatter. And yet, part of learning and quickly ignored. Our phones prompt us to click how to play means playing with others. Collaboration and press, and they hold our hands through screens, is absolutely essential to play, and sharing knowledge making the internet more manageable. Using games of the rules can even enhance the experience. The or other apps designed to feed us a soothingly narrow chance to encounter and learn from another is worth set of options, we are able to constantly and effortlessly the risk of self exposure. It opens up avenues of inspirasate our curious brain’s deeper desires to explore and tion and the possibility to inspire. To quote the preface make, surrendering the freedom to create in favor of the art history book Flash of the Spirit, “A tree cannot of blind consumption. Alcohol and many addictive make a forest.” drugs stand in the way of play; they are the antidote to In order to receive my first belt, O bautismo, I must boring conversations and social awareness, they calm play with all of the students and the instructor. We our minds, rather than excite and engage the brain in make the circle, and I kneel by the mestre to begin. the way that play does. Addiction reworks the brain’s The wall of sound is directed at me and my opponent. priorities, into a narrow trajectory of need and get, Slowly the music takes on the rhythm of my breath and disrupting possibilities of new ways of thinking. my heartbeat. Me and my opponent are false mirrors Video games pull us into worlds made from a of each other, mimicking each other’s movements with collective imagination and let us interact with those an understanding of the peril of a surprise swipe. My worlds. This summer, I played The Legend of Zelda, a body registers exhaustion, but it has not registered single-player game, with my 13-year-old brother and the demands of the game. Soon, I am spinning and experienced real tension over how we were going contorting in the white space left by the other body, about the open world. On his turn, I would get upset we are missing kicks just slightly and on purpose to with him because I wanted him to complete tasks in keep the game going. And then with the beating of the order to explore the world, while he was perfectly fine drums, and the choir encircling us, we are caught in learning how to cook spicy turnips. I kept egging him to trance and have no choice but to continue the game. complete tasks until he told me he just wanted to enjoy the virtual world. I had to check myself in that moment and wonder why I was so obsessed with completing EDUARDO GUTIÉRREZ PEÑA B’ 21 bought clogs tasks, completing the game. Many video games for Indy clout. are designed to satisfy a person’s need to complete things. In many role-playing games, there is the idea of farming, which involves collecting enough game skills and currency to advance to a subsequent stage.

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FANG Collective Community Bail Fund. As jails and prisons continue to become coronavirus hotspots, they present extremely unsafe conditions for those inside, many of whom are held because they can’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Corrections and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective: https://gofundme.come/f/fang-bailfund Project LETS Mutual Aid Fund. Project LETS is working in coalition with grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to provide direct financial assistance to the most marginalized and vulnerable in our community.

Donate here: https://projectlets.org/covid19

BAIL FUNDS & MUTUAL AID: These community health centers accept all insurance and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance.

Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls - 722-0081 Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & North Providence - 351-2750 Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 These clinics provide free and/or low-cost health services: Clínica Esperanze, Providence - 347-9093 Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347 If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit https://health.ri.gov/covid/testing/ Para más asistencia en español, llama a la línea de apoyo de AMOR: 401-675-1414.

LOCAL & ONLINE EVENTS: Saturday, 11/14: The weekly Saturday morning Hope Street farmers market hosted has moved to its winter location at the new Farm Fresh RI Market Hall at 11 Sims Ave. Find all your favorite RI and MA farms and food vendors from 9am–1pm in this new space.

Sunday, 11/15: The winter Providence Flea market featuring artisans and vintage vendors—also at 11 Sims Ave from 11-3pm.

Thursday, 11/18: Open Mic Thursdays at Askew Providence from 8–11pm. Join for an evening of socially-distant live music and comedy. 150 Chestnut Street.

Ongoing: Demand that Invesco—a major bondholder for the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls which maintains the prison’s contract with ICE—divest in a move toward shutting the facility down for good. Call or email Aimee Partin at (404) 724-4248 or aimee.partin@gmail.com.

Designed by Mehek Vohra

AMOR COVID-19 Community Support Fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit https://tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer

This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to pandemic relief and mobilize for racial justice, in addition to our traditional event listings.

HEALTHCARE RESOURCES: