List ice luge on Wriston
horseradish vodka (70% off) (repulsive) unidentifiable tracks in the snow ice luge (for shots) also on Wriston
free lamp ankle tattoo (I slipped) nothing, I didn’t get out of bed
Renee Gladman bookstore fraud
Masthead
MANAGING EDITORS
Paulina Gąsiorowska
Emily Vesper
Nan Dickerson
WEEK IN REVIEW
Ilan Brusso
Kat Lopez
ARTS
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EPHEMERA
Mary-Elizabeth Boatey
Sabine Jimenez-Williams
M. Selim Kutlu
FEATURES
Riley Gramley
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Sarkis Antonyan
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Nina Lidar
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Arman Deendar
Talia Reiss
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Brice Dickerson
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Everest Maya-Tudor
Alex Sayette
SCHEMA
Tanvi Anand
Lucas Galarza
Ash Ma
Izzy Roth-Dishy
WORLD
Martina Herman
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DEAR INDY
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MVP TIMELY PEOPLE.
*Our Beloved Staff
DESIGN EDITORS
Kay Kim
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STAFF WRITERS
Layla Ahmed
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The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
expensive Allegra reader Main Green ice field scrying parentheses motorized Temu scooter
male ankle (alarming) dog with shoes barszcz (with love) atmospheric lack the yonic complete failure juul (free space) throuples psychotherapist chap
While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.
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The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
Week In Sweet Dreams
Are they a prophetic sketchpad of the unconscious, cryptic telegrams from on high, or just the aimless currents of cranial slosh and slush? This issue, the editors of Week in Review were tasked (by none other than themselves!) to capture, with true Freudian ferocity, their respective crepuscular escapades… AKA their DREAMS. Before we went to bed last night (together, in a peapod), we shoved massive wires up our noses. We welcome all insight from any would-be analysts, so long as you are not dissociated from the radical empathy buried deep within yourself, or pretending to be bi.
Kat’s Super Awesome Plane Adventure In The Dream Kat Had
c So there’s this dream I had. It was you, me, and American retired aviator, diplomat, and aviation safety expert Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III. The core three. Sully, that ol’ rascal, was flying us to French Latvia (like French Canada, but nestled in the demure heart of the Baltic state) for Indy* staff writer Emily Mansfield’s birthday, and everybody had to change their name except for Sully and me. They told me I was “too unknowable” to have to do that. And too pretty, also, and too good at baseball. Oh, classic multifaceted me! I sat next to a girl I know from high school who had changed her name to Divine??? with three question marks, which was odd but apt. She so would be a Divine???. She has the body for it. And the avian spirit. She is like if a bird were a girl, and the girl were named Divine???. Oh! And you were there too! On the plane, in the dream.
Anyway, as Divine??? and I tittered and chattered and clucked like chicks and ducks and geese are wont to do, the plane had an “oupsi,” as the French Latvians would say! Captain Sully called over the intercom, “Look, folks. I fucked up this time, I fucked up real bad. I’ve gone and caused a cup of piss malfunction. Yep, we’re going down alright. Yikes! I sure did fuck up!” You were there, too. You heard all this.
Shit. Sure and bright as a summer’s day, the Cup Of Piss malfunction commenced. The plane burst into flames, rent asunder from the inside out, and we crashed and crunched into the top floor of a parking structure. Captain Sully, ever the showman, yelled, “Take a look, boys! It’s beautiful!!” I did not take a look. I was not really feeling that the vibes of the Cup Of Piss malfunction would be chill/cool. Anyone else not really feeling cups of piss?? I’m not. SORRY, MOM!
AND SUDDENLY I’M UP, I’M AWAKE! I am on a real airplane. To Paris. OHH and I wake up screaming. Not even a real scream, just a sharp, fertile “HYUH!!” loud enough to startle the Parisian tween to my left. I shake, too, like a real violent shake. “Ouh,” she exclaims in her tweenish French accent. “Are you okay? Did you have a… how you say… nightmare?” I, brave and proud as a lioness, tell her, “Nuh uh.”
“Cut the shit, Lopez,” the Parisian tween hisses. She begins to transform, her mousy brown bob shrinking into a cropped, grey coif, her beret slinking sideways into a pilot’s headset, and her cardigan stiffening into a blazer emblazoned with a blazing US Airways logo. She’s been Captain Sully this whole goddamn time. “You are afraid. You’re always afraid. You’re afraid of the plane crashes on the news, you’re afraid of this plane going down, and you’re afraid to admit your own weakness to yourself.”
“Nuh uh! Nuh uh!” I say, shaking my head and covering my ears with my hands. “I’m brave as they come. I’m brave as a lioness.”
“Yeah! Kat’s brave!” you say, because, as I’ve said, you’re there too. “Wait,” you realize. “If Captain Sully’s over here… THEN WHO’S FLYING THE PLANE?”
We all feel a sharp jolt. Then we feel flames on the plane, and sparks, and falling, which is evil. “Goddammit!” Captain Sully screams, “It’s another Cup Of Piss malfunction!!!”
I freeze in fear. Yeah, I said it, fear. Like the purple guy from Inside Out (2015). But you know what? I can’t let fear rule my life. I don’t shut my eyes as we fall to the ground. I take it. I take it like a brave, hot-bodied bird woman named Divine??? hurtling through the air among the flames and parking towers. I brace myself and Look at the malfunction in front of me. And you know what?
It’s the most Divine??? dream I’ve ever had. And you were there, too.
Schooling(s) By Blan Irusso
c “RISE NOW” A disembodied voice calls to me, as I wake slowly on my childhood bed. It has the yearning timbre of my religious father, but the soft consonants of my wayward mother. I love them both. And so I listen. Now standing, the floor beneath me crumbles into sånd. Ouch, my body, I think as I freefall to the ground, landing in a synapse palace I like to call the Kindergarten gym.
“Ok, children, now it’s time to demonstrate fidelity to your gender, GO!” All the boys do so well at kicking balls, and the girls twirl with magical womanness. And then it’s my turn. “Ok boy, do your thing” Gym teachers Mr. Freud and Ms. Klein say to me. Their features tense into an expectant plea; they are scared too. I walk up to Mr. Freud, knowing I will have no choice but to kick. Ms. Klein readies the ball, and my liddle legs tense with boy terror. She releases it, and in a moment of truth my limbic system opts for ‘fight’, slingshotting my tiny self ball-ward; I am become speed. My skechers screech across the gym floor, their foam bases melting from the friction. But just as my liddle foot makes contact with the red vinyl, the ball bursts into a flurry of 20 million monarch butterflies each with the grizzled face of Elizabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale right after she lost her rights.
The butterflies shower me in kisses and love, and I regain consciousness in Eleventh grade history and now I’m angsty. Mr. History Teacher is all Blah Blah Blah, and honestly I’m not having it. Yuck! I mean, history shmistory, y’know? Those who can’t do, teach, y’know? And I know I can do. I can do it big.
“In Ancient Greece, men and boys…” Mr. History Teacher drones on and on and on. Suddenly, well, my chair begins to wobble, my pants begin to shake, it was like a force beyond me pulled me up by the hoodie, and there I was, in the middle of the classroom, standing tall. Before my senses had even a shot at stopping me, my mouth starts a’blabbering:
“Who needs this stuff! Sorry, Teach, but I’m not into it. I don’t want to learn about Greece, I want to learn about Love, Poetry, Art, y’know, the REAL stuff.”
“Ahhhh, there ya go again, with a genius W take. Dap me up, king, you’re the shit!” The whole class erupts in laughter and starts to huddle around me, chanting my name and stuff. It’s all going good and great, I’m hopping from desk to desk all sure of myself, not embarrassed at all of my allergies. Go me, I think. Haha! High school is the best!
But as I land on the last desk, my foot shrinks back to kid size, and there I am again, running up to the ball in the kindergarten gym. Ms. Klein and Mr. Freud still wear their frightened faces, but now Mr. History Teacher stands behind them. Here goes nothing. The collision between my foot and the ball is a lot like the moon landing in the sense that it didn’t happen. I slip and fall back into the floor. Here is where I’ll stay, I think. Here is where I belong. But the disembodied voice of my father’s religiosity and my mother’s waywardness returns: “It’s ok to fail, but it is never ok not to rise. Rise Now”
I rise slowly. My body wavers between teen and tot, my hope between a little and a lot. Bop! The musicality of that last sentence somehow permeates my dream consciousness, and suddenly I breakdance harder than anyone has ever seen. Take that, gym! Oh, you know I can’t kick a ball, but that will never stop me from dancing. Nothing will. Not even hate.
I rewind the clock to 5 seconds ago, and I take my aim at the ball. Like a kiss from God, my Skechers launch at the vinyl red, and it goes flying across the gym, landing directly on the faces of my gym teachers. Everything is good now.
ILAN BRUSSO B’27 & KAT LOPEZ B’27
have been DEAD THE WHOLE TIME!!!!
ILAN BRUSSO & KAT LOPEZ JOLIN CHEN ILLUSTRATION MINGJIA LI )
Semantics of Dissent
A STUDY OF PROTEST LANGUAGE IN THE STUDENT MOVEMENT FOR PALESTINE
c “Shame on you. Free, free Palestine!” A crowd of nearly 2,000 Brown alumni chanted in chorus on the lawn of the First Baptist Church during Brown’s 2024 Commencement ceremony, “End the siege on Gaza now. Brown Class of 2024, we confer your degrees. Stand up and move your tassel!” Student protesters stood with their backs to President Christina Paxson, moving their tassels from right to left. Now, over six months later, these words have come under federal scrutiny.
Within the first month of Trump’s second term, his administration launched a full-scale attack on pro-Palestinian activists, threatening to deport student protesters and investigating schools that tolerated pro-Palestinian protests—including Brown. On January 29, 2025, Trump signed an executive order calling on the Secretary of Education, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Homeland Security to find legal grounds for the deportation of international student activists protesting the genocide in Gaza. The Trump administration has framed this executive order as a corrective to “the explosion of anti-Semitism” and associations of “terrorism” in higher-education spaces.
One day later, Trump was quoted in a White House fact sheet: “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” Even before Trump’s return to office, the devastating impact of institutional attacks on free speech had been felt particularly by international students. In the fall semester, Momodou Taal at Cornell and Joseph Charry at the University of South Florida faced suspensions as a penalty for their involvement in protests for divestment in 2024. Charry was deported to Colombia in October 2024.
On February 3, the Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) initiated a Title VI investigation into the Warren Alpert Medical School for “reports of antisemitic incidents” during its aforementioned May 2024 commencement ceremony. This investigation is not the first of its kind. Only six months ago, Brown agreed to “streamline and clarify” its anti-discrimination policies after the OCR of the US Department of Education filed a Title VI complaint claiming that the University “failed to respond appropriately to incidents of harassment” on campus.
These investigations follow more than a year and a half of student protest against the genocide in Gaza, which have resulted in scrutiny of student activists’ language use and the eventual suspension of Brown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Critics of pro-Palestinian protestors have increasingly focused on the allegedly antisemitic protest language that student activists have used to amplify their demands.
Slogans, chants, songs, and poetry are essential elements of protest language, demonstrating the cultural and historical dimensionality of political organizing. The protest language of the Palestinian resistance movement against Israel’s apartheid regime has origins which extend back the better part of a century. Student organizers on college campuses today look to these roots when demonstrating, calling attention to the ways that protest language is both a historical artifact and a contemporary tool for organizing. Over generations and across borders, protest language is recycled and renewed to suit different causes and coalesce struggle in an interconnected fight against oppression. At Brown, Chilean protest chants, songs
from the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, pro-union slogans, Jewish morning prayers, and folk songs in Palestinian Arabic can all be heard within a single rally.
Unsurprisingly, as fascism looms large and protest continues to be criminalized and demonized, much of the protest language around Israel’s genocidal actions has been placed under a microscope. Over the past year, a pattern has emerged across party lines, where those who vehemently disagree with the Palestinian liberation movement—whether right-wing politicians or self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ Zionists—police the language of student activists. By criticizing protest language, they aim to manipulate the mainstream narrative of student protesters so that they appear ignorant and hateful.
In reality, student activists at Brown have done intentional and careful work to ensure their words are historically resonant, culturally responsive, and emotionally impactful. Alicia Joo B’26, who was arrested at the December 2023 sit-in led by Brown Divest Coalition (BDC), described how the language in her activism was informed by “extensive conversations internal to the group” and looking to reliable news outlets like Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and journalists on the ground in Gaza like Bisan Owda, Motaz Azaiza, and Plestia Alaqad.
As early as November 7, 2023, student groups such as Jews For Palestinian Liberation (JFPL)—formerly Jews for Ceasefire Now—a coalition of anti-Zionist Jewish students calling for Brown’s divestment from ten companies which “facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory,” have clearly and deliberately communicated the reasoning behind their language choices and beliefs, including their decision to use chants like “from the river to the sea.” This particular chant originated in the 1960s and is often interpreted as a call for the forced removal of Jewish people from
Palestine, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. However, student leaders in JFPL clarified their use of the chant: “[the chant is] not an eradication of Jews from the land, but a total dismantlement of the apartheid regime occupying it.” Rafi Ash B’26, a Jewish organizer in the BDC and leader in JFPL, described how the language choices made by student activists in JFPL “came through a collective writing process” where students from a plurality of experiences could come together to “make these decisions in consensus modes.”
“Over generations and across borders, protest language is recycled and renewed to suit different causes and coalesce struggle in an interconnected fight against oppression.”
Across the country, Zionist donors and influential political actors have encouraged presidents of elite institutions to forsake their backgrounds as academics, neglect their impulse to think critically, and unequivocally condemn pro-Palestinian slogans as hateful and genocidal in order to discredit student protest. This became evident after Harvard’s Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill resigned after facing intense bipartisan scrutiny and allegations of antisemitism after testifying in front of Congress in December 2023. In higher education spaces, it has become a sociopolitical taboo for university leaders to engage in complex historical and literary analyses of anti-genocide protest language. Even those who attempt to claim ‘institutional neutrality’ as a way of honoring free inquiry are ostracized and shamed as ‘pro-Hamas antisemites.’
But it is important to understand that phrases used at Brown protests, such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada,” are intentionally provocative. Words like “intifada” and calls for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” conjure up histories of violent revolution, especially to Zionists with ties to Israel, who might remember the First or Second Intifadas with fear. But when contextualized, it is clear these terms have been falsely demonized as calls for violence. In fact, Palestinian student organizer Aboud Ashhab B’25 described how the phrase has liberatory roots, stating, “What does intifada mean? Quite simply, in Arabic, it means uprising or revolution.” These kinds of inflammatory protest slogans emerge from dense histories of oppression and protest, nonviolent and violent alike. Therefore, they demand critical analysis. Incendiary rhetoric is meant to ‘stir the pot,’ provoke curiosity, and encourage meaningful dialogue and reflection.
Still, sometimes student activists get it wrong; the political lineage of their language is not always consistent with revolutionary anti-colonialism. At the April 2024 encampment, pro-Palestinian protestors claimed they would “occupy” the Main Green until their demands were met. By using the term “occupation” as a means of obtaining their demands, protesters in effect replicated the colonialism they declared abhorrent. Sophia Plaschke B’26, a Lumbee member of SJP, described conversations she had
with her Native peers: “For me, a lot of the discomfort, specifically with the term ‘occupying the main green’ is that…Well, I mean, what were you already doing before?” She continued, “protestors position themselves at odds with the institution, but I think some of the tools that they use still reflect…liberal values…Particularly in this situation, I understand the sentiment, but people need to understand that just because you’re using anti-colonial language, it doesn’t make the act itself anti-colonial.”
Student activists at Brown have been calling for democratization of the University, chanting at a protest on October 10, 2024, “show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!” However, by idealizing the concept of ‘democracy,’ student activists fail to acknowledge how ‘democracy’ has colonial connotations, as it has been used as a homogenizing tool to justify and enact U.S. imperialist actions across the globe, while enforcing the cultural genocide of Indigenous people and other minoritized groups domestically. Though democratization of the University is about ensuring that institutional governance structures are reflective of those whose labor contributes to the University, it raises the question: can the University be reformed? Considering the intimate relationship between major U.S. academic institutions, the military-industrial complex and gentrification and displacement, can calls for democratization fully address the ongoing structural harm which stems from hundreds of years of violence? +++
Protest language is the fire that fuels the movement. It has the capacity to deal a blow not only to the structures it attacks, but also to the most marginalized members of the protest community. Intentionality and continued learning is key, for, at the end of the day, student activists are students of activism. Ashhab described how the encampment functioned as a space of education for understanding “what ‘land back’ means, what ‘liberation’ means, what ‘intifada’ means…and having these pivotal conversations.” Through their organizing experiences, students study and partake in careful negotiations between inclusivity and political redlines, student safety and movement strategy, and appeals to the people versus demands of those in power.
However, student activists’ opportunities to learn experientially are becoming more limited by the minute. On October 24, 2024, the University suspended Brown’s chapter of SJP for alleged “unacceptable” behaviors during a rally. In a letter to the administration, the ACLU of Rhode Island argued that the suspension contradicts “the University’s core mission and [casts] a chill on campus free speech.” Campus free speech through protest has been diminished, too, by an institutional attempt to manufacture silence via surveillance of student protesters—increased Department of Public Safety presence at rallies, ID swipes at the encampment, the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, and the monitoring of student activist groups’ social media presences.
The investigation into Brown’s medical school, the disbandment of Brown’s chapter of SJP, Trump’s policy targeting international student protestors and undocumented people, and the constant surveillance that all Americans must endure in this age (but which is especially weaponized against the
most marginalized groups) demonstrate an alarming pattern. Those in power—from politicians to tech CEOs to University presidents—are intimidated by popular movements and the power of student protest, and are willing to sacrifice our civil liberties and manipulate media narratives to fabricate political unity and suppress dissent.
The language debate that has captured the media’s attention has created a moral panic fueled by anti-intellectualism and Islamophobia. But who does the language debate really benefit? Why create a culture of censorship rather than curiosity? These questions have a relatively simple answer. The ruling class has gained their political power and capital from the very imperial violence that student protestors have decried for the past year and a half. From the university to the federal government, those in power carry out their “business as usual” best in silence, and will terrorize and distract dissenters into reticence to pursue their personal agendas. They have everything to lose from accountability and disclosure. Though using and understanding radical protest language is essential to social movements, fixating on questions about semantics posed by the elite serves as a method of distraction.
The top-down assaults on protest language divert public attention away from the material reality of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. To this end, Ash recenters the discussion around the role of language in protest, describing how “people get bogged down in debates around language, which I’m not necessarily sure is the most important question we have in the movement.”
In the spring of 2024, news about student protests in higher education spaces was unavoidable, often shrouding coverage of the genocide itself and the daily horrors Palestinians must endure at the hands of the Israeli government—continual displacement, forced starvation, and the destruction of their homeland. The atrocities continue; thus, so does the fight for liberation. As Ashhab reminds us, in less than a month after the ceasefire was announced, over “…110 Palestinians have been killed across Gaza and the West Bank…so it’s really not a ceasefire, as much as it’s a stop of hostilities.” He raises the question, “to what extent will things flare up again where people will start to care, right?”
EMILY M. B’27 is debating the point.
The author of this piece has chosen to remain partially anonymous due to ongoing online harassment.
SO WHAT’S THERE TO
SO
The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects, so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful to you, darling. I say it to the paint.
- Richard Siken, War of the Foxes
TALKING TO THE LIGHT
( TEXT ALEX SAYETTE )
c I am reading Richard Siken (duh) and I am falling apart. I’m reading the first line of the first poem in his second book, War of the Foxes, and I’m wondering what to make of a world which, it seems, we never experience directly. There are words—and yes, there is paint—but how can we create a world without merely describing it?
I am falling apart, perhaps, because Siken encourages it—because, in his poems, words can mean anything. With Siken, a man isn’t simply a man. A tree is only a tree until it “imagines” it is a deer. This fluidity can make Siken’s poetry challenging but it’s also what makes his work radical. His poetry reminds us that the word is an abstraction—both here, in his poetry, and everywhere else.
The question of how a painting or poem comes to mean something—to become something beyond the summation of its parts—is not so different from the imagined transformation of the retinal image into our visual perception. Before one can perceive the world, light from the environment produces a 2D image on the retina. From here, our perceptual systems make the seemingly impossible leap from sensory input to our internal, 3D perception of the world. This question of how an extra dimension is reconstructed led the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz to argue that perception is inherently ambiguous: we use our prior knowledge of the world to bridge this gap, but fundamentally, we’re playing a game of best guesses.
Consider the Ames room: a seemingly normal room in which a tall man stands in the back right. As he moves to the left, miraculously, he shrinks. How does this happen? The room isn’t rectangular as the corners and furniture would imply, but trapezoidal, growing in height and depth toward the back left. When the man walks against the back wall, he grows more distant from the viewer. This illusion supports Helmholtz’s view of an ambiguous retinal image, demonstrating how a single 2D image can map to an infinite number of 3D environments. Accordingly, the visual system does not view the world directly from the retinal image but instead infers the most likely state based on prior knowledge.
Assumed prior knowledge leads to a problem of its own: How do we develop prior knowledge without first having it? Where does this original knowledge come from?
James Gibson solves this problem of origins with a different model: He insists that optical information alone is sufficient. The optical flow—the pattern of light reaching the eye—is rich with information that directly specifies properties like size, shape, and distance of objects. According to this view, perception is an embodied, direct process in which our perceptual system makes use of the information in our environment without needing to infer hidden properties. With Gibson’s theory in mind, the Ames room provides evidence for a direct approach: Had the viewer been able to interact with the environment— to move around and fully make use of the information—the illusion would shatter. The world is again sufficient.
Gibson’s theory helps us understand that we do not “see light” and therefore do not literally view the 2D retinal image. As Gibson contends, “There is no sender outside the head and no receiver inside…The retinal image is nothing to be seen.”
So how can Gibson’s theory of embodied perception make sense of Siken’s poetry? While Gibson’s theory closes a gap by moving perception away from ideas of “viewing” the retinal image, it unveils a mystifying puzzle: If the “retinal image is nothing to be seen,” then how do we see? Siken, too, works with abstract units—brushstrokes and words—as Gibson does with light. If you say the word too many times, if you stare at the painting long enough, it all unravels eventually. But before it does, what keeps it from falling apart? There is information—magic—in the light.
I re-write Siken: I am faithful to you, darling. But this time, I say it to the light.
ALEX SAYETTE B’27 believes it when he sees it.
THIS TITLE IS A METAPHOR
( TEXT NADIA MAZONSON )
I.
c Plato distrusted the poets. In the Republic, he argues that representation of direct speech within poetry is dangerous because it causes the speaker to become infected by the speech they deliver. The speaker, in turn, infects the audience, who is beguiled into accepting the illusion of the speech’s correspondence with reality.
For Plato, all artistic reproduction—mimesis, imitation—is a false apparition. The painter, for instance, who paints a couch does not interact with its absolute, true concept. Instead, the painting imitates a particular physical couch, which is created by a particular craftsman and viewed from a particular perspective. Since this particularized couch is always already removed from the ideal, universal Couch because it appears in space and time, the painting thus becomes a “copy of a copy,” thrice removed from reality. Within this paradigm, the painter is lower than the craftsman, who at least possesses knowledge of the exemplar Couch which they imitate. The painter knows nothing of the original and represents not truth, but appearance.
In the same way, mimetic language exists on the outside of the outside of the truth. Poets such as Homer could imitate or represent concepts such as duty, valor, and proper governance, but they could neither produce nor impart true knowledge of them. Mimetic language, then, is a phantasm of its original, displaced from the disembodied Platonic ideal which it insidiously imitates. Poetry, for Plato, is inscribed with an intoxicating, irrational power: It claims to give light to truth while suspending its audience in a field of adorned shadows.
My words, it seems, are ghostly.
II. In his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass writes that “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” There is something violent about representational language, about any attempt to collapse some expansive, mutable concept into a concrete grammatical enclosure. How can one ever convey a feeling in words alone? I certainly don’t distrust mimesis as Plato does, but I often find myself troubled by how language can never fully coincide with the reality of existing in a body in the world. For instance, I’m always frustrated when my therapist asks me to describe where I’m feeling anxiety in my body. “It’s a
( TEXT ALEX SAYETTE
LEO NACHAMIE
NADIA MAZONSON
DESIGN MINAH KIM
ILLUSTRATION MIA CHENG )
heaviness in my chest,” I’ll say, but it’s really more like a ball of television static. And that’s not exactly right either, since one cannot literally feel television static in one’s body. There’s always a transubstantiative act to be performed: Something amorphous and unapproachable must be enclosed within the finite space of a symbol. All language, then, is a form of metaphor, of substitution: The signifier can never coincide with the thing—if such a thing does exist—that lies underneath.
III.
So what’s the solution here? In his allegory of the cave, Plato proposes that it is possible to strip off all the layers of metaphor and substitution and illusion through which we mediate the world and finally be left with something raw and immediate: truth. He represents this passage from phantasm to reality with a spatial analogy of ascendance. You exit the cave of mimetic shadows and emerge into the world of real, actual forms above. Here, you may access “the things themselves,” removed from mediation. You are, Plato posits, “able to see the sun, not images of it in water or some alien place, but the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it.”
There are two principal issues with this allegory. The first is the problem of allegory itself. To properly convey this movement from illusion to truth, Plato must necessarily embed it within the metaphoric (which is to say: mimetic) figure of the cave; it is impossible for him to escape representation. The second problem, of course, is that you can’t look directly at the sun. You’ll go blind.
IV.
You can’t look at the sun, and you can’t approach a concept except through mediation. Ferdinand de Saussure writes that “without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.” Conceptual categories cannot exist prior to their crystallization in space and time. There is no ideal, eternal Platonic form, no pure, undiluted ‘meaning’ to speak of. Or, at least, there’s no way to come into contact with this meaning—to look at the sun—without mediation. There have been attempts, of course: Modernist writers who developed stream-of-consciousness narration aimed to produce a textual form so immediate and visceral as to leave the reader in total simultaneity with the text. But you can’t ever completely suture the reader onto something so abstract, imagistic, and thoroughly non-linear as human thought. As a result, these gestures tend to end in dissolution.
In Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a novel which functions as a postmortem of the failures of modernism, the figurative act of looking at the sun leads Horacio Oliveira, Cortázar’s protagonist, down a road to insanity. Over the course of the novel, Oliveira blows up his life searching for a form of living (and writing) that will allow him to access the “center,” which is something like the Platonic ideal: a state of total, transcendent unity between thought and language and reality. It doesn’t work. Oliveira loses his lover, alienates his friends, and descends into a state of delusion. In the end, he jumps out the window of a mental asylum, mistakenly imagining that his “center” lies beneath it. He wakes up in the hospital covered in bandages, battered by the very physical reality he sought to transcend.
Cortázar’s conclusion is a bleak and unsatisfying one. But this idea—that we can neither transcend nor fully access our physical reality through linguistic mediation—rings true. Despite our best efforts, it seems that language is inexorably unfaithful in its representation of the world as we experience it.
BE FAITHFUL TO?
V.
So what is there to be faithful to?
I have faith in language because it is what Plato feared it to be: phantomic and intoxicating. Mimetic language may be an illusion, but how fabulous of an illusion it is! If the unmediated pre-concept is the sun—too bright and too indistinct to approach directly—then language is the prism which gives it form, scattering it in a million brilliant directions. It’s not language’s job to be faithful to the world: It’s language’s job to remediate it, to transform it.
In any case, I have faith in the way these phantasms glimmer when I hold them up to the light. I have faith in the way stories make me see myself in pieces, refracted across perspectives that are not my own. That this language is ghostly, mere appearance, is exactly the point: I have faith in language because it is not faithful to me.
NADIA MAZONSON B’27 is currently enrolled in COLT1210, if you couldn’t tell…
PRAYING TO THE PAVEMENT
( TEXT LEO NACHAMIE )
c It’s September 14, 2023, the third class of Professor Rose-Petruck’s CHEM330, and I’m in the upper rows of MacMillan 117. After spending the first hour of class reviewing equilibrium, he pivots. He begins to scrawl on the board:
We do not know how Nature works.
This was our introduction to quantum mechanics, the framework that presents one of the most accurate descriptions of reality on the smallest-known scale. We can predict subatomic behavior with incredible precision, and have defined elementary building blocks, particles that cannot be broken down further—quarks, leptons, bosons (all gibberish to me too). Our quantum models take us the closest we’ve ever been to understanding the physical world. Yet, even with everything that quantum mechanics can deliver, there is a level of uncertainty. It’s all probability.
My professor runs his arm in a sweeping motion, tracing a large white circle of chalk on the blackboard. Inside, he writes the words: Natural Sciences. He explains that what we’re learning are only models that represent nature—not nature itself. At some point, on some level, these models fray and fall apart. Some are retired, some rendered obsolete: Scientists imagined atoms as billiard balls, then chunks of plum pudding, before landing on Bohr’s model, which, despite its inaccuracies, is still taught in low-level courses.
Today, physicists operate under two main frameworks: the aforementioned quantum mechanics, and general relativity. Both theories leave questions unanswered, and, at times, conflict with one another. “Nature obviously doesn’t have these friction points, because, after all, it’s working,” my professor adds in a thick German accent. Our models may improve in accuracy and scope, but humanity has yet to crack the cipher of the natural world. After millennia of searching, it feels necessary to wonder if this dream can ever be actualized. On this point my professor says, “If all there is is quantum mechanics, then eventually I will understand everything. But, that’s a belief now.”
Another sweep of the arm—a second circle. The two shapes do not intersect but abut each other
neatly. In this one, he writes Belief System. “If science is not able to 100% explain Nature, there must be something outside of science that’s not covered by our scientific models.” This is the role of the belief system: to explain the unexplainable. He clarifies that the distinction between these two domains of thought allows for their coexistence, and that if they do not exist in conjunction, conflict arises. The scientist asserts a level of hubris assuming too much of man; the pious, by exclusively believing in the miraculous, is just as arrogant. This intertwinement paints the secular scientist in an interesting light. There is an idea that someday we will illuminate the mysteries of nature, a framework aptly named the “Theory of Everything.” However, this notion hinges on belief. Until our models succeed—if ever—the supposedly objective physicist is involuntarily reliant on faith.
I found this argument profound in a way that I couldn’t exactly place; it justified believing in something. However, unsure of where my beliefs lay and not wanting to spiral into an existential crisis (been there, done that!), I quickly moved on and turned my attention back to chemistry. It wasn’t until the next semester, deep in the Hay’s special collections, that this dynamic between science and faith revisited me.
It was tucked away in a manilla folder, hidden within the yellowed pages of a document titled The Debt of Christianity to Science. Its author, Winslow Upton, was a professor of astronomy at Brown and a devout member of the Episcopal Church. The paper argues that much of the structure of Christianity is owed to the scientific method. In all honesty, his argument seems precarious. He offers conclusions drawn from the similarities of the scientist and the Christian: the mutual pursuit toward truth, the need to amend falsehoods, and, perhaps the strangest connection, the possibility of the world ending via catastrophic events. To support this, Upton relies on the fact that the scientific method predates the Christian era, but he never provides evidence of the scientific process informing the Church. It is quite possible that their similarities are just essential features of what he deems “truth-seeking systems.” Beyond his central argument, however, Upton disrupts his own narrative:
In writing this paper, I have been impressed with the fact that the subject is but half of the truth. There is a large credit side to the account, for Christianity is not only giving to the world vastly more than it receives from any other department of human interest, but even to natural science it adds a needed element.
He writes that science neglects “spiritual forces” and that a “different point of view” is necessary to supplement this limitation. Upton’s use of the phrase “spiritual forces” is left vague—perhaps it is divine miracle, or the soul, or ghosts, or angels, or God. Regardless, Upton’s position is that Christianity is the impressive entity capable of elucidating the unknown. This is, of course, the same argument that my chemistry professor provided, only in less general terms. “Spiritual forces” are anything that science is incapable of explaining: the mysterious, the occult, the true mechanics of nature. The “different point of view” is a belief system: Christianity, abstraction, faith.
As I labored through chemistry courses, this tension persisted in my mind. Was I going to devote a lifetime of study to a field that might never unearth something truly real? In a recent advising meeting I asked what I would gain by taking physical chemistry. My advisor responded ambitiously: This course is a chemist’s first look at absolute truth. I was skeptical—I knew he meant that this was our closest approximation of absolute truth. But why does the distinction matter, other than compensating for arrogance? You could argue there’s no value in acknowledging the facade of physical science—we can do real things based on faulty models. Our theories have guided us toward harnessing quantum computing, designing new drugs, and creating cleaner environments. So why is it important to treat these models as estimations? Besides the practical argument that seeking better models facilitates greater innovation, there’s a more endearing case to be made: We already witness absolute truth every day in our interaction with the physical world.
The truth is that there are no plum pudding atoms or Bohr’s models or particle-wave duality or quarks or bosons or strings. There simply is—and we have the pleasure of observing the miraculous phenomenon of existence every time we take a step and the atoms or waves or whatever they are support our footing. We don’t need to predict with a degree of certainty that the sidewalk will bear our weight with each stride, we just trust that it will. When we leap into the air, we do not hesitate wondering whether or not gravity will bring us back down. Our world is so brilliantly complex that it eludes our grasp of understanding, yet we maintain that it will endure.
LEO NACHAMIE B’27 doesn’t see the appeal of plum pudding.
A New Levantine Dawn
HOPES & ASPIRATIONS OF SYRIAN STUDENTS
( TEXT ABOUD ASHHAB DESIGN ANAÏS REISS ILLUSTRATION PAUL LI )
c On December 7, 2024, millions of Syrians woke up to a new reality. The Assad regime that had ruled them for half a century, costing them their freedom and dignity, crumbled in the face of an eleven-day offensive. Scenes reminiscent of the first large-scale protests in 2011 flooded social media: in public squares across the country crowds rushed to the statues of Bashar Al-Assad and his father, Hafez, and toppled them down. There was no authoritarian Syrian state to reign down violence on protestors. There were no merciless bombing campaigns, tanks rolling through the town square, nor intelligence officers, nicknamed the Shabiha (phantoms), kidnapping and disappearing tens of thousands.
The Syrian National Army, depleted and abandoned by its Russian and Iranian patrons, surrendered en masse. By the time opposition forces reached the city of Damascus, Bashar al-Assad had fled to Russia, marking the end of five decades of Assad family rule. A new Syrian government took office for the first time since 1971, ushering in a fragile yet hopeful chapter in the nation’s history.
A ‘Reformed’ Opposition
The swift collapse of the Assad regime was the result of a finally unified opposition (mu’arada). After years of struggle and strife, in 2020, a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Turkey, the largest allies for the respective rebel groups, led the once fragmented and infighting factions in the Northwestern Idlib enclave to undergo significant political reorganization. Under the leadership of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa—better known by his nom de guerre Al-Julani—the opposition transformed into a technocratic state, managing trade, humanitarian aid, and public order during a stagnant Syrian Civil War, the COVID pandemic, and a devastating earthquake in 2023.
Al-Sharaa’s own life mirrors the evolution of the Syrian opposition itself. Born to a Syrian expatriate family in Saudi Arabia, he returned to Damascus at 6 years old. The early 2000s would fundamentally change Al-Sharaa’s worldview: the opening of Syria to the world under the “Damascus Spring” reforms and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq radicalized him, fermenting the revolutionary aspirations that led to the 2011 Arab Spring. Al-Sharaa joined the armed resistance to U.S. occupation in Iraq in 2003 and later spent five years in the infamous Abu-Gharib prison where he became part of an international network of Islamist militia leaders. Al-Sharaa would go on to create the Al-Nusra front, one of the largest armed rebel groups in Syria and a close affiliate of Al-Qaeda.
But over the last few years, Al-Sharaa has rebranded himself as a reformist leader, abandoning
grandiose visions of an Islamic state in favor of pragmatic governance. In 2017, Al-Sharaa created a miniature Syrian state in the Idlib enclave called the Syrian Salvation Government, which was ruled by a coalition of Islamist parties under his party, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
In the years leading up to the fall of Assad, Al-Sharaa has proved to be a competent leader. In his presidential address, he declared, “I speak to you today not as a ruler, but as a servant of our wounded homeland.”His gradual reforms even seem to return to the original vision of a pluralistic Syria. The tenuous balancing of militant and civil administration, and the containment of Islamic armed groups, has continued since Al-Sharaa took power late last year. The reformation leader has stressed that his administration is only transitional.
The fall of Assad was met with a mix of optimism and caution by the Syrian people, both within the country and the millions who had been forced to flee and scatter across the world. Despite the apparent end of a brutal dictatorship, Syria’s challenges are far from over. The country remains fractured, with Kurdish forces controlling the east, Israeli occupation in the South, and deep sectarian divisions complicating national reconciliation. To understand what this new moment means for Syrians, I interviewed two Syrian students, Mahmoud and Adnan, who shared their personal experiences and reflections on the fall of the Assad regime and what lies at the crossroads for Syria.
Interview 1: Adnan, a Syrian Student from Homs (translated and edited for clarity and length)
Aboud Ashhab: Tell me about your family in Syria.
Adnan Al-Dabbagh: I am from Homs, Syria, near the Lebanese border. My family was one of the first to emigrate from Syria as expatriates. They left for Saudi Arabia, where I was born in 2001. We used to visit Syria every year up to 2011. My family comes
from various political affiliations. On my dad’s side, many of my uncles had to leave the country for their involvement in demonstrations, and my grandpa was arrested for being related to protestors. He spent 20 years in the Tadmor prison and was a victim to years of torture and abuse. We only learned of this in his last days, when he had Alzheimer’s and started recalling his memories in Tadmor. He kept so many memories of agony and pain inside of him. Tadmor is the second most notorious prison run by the Assad regime in Syria, after Sednaya Prison. My father was 10 years old when my grandpa was detained and intelligence officers used to take him in for questioning making him feel viewed as a threat.
I bring this up because every Syrian generation, every family, has these stories. Every Allepan, Homsian, Haman, and Damascene has these stories about the torture, imprisonment, and murder endured under both Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. That is why when the Assad regime fell, all the Syrians at Brown gathered in my house to watch it unfold. There was a told yet untold feeling among us, that we all had the same stories, the same pain.
AA: Tell me what watching the Assad regime’s fall was like. What were your feelings when the opposition first started its campaign?
AD: I could not imagine the joy I would feel on December 8th. The rebel capture of Aleppo on felt different from previous offensives by the Syrian army. Back in 2011, the Syrian army relentlessly besieged and starved entire cities like Homs. I had a small sense of hope but nobody expected the regime to fall so quickly and relatively peacefully.
The week before, many of us thought the Assad regime would remain for a long time. We saw Bashar al-Assad as “little Hafez” in that he would brutally hold on to power like his father, which is why Syrians were shocked when he fled the country.
AA: Ahmad al-Sharaa has been named Syria’s interim president. Since December, what changes in Syria have you noticed, on a political or local level?
AD: At a personal level, I started following Syrian news more closely and what people are saying on the ground. Syria has long been left out amidst other ongoing wars. After a long period of neglect where many of us felt that life in Syria was not truly living, that Syria had become a graveyard of hopes and dreams, created by a genocidal campaign to rid its people of the land. Syria constantly lacked food, electricity, and basic services. People lived in poverty and were not paid for their work due to state negligence.
So there was a lot to celebrate when the Assad regime fell. We have to acknowledge that there are still many limits and setbacks right now. The security situation is extremely unclear, so security will be the most important thing to help rebuild the country. It is difficult to assess what is going on in this transitional period where it remains unclear who is in power but, I hope this period sticks to its name “transitional.”
Although I appreciate Al-Sharra’s integrity as an interim leader, keeping armed factions in line, protecting the rights of all Syrians and apologizing on behalf of those who use arbitrary force, I can’t help but draw some parallels to the last transitional period in 1971, when Hafez Al-Assad led a military coup in what was known as the “corrective movement” ending the revolution and “stabilizing” Syria. There is hope that history will not repeat itself but Syrian people are cynical to any leader promising change.
AA: What is the current debate in Syria on Al-Sharra’s government? Do you also think the government will take a moderate role on the matter of secularism and sectarianism?
AD: There is fear-mongering from both sides of this debate. Whether it’s a woman meeting Al-Sharaa and covering up, or a Christmas tree getting vandalized, people say “Syria is becoming the next Afghanistan.” I do not think this is the case. Syrian society is inherently different and pluralistic, we could not have a theocratic regime like the Taliban, as Syrian values are fundamentally opposed to such ideologies. Of course, we are also not fully secular in the Western sense. If we were on a scale from “France-Afghanistan,” Syria would not be on either end.
In terms of the Syrian political discourse, there really has not been any genuine Syrian political thought for the past fifty years under the Assad regime. Debates regarding changes in Syrian society never materialized as there was no Syrian civil society to hold such debates.
AA: Do you think there is now freedom of expression in Syria?
AD: Things in Syria are a lot better than they were. Although this right is not guaranteed by law, Syrians have been expressing themselves more freely and even having debates that are critical of the current regime. Syria under Assad was an Orwellian state: the walls could hear you. Now, everyone goes out to protest the littlest things. Some say this is a waste of time, but I disagree. This is our right, which we lost at the cost of a lot of bloodshed. The quality of public debate is sort of cyclical: secularists and traditionalists are name-calling each other and do not know where Syria will be in the upcoming years.
AA: Do you think this cyclical debate is the result of the general uncertainty over Syria’s future?
AD: Up until this year, we did not even think about a future for Syria. Many Syrians are scared, I myself have a fear for the unknown and the possibility of more violence in Syria. We are all tired of war and bloodshed. We want to go back and live our lives in peace and dignity. God willing this happens. That is why the debates going on right now feel quite reactionary, (excuse my French, quite shit).
AA: How has the Assad regime shaped life in Syria until today?
AD: I guess to put it into the Western understanding, it was a lot like North Korea. Hafez Al Assad admired and learned alot from Kim II Sung of North Korea. In 2000, there were some reforms and Syria opened up to the world but you could not navigate it freely. You could open Facebook but I dare you to speak your mind. Post one wrong thing and you will be paying a visit to your aunt’s house, [intelligence office] as they say in Syria. We have an entire culture of humor to
cope with the mass state surveillance and repression under Assad. Our society was one filled with statues of Bashar and his father: you always lived in their shadows.
AA: Do you hope to return to Syria someday?
AD: I always dreamed of returning to Syria, even before the fall of the regime, at least for retirement. Now that hope is even greater, it feels like I can start saying: “I can go back home and figure it out.” This is kind of a weird feeling for a Syrian since Syria was never a plan B, so to speak. We all have the mentality of needing to succeed abroad in order to live because there was no hope in Syria. I have some optimism for the situation to improve but it will take time until Syrians are ready to start returning home. For me, why not return eventually?
Syria will come back from the ashes and return, it is older than most places we know. There is a saying by Mark Twain on the city of Damascus: “She measures time, not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise, and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality.”
Aboud Ashhab: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview and for allowing me to record it. First, tell me about yourself and your family. You’re Syrian and a student at Brown—where in Syria are you from? Did your entire family have to leave during the civil war?
Mahmoud Hallak: I was born and raised in Aleppo, Syria.
When the events happened in 2011, everyone was trying to figure out how to secure their place or leave immediately. We left in 2013—after the university right next to our house, Aleppo University was bombed. Now I live in Boston and go to Brown. We’d been planning for a future in the U.S. for about eight years, but with the recent news, we’ve been thinking about other possibilities.
AA: From your childhood, or from what your parents told you, what was life like under the regime?
MH: A lot of things weren’t talked about. There are news and descriptions of events that we hear about now, but before, everything was hush-hush. If something happened you wouldn’t really know what had actually occurred because no one would talk about it. Living in Syria when it was an active warzone, we didn’t have electricity, and sometimes we didn’t have water. Every night, you’d hear the sounds of cannons and jets flying overhead. That was the worst of it— there was never a moment of silence, just a boom every thirty minutes.
AA: Where did your family go after leaving Syria?
MH: We immigrated to Lebanon, trying to keep life as normal as possible—especially with schooling
because education in Syria was nonexistent then. There are a lot of stories I don’t want to get into in this interview. We applied for asylum in the U.S. while in Lebanon, and after a couple of years, we were granted asylum.
AA: How did you feel when you first heard about the fall of the regime? What was your initial reaction, and how did your family react?
MH: The day it happened was sudden. My family was already asleep. I had no one to talk to, so I drove to a friend’s house to meet with other Syrians at Brown to celebrate.
It was a celebration. The way it ended gave us a lot of hope. A week before, we had been discussing how long the fighting would last and how much bloodshed would happen before any real change could occur. The fact that it happened so quickly was hopeful.
The next day, I talked to my family and cousins. They were much more affected by the regime than I was.
For me, the main issue was that I had mandatory military service and couldn’t return to Syria without getting drafted.
AA: The regime fell on December 7. At the end of November, the first military offensive started from Idlib and Homs, near your hometown. What was your reaction when the offensive began? Did you think the regime would fall so quickly, or did you expect a prolonged conflict?
MH: Honestly, I wasn’t hopeful at all. Some people were, but I thought it would just mean more suffering, especially in Aleppo.
I really thought it would take months or years for any progress to happen. I didn’t expect the outcome at all—where the governor of Damascus just let them walk in and establish a new government. I don’t think anyone could have predicted that.
We had seen so many rebel groups rise and fall before, and it never led to real change—just more infighting. And, as always, civilians were the ones who suffered the most.
AA: What do you believe are the most significant changes this will bring to Syria?
MH: The future is uncertain. There’s tempered excitement, but what we know for sure is that people who were persecuted by the regime can now return: people are no longer afraid to go back home.
It’s hard to say how much daily life will improve. Infrastructure is still devastated after over a decade of fighting; change will take time and great effort.
That said, people are excited about a new government, a new direction for the country. It’s been so long that people are desperate for change.
ABOUD ASHHAB B‘25 thinks mansaf is better than Syrian shakriyeh.
Interview 2: Mahmoud Hallak, a Syrian student from Aleppo (edited for clarity and length)
Lol-Cows and Big Backs
A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF LOVELYPEACHES, BLACKNESS, AND THE SUBHUMANIZED BODY
c “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’” so begins Hortense Spillers’ seminal essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe The list of names brings to mind the familiar depictions of Black women that many young people, especially young Black girls, saw as children. She was loud and foul-mouthed, sassy and crass, big and fat. bell hooks said she was “someone the black and white audience could hate. Scapegoated on all sides. She was not us.” For me, she was lovelypeaches. lovelypeaches, whose real name is Brittany Johnson, is an internet influencer who rose to notoriety in 2018 because of her provocative social media content. Since then, she has shared details about her background that paint a troubling picture. She’s from Louisiana and started doing sex work in her late teens after running away from home. She recorded her videos in hotel rooms when she could afford it. What started as a single viral song and occasional erratic rants on livestreams turned into a series of online controversies that brought thousands of people to her page, turning her into a niche internet celebrity.
I was first introduced to her by a friend at school who asked me if I had heard the song Burnin’ n Itchin’, a two-minute rap where peaches describes her genitals as burning, itching, and emitting a foul smell. My friend laughed raucously as she played the song, and proceeded to show me various videos from the lovelypeaches Instagram account, which was going viral. Her appeal to young viewers lay in the sheer absurdity of her content and the disgust she evoked. She allegedly ate her feces on a livestream, videoed herself in bed with the geriatric men who solicited her services, and shoved objects up her vagina for thousands of people to watch. Yes, her actions were often
abhorrent, but inextricable from the disgust was also her body. She was big. She affirmed every stereotype about Black women and big women––uncouth, odorous, lascivious, undesirable. Yet she was a sex worker. She was a libidinal subject devoid of any erotic appeal. This created a dissonance amplified by her online behavior. She talked about her various STDs, which fueled people’s disapproval of not just her physical body but the moral depravity that it represented to her audience. All of these things were symbolized by a big Black woman who sang about her smelly orifices, and that was a part of the spectacle. We couldn’t look away because we were disgusted. We took pleasure in our disgust and laughed.
She was a lol-cow: a derogatory term coined in alt-right forums for an internet personality whose mental illness or desperation for interaction is exploited by spectators for quick, reliable entertainment. But her exploitation wasn’t contained in the hidden corners of 4chan chatrooms. People engaged with her content on mainstream platforms. Her sounds went viral on TikTok, thousands of people joined her livestreams to watch her erratic breakdowns, and her reaction pictures were disseminated widely on Twitter and Instagram. What’s most disturbing to me is the fact that so many of the people farming her for laughs were Black. We did this because we thought she was not us
The term lol-cow speaks to the dehumanizing ways we interact with lovelypeaches. In Interstices, Spillers explains that during slavery, the black female body became “the principal passage between the human and the non-human world. Her issue became the focus of cunning difference––visually, psychologically, ontologically––as the route by which dominant modes decided between humanity and ‘other’.”
( TEXT KENDALL RICKS
DESIGN SEOYEON KWEON
ILLUSTRATION SOFIA SCHREIBER )
In the case of lovelypeaches, lol-cow speaks directly to this sub-humanization. The cow is livestock; its sentience isn’t recognized, its body is extracted from, it is abused, bred, and slaughtered. We feast on cows without giving their pain a second thought, relishing in our own pleasure. People laughed as she cried and they milked her for more content. People didn’t just like her livestreams and posts; thousands of people messaged her directly and cohosted her livestreams. They goaded her to keep producing content despite speculation that her behavior was the result of untreated mental illness and years of sexual trauma. Every livestream comment, Twitter reaction pic, and viral TikTok turned peaches into a commodity to be abused.
+++
It is unhelpful to scrutinize the extent to which peaches is an agent in her dehumanization. The more pertinent question is the extent to which we, the lookers and the laughers, are culpable. Our relationship with peaches is a captive one. Spillers describes this captive/captor relationship as one of “irresistible” looking, wherein the captured “provide[s] a physical and biological expression of otherness…and embodies sheer physical powerlessness.” We looked so long that she came to depend on our gaze, however disapproving. It fed her the attention and the money she so desperately needed. It fed Black people laughs, and it fed white supremacists an example to point to when justifying Black people’s inhumanity. It was a self-sustaining cycle that rendered her powerless and legitimized the Black woman’s body as a passage between the human and non-human world.
It is true that the lol-cow isn’t always Black or fat or a woman. But in peaches’ case, the lol-cow becomes an abstraction of the Black female form. It marks her body as a site of disgust and contempt primarily through her fatness and her libidinal status. peaches is a perfect candidate because she represents an extreme example of deviance from the norm. This deviance is three-fold: sexual (sex work, brazen displays of sexuality), moral (her infected status, her apparent mental illness, her inappropriate behavior), and physical (fatness). Every audience can laugh, including Black people who participate in her othering and don’t see her dehumanization as their own. She was not us.
As much as I’d like to imagine liberation for lovelypeaches as an individual, I don’t know if I can. Liberation would look like adequate mental health care and stable housing that doesn’t depend on her continued exploitation. Imagining liberation would be a much longer investigation of the systems that failed her and reimagining those very systems. I would like to say that changing how we interact with peaches could liberate her, but that would only abstract her further and make her liberation dependent on the people who necessitate it in the first place. The best I can do is work with the Black women before me to question why we kept looking and how we can look differently. So I turn to bell hooks and invite you to experience the rupture. +++
In her seminal essay, hooks argues that Black people, especially Black women, gain agency by critically interrogating racist cinematic depictions. Her work is generative for thinking about Black womanhood
on social media. The digital age gives millions of Black women more control over their representation, yet we choose to look and laugh at lol-cows like lovelypeaches. If we are to take hooks’ illustration of looking critically as an embodied practice of resistance, then looking must also have the potential to be oppressive. According to Spillers, looking established the Black female body as the other, the sub-human. And according to hooks, looking was a means by which white audiences negated Black womanhood at the cinema. Looking uncritically at peaches and people like her continues this practice into a new age, and implicates black and white spectators alike in Black women’s negation.
We must adopt a critical gaze to make looking disruptive again: we must experience the rupture. hooks explains that to experience pleasure at the cinema, Black women had to distance themselves from racist depictions. Distance from the character is identification with the film’s discourse, which perpetuates the stereotype. For hooks, rupture is when a spectator “resists complete identification with the film’s discourse” and engages critically with cinematic mediations of Black womanhood. She explains that after experiencing the rupture, she could watch movies with an interrogative lens and not get hurt. hooks’ theory is predicated on cinematic representation absolutely negating Black women’s lived experiences. But peaches isn’t a mere representation, but a real person mediating her own life. The hurt we experience does not stem from a fabulated reconstruction of Black womanhood but from the extractive and dehumanizing practice of milking a Black woman for laughs. A more human practice of looking does not necessitate cool and impartial observation, but empathy.
Thus, a critical part of the oppositional gaze is reidentification. We must not identify with the discourse that makes peaches a lol-cow; we must reidentify with the person. Rupture is the moment when we sacrifice the pleasure of laughing at the joke for the awareness that we are the joke. She is us.
This radical assertion may be uncomfortable for Black women because the current cultural moment has been defined by #blackgirlmagic and an ethos
of “yes, we can too” (we can be beautiful, we can be soft, we can be feminine). One Black woman in hooks’ essay explained that she “could always get pleasure as long as [she] did not look too deep.” To look deep is to recognize that the lol-cow is us. It is tied to anti-black, fatphobic, subhumanizing ideals of black womanhood that can be more than uncomfortable or offensive. It can be downright hurtful. To experience rupture is to never experience media the same way again.
+++
The oppositional gaze weighed heavily on my mind as a new trend emerged online and in everyday vernacular: the big back. It’s hard to pin down where the term started or how it proliferated. Either way, big back has taken on a life of its own. It’s an adjective that denotes overindulgence (“that’s big-back behavior”) and a noun that describes a person who is gluttonous (“I’m gonna be a big back and get seconds”). It also has derivatives: after a large meal, someone might say, “I can feel my back multiplying.” The term I have been thinking about the most, however, is “unbig your back.” It’s not an innocuous or self-deprecating reference to one’s size or eating patterns. Rather, unbiging one’s back is a call to physically modify the body and to reject one physical form in favor of a smaller, slender, more desirable one.
I wondered why the trend started to bother me, why I could no longer laugh at it. This wasn’t the first time social media’s corporeal obsession was embodied by a fixation with a particular part of the body. I remember the Kylie Jenner lip challenge and legging legs. Pilates arms and tummy-flattening teas. However, the big back seemed like a more sinister form of body shaming. One that threw its heavy stone then hid its hand behind the guise of a joke. And like most jokes, like the lol-cow, someone is being laughed at.
My gaze had become especially critical. Resentful, even.
The recent obsession with the back has always struck me as a racialized phenomenon. The phrase started gaining traction in Black spaces on the internet,
and like most Black linguistic trends, it spread far and wide. While it’s hard to say that the term has its roots in African American Vernacular English, “unbig your back” (or “yo back” as I frequently hear) sounds like a tongue-in-cheek phrase that would elicit boisterous laughter at the cookout. I first heard the phrase when a man tweeted, “our backs gon’ be big forever,” in response to a picture of a decadent African American dish. The humorously searing critique of African American cuisine features a referent “our” as in us, as in my people, Black people, will always be big. Simmering below the surface of this innocuous joke was a smugness and an implication that big is bad.
I couldn’t help but think about the fact that almost 60% of Black women are considered obese according to the body mass index. I thought about how most body shaming comments were directed towards women, as opposed to men in my family. Me, my aunt, my mother. I thought about how Black women do the cooking and baking in my family. How a Black woman probably cooked the plate that man was joking about. I thought about how the African American community is a matriarchy where problems are blamed on Black women and simultaneously thrust upon them to fix. All of this swirled around my mind, and the referent “our” took on a gendered dimension.
When I first set out to write this piece, I worried that “to look too deep” wouldn’t just hurt and take the pleasure out of the joke. I worried that to look too deep was to read too much into it, to be too woke. But I can’t reverse the rupture. To laugh at the lol-cow or the big back is to laugh at myself. And I just can’t do that.
KENDALL RICKS B‘27 is experiencing the rupture.
A group of writers gathered around a table. They doodled with crayons, broke them in half, and scrib bled until time was up. Drawings (un)finished, they were given twenty minutes to write—with one direction: somewhere in each writer’s piece, a shared phrase must appear. Here’s what they wrote.
Tulip stems severed into grayscale Venn diagrams on the wall. Like dead tongues, crumbed, embryowet. Metal forks of my palm’s veins. Blasted into the crux of dusk. The valley is furrowed, and I am utterly silent. Satellites here, dangling. There’s no carnival world anywhere around Chatsworth—just a plastic cowgirl sex doll plastered behind some glassy grease—so I want to leave. I never want my abandoned body to cave. This past decade I was low-gazed, nonbreathing. Callous hands I’d use to clabber, hoist myself limply onto boulders. Tongue in air. Tongue so small in the huge sweep. A blaring distance that couldn’t ever harbor my lone electron And it wasn’t easy to break it in half. orbit, cramped, saw-edged. I’m crimson, beady, starfished out. Moths pirouette about my head slow in glitching frames. My open slit mouth is their net.
SARKIS ANTONYAN B/R‘27 deeply enjoys his solitude.
There was a long wax rope. Each end knotted around the stem of a doorknob—one knob affixed to a red door, one to a purple door. The red-door-doorknob and the purple-door-doorknob faced each other, like an eye holding fast to its reflection, opposite and level. The long wax rope was stiff and taut, its sinews wound and packed together. It could have been a beam on which to tiptoe if it hadn’t been susceptible to the chisel of a toenail, or to softening and slickening under skin. It could have been a beam of light—or the joining of two beams, refracting into each other, seamlessly—if it hadn’t been opaque, thick like jaundiced milk, and if the dust particles didn’t crown it like peach fuzz.
The doors longed for each other. The red loved the depth that flowed beneath the purple’s glossed facade and brought to mind the texture of the strange word “night.” It wanted to swing forward, toward the purple door, and catch a taste of that depth in the air. The purple loved the strength of the red, that bam of vibrancy, and it, too, wanted to swing forward, to lavish in proximity.
In all the cool space through which its length extended, the rope did not bend or tremble. But the doors longed for each other. They knew they had to push, with all their might, against the rope. And it wasn’t easy to break it in half.
The friction of their pushes warmed the air, and the rope bent, and dipped to the ground, and cleaved to the doors and their gravity.
NINA LIDAR B’26 is working on her flexibility.
me down the mountain of minutes, timed out of teetering, teething timed into all that was gamey and cold. my sock felt the suck of eve’s fruit in the morning. my sock, with holes for toes unknown to unripening, felt the drool of a you that sprawled on mahogany panels, surreptitiously hunting down splinters in the eve, and when cold feet hit the floor, we hug or kick the ground, crack open the dually-toned sand-papered basket-case of wooden you, a cradle crisply crumbling, and it wasn’t easy to break it
splits the apple down asym l lines and is still scared of what she finds.
of light. The pigeons strutting around us, their thick velvet bangles, expansion flooding our bodies, legs now lampposts, now almost redwoods.
I watch your chest ache toward that broken eyeline,
it wasn’t easy to break it
August, when orb-weaving is fashionable, or maybe
Playground Stories
On the playground, during the days when our knees were always skinned and our cheeks still full of youth and sour candy, I led a cohort of my peers in a religion all our own. Even now, I’m not sure where the stories came from. They sprang from my head, fully-formed, like Athena, although I didn’t know the reference at the time. Or, maybe they sprang from my gut, remnants of cafeteria lunch stirred up on the swingsets. What matters is that I was not thinking of them or planning them; they just happened. I felt like a prophet, visited by some otherworldly knowledge. I don’t remember the stories now—that time is gone to me—except for the
SELIM KUTLU
The Great Bird, She who soars through the stars and rests on the sun, guarded a nest of three eggs. Where they came from, whether they were Hers… it didn’t matter. They were Her duty, and so She settled to watch them, leaving the cold, dark edges of the universe alone for a time. But there was something wrong. When She first became their guardian, the eggs burned like the sun, lights dancing just beneath their shells. And then, they didn’t. The motion slowed and slowed until the lights were still, dark. When She nudged an egg, like She could wake the sleeping glow, frost crept up Her beak and froze it shut. Her distress was trapped, squirming, pushing, clawing within the fleshy prison of Her chest, tearing bits loose like a chick hatching. The second egg was no better. Just as cold, just as gray. She scratched at the last egg to set free the child inside before it, too, And it wasn’t easy to break it in half. When She finally managed, a single crack spiderwebbing outwards until the brittle shell crumbled, She found it empty. She crushed it. She crushed the other eggs until Her nest was littered with shells, a soft dusting of white,
My stories in the past explained things—the seasons, the clouds, Mrs. Brighton’s bad moods. But I still don’t know what I was trying to explain here. Maybe that’s why our little cult wandered off to other corners of the playground: I had run out of answers.
ELAINA BAYARD B’27 is losing at duck duck goose.
JESSICA RUAN )
Kidman-Moore in Lactose and Gore
EXODUS 23:19,
“THOU SHALT NOT SEETHE A KID IN ITS MOTHER’S MILK.”
( TEXT LILY ELLMAN DESIGN SOOHYUN IRIS LEE ILLUSTRATION ZOE GILMORE
)
[spoiler [milk] alert for Babygirl and The Substance]
c “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” asks the deep, sultry voice of the dealer of The Substance, overlaid upon edits of old photos of celebrities compared to their current look-alikes. TikToks reference the movie via interactive slideshow, as users swipe through side-by-side photos— Margot Robbie and Jaime Pressly, Lili Reinhart and Brittany Murphy—one-dimensionally asserting the former celebrities as younger, prettier versions of the latter. Two months later, in another realm of TikTok, viewers ogled the sight of Babygirl’s Romy (Nicole Kidman) chugging a glass of milk at a bar, making endless mockeries of the ridiculous scene. Both The Substance and Babygirl depict female protagonists who have ‘aged out’ of their respective pursuits of beauty and sexual submission. The way these movies play with the idea of youth and social norms relies on consumption of fluids as pathways to the protagonists’ desires. This article, a jacuzzi of Kidman-Moore milk and blood amid a blizzard of lust and vanity, will explore how these liquids serve as catalysts for the protagonists’ deviance, separately symbolizing the fluid, messy means of accessing their taboo indulgences.
Babygirl explores the raptorial affair between the CEO of a robotic automation company, Romy, and her audacious younger intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson). They play with the danger of discovery by other company employees at an after-work drink gathering at a bar. With a view semi-obstructed by Romy’s “slut-strands,” an unfocused camera hones in on the CEO’s distraction from the jazzy smalltalk surrounding her, foregrounding her interest in the ever-nonplussed Samuel. The two lock eyes in one of Romy’s quasi-furtive glances across the bar, a company cooldown made that much cooler with the addition of a tall, full glass of milk. “What is this? Did you order this?” she asks her co-workers before publicly manifesting her affair with the intern in a desperate chug. After depicting Samuel from afar in a schmoozing state, the camera remains close to Romy’s unbroken gaze, and her co-worker warns her: “Don’t drink that…” After three large gulps, the camera zooms in on Samuel’s face, his mouth agape until Romy tilts her empty cup upwards in glorious finality. Ironically, as she looks back at Samuel, two tiny lines of milk form a devious smile atop a sepulchral line of lips. She is left with a devilish adornment to her otherwise blank facial expression, as the two horns of milk suggest the social transgression of her sexual indulgence; her desired submission is problematized by her powerful position as Samuel’s boss, their vast age gap, her self-proclaimed feminist ideals, and her loving family.
The scene cuts to Samuel passing by her isolated seat at the bar, whispering, “Good girl.” In a demeaningly daring and public act, Romy drinks the milk Samuel bought for her to consummate her surreptitious relationship with him. Downing the drink in a bar is not only perverse, alluding to child-like activity in a venue exclusive for adults, but also socially-slighted in the current online era of “Ew, who would drink a glass of milk by itself?” In this way, Romy’s fantasy of submission, or to be “child-like,” is publicly accessible to her through this ambiguously originated glass of milk. This milk ignites within Romy a lascivious indulgence, a giving-in to her desires. Liquids are typically associated with a sense of transmission, an amorphous form of consumption or excretion; as Romy chooses this milk, she displays her transformation into a state of submission, into a “babyhood.” She needs an outlet for her otherwise strenuous job, parental duties, and unsatisfied sex life; she needs a way to lose control that is hidden from public judgement.
In The Substance, Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, the star of a Jazzercise-like fitness TV show.
Sparkle begins the movie by getting fired from her job after her producer concludes that she has aged out of the role, only to be replaced by a younger, prettier version of herself, whom she attains through a miracle drug called The Substance. The Substance only works for one week at a time and is maintained through daily stabilizer injections from Elisabeth’s spinal area to keep Sue from deteriorating. These transfusions require her new hot self, Sue, to puncture Elisabeth’s battered skin to aquire the liquid to inject back into her body. The catch is, with every moment The Substance’s weekly time limit is exceeded, Sue effectively steals youth from Elisabeth. As a punishment for this greed, with extra moments overtime resulting in extra parts of Elisabeth’s body deteriorating. The craving for validation and beauty overcomes Sue; while her dances start getting her onto billboards and talk shows, Elisabeth just gets older and older. After a couple of weeks of Sue violently taking Elisabeth’s vitality from her by deepening bloodied wounds of The Substance’s injection site, she violates the terms of The Substance, and Elisabeth’s looks and health go completely awry. As Sue cheats, pushing the needle intensely through a shell of hardened pus and blood for Elisabeth’s sustenance, Elisabeth becomes a monstrous, visibly-aged creature, seeking vengeance against her other “self.” In her indulgent need for more beauty-time, Sue exacerbates the original insecurity that Elisabeth was initially trying to resolve. Elisabeth becomes decrepit while Sue, who no longer feels like Elisabeth’s self but rather her enemy, gets to frolic around receiving praise for her looks.
Blood plays a pivotal role in sustaining Sue and Elisabeth’s dual existences, and it also comes to a head, literally, in the finale of The Substance. A giant, wrinkly, tumorous, slobbering, veiny, blue-pink, toothless, merged Elisabeth/Sue, formally known as Monstro Elisasue, covered in aimless limbs, births a breast from her head in retching cries. After a minute of this extrusion, the breast plops on the ground as the camera frames it in front of a blurred audience. Thick splatters of blood fall around the breast and the tied veiny cord that holds it, followed by the monster hacking up blood to cover the body part while the audience stares in horror. A repugnant watch, this moment in the movie parallels the blood punctured from Elisabeth to sustain Sue’s beauty, to propel her debut as a monster. This blood begins to splatter atop and encase the once-prized parts Elisasue’s self, favoring the violent grime of these transfusions over their goal of youth and beauty. The audience then stages an uprising. Screeching of monstrosity, civilians start sprinting at Elisasue and she comes face to face with a man who decapitates her. As her monster falls to the ground, blood splatters all over the audience, alongside Elisabeth’s secret dreams of youth. “Finally, it's the moment where she's free from her human body and appearance,” said director Coralie Fargeat in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Under the pretense that the transfusions would free her from the confines of aging, Elisabeth’s blood leads her to the freedom of monstrosity. Blood comes back to stain any physical conception of self that she hoped would save her from social ostracism.
These two movies reference these inverse fluids, milk and blood, counterintuitively. With sexcapades generally deemed as deviant, Babygirl’s use of milk as it is associated with infancy feels like a foreign, unsettling option as a metaphor for Romy’s sexual indulgence. Likewise in The Substance, youthful beauty clashes with blood, a liquid that immediately evokes images of pain and death. For movies that have found themselves in the realm of pop-blockbusters, blood and milk become a switch flipped; the liquids embody expectations defied not only for viewers themselves, but for the women’s own limits of their indulgences. The moments that the fluids take over the women, in
signaling consent and desire, their fixes of attention no longer become guilty pleasures but dependencies. The second that Sue first dips beneath Elisabeth’s bubble of blood for more stabilizer fluid, not only does she metaphorically become her own vampire, but she loses any sense of control over her body that she thought she had by abiding by the Substance Dealer’s instructions. So too, Romy’s relationship with Samuel is held in a controlled box, never publicly indicating her pursuit until the glass of milk is placed in front of her. The mystique and test of the drink evokes a rush within her, where her desire overcomes her, causing her to deviate from her standard of secrecy. This scene also foreshadows one of her begging for Samuel at a bar, when he has lost interest in Romy. For now, she privately plays according to his terms and defies public expectations as his boss. These women use milk and blood to break the rules implicitly and explicitly set for them surrounding their desires: maintain a private company affair and abide by The Substance’s rules.
Another layer to the defiance in these two liquids is their particularity to the reproductive system. The notion of the “monstrous-feminine,” originated by Barbara Creed, is further explored by Rachel Frances Sharpe and Sophie Sexon, in their discursive dissection of the abject nature of blood and breastmilk, citing philosopher Julia Kristeva’s argument that: “the maternal female body threatens social order and semantic cleanliness in that it produces fluids which transgress the bodily boundaries of the flesh (Kristeva, 1980).” This idea of bodily productions permating the social stratosphere in their “transgressive” nature is distinct to the maternal body. Sharpe then relates this exudation to horror, writing: “The symbolic associations of mother’s milk and menstrual blood induce a reaction of horror from the observing subject, who associates these fluids with a monstrous form of maternity.” Sharpe explores Kristeva’s idea of excess in bodily fluids as a form of monstrosity, and thus a social threat. In this sense, the maternal body is socially expansive, and its fluids are placed in a category of processes that are deemed indulgent through their uncontrollable excreting natures. A socially-imposed indulgence, the producers themselves seethe in the naturally-occuring liquids, exuding them while clothes hold them freshly close to their bodies. This mirrors Romy and Elisabeth’s indulgences; their careers require that their cravings for youth and submission be held under wraps, but the desire for them in the first place is created by or exacerbated by that same career. Samuel began pursuing Romy at work, and Elisabeth was fired for her physical appearance. Their interactions with milk and blood hold symbolic weight in the womens’ respective social orders, delicately threatening both their careers and their self-images. As explored by these two movies, the consumption of milk and blood, though at times physically contained, cannot be controlled. This begs the question of who is defining indulgence for these women––the line underscoring both narratives is the desire for youth. Can Romy and Elisabeth resist longing for youth as older women, quiet victims of patriarchal standards––if their desires to meet a youthful standard so naturally subsume these protagonists, like the natural seeping of breast milk and period blood, then is it indulgence in the first place?
LILY ELLMAN B’27 doesn’t�� owe�� her�� newborn�� baby�� anything��
BAD OMEN
*Cut on dashed line
LUCA SUAREZ B'26 is watching Wheel of Fortune.
The Sun Never Sets on the Happiest Place on Earth
SETTLER FUTURITY IN WALT DISNEY’S ENCHANTED TIKI ROOM
c It’s around three in the afternoon, but having been on my feet since the crack of dawn, I’m more than happy to take a seat. I’ve found myself shepherded along with maybe a hundred other people in sweatstained T-shirts, mouse-ear-shaped headbands, and exhausted expressions into a dimly-lit, thatch-roofed oasis. Since eight o’clock sharp, we’ve trekked for miles through the American Southwest, traversed densely vegetated “East Asian jungles,” and surveyed the expansive “African veldt”—all, surprisingly, without need for a passport! Now, we let out a collective sigh of relief; our blistered ankles and sunburned noses don’t feel so intolerable in this strange, Edenic paradise. We sit on pews in-the-round, surrounding an altar decorated with tropical flowers and pineapples. Carved faces adorn beams and semi-sheer bamboo shades filter the blue sky and volcano beyond.
The khaki-clad twenty-something who ushered us into this space invites us to lift our voices: “Wake up José!” we chant in unison. Wake up José! Blackout.
Lights up on José, a talking macaw with a vaguely Mexican accent. Oh—and now his friends are joining in! The ceiling above bursts into a tropical panoply of birds in song:
In the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room, In the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room, All the birds sing words and the flowers croon, In the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room!
How I’d love for someone to call ‘scene!’ to end this absurd fever dream. But the director refuses to yell ‘cut!’ The birds continue to sing, and soon, the flowers and totems join in. Actually, I think I’m starting to enjoy the show. How other-worldly! How fantastical! How unreal! How…exotic!
I leave the room chipper, and about ten degrees (Fahrenheit) cooler than when I arrived. And look! Right outside the exit awaits a Dole-Food-Companybranded pineapple frozen dessert! What perfect timing! A benadryl-induced nightmare? No! This is Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, a musical attraction in Disneyland. I grew up visiting a similar version of the Tiki Room with my family in Florida’s Disney World. It was the attraction we’d visit in the mid-afternoon when the Florida sun was unbearable, our feet were sore from hours of walking, and every child in the park was breaking down in a temper tantrum. There was rarely a line, so we’d take the opportunity to rest in the dark, cool space for fifteen-ish minutes while a chorus of animatronic tropical birds, flowers, and carved wooden ‘tikis’ kept us entertained with a musical variety show. And afterwards, there’d be a Dole Whip awaiting us—the cherry on top.
But when I return to the Tiki Room a decade later, something’s off. The birds with foreign accents, the plastic tropical decor, and the “musical luau” raise numerous red flags in my brain. Despite my holdups, as José the macaw proclaims, “Olé! It’s showtime!” and the “glee club” begins to croon, I still enjoy the show. It makes me feel nostalgic for, well, something I’m not able to articulate; something that’s thoroughly American, imbued with feelings of
progress and modernity, but also undeniably romantic and tropical—a Mai-Tai, anyone? Despite the considerable investment I’ve made in disavowing my heritage (Disney Adult father), I’m not immune to the Tiki Room’s interpolative power; no amount of critical looking can save me from this multisensorial onslaught. As the bench below me reverberates with the clacks of plastic bird beaks, José’s proclamation transports me from an outdated theme-park attraction to an archipelago over 2,000 miles away: Hawaii, or some idea of it.
Tucked between the palm fronds of the ambiguously-colonial-jungle-themed “Adventureland,” the Tiki Room emerges, constructed with bamboo trusses, a thatched roof, and an assemblage of carved wooden masks. Drawing guests towards the entrance, a faux lava-rock courtyard invites us to interact with carved effigies of “island” gods and goddesses that, as a sign reads, “guard the portals” to the Tiki Room. Ushered in by an underpaid “cast member,” we then enter the Room where pineapples overflow from a central fountain, bird of paradise flowers sprout from wall sconces, and plastic orchids pour from carved wooden canoes. Among the rafters, a flock of animatronic toucans, cockatoos, and macaws hang on ledges, accompanied by “tiki drummers,” wooden figures that bear loose resemblance to alligators and beat on anthropomorphized drums. The aesthetic of this space is strangely familiar, and it’s not just because I’ve visited before; the Room draws from and reproduces a distinctly American imaginary of the South Pacific that, for over a century, has infiltrated nearly every component of my life: Tiki culture.
As the United States shifted its territorial interests beyond the boundaries of the continental nation state, the aesthetic genre of “Tiki” developed in conversation with the nation’s imperial ambition to rationalize the settlement of nations in the Pacific. By the late 19th century, early European settler colonists in Hawaii had already established a lucrative sugar and pineapple plantation economy predicated on the exploitation of native Hawaiian and Asianimmigrated contract laborers. Motivated mainly by the implementation of import tariffs on Hawaiian sugar to the continental US, plantation executives overthrew the islands’ sovereign ruler Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893 and ruled the islands until their annexation as a US territory in 1898. However, the protections that statehood and full citizenship would offer the Hawaiian people were not extended until 1959—four years before the Tiki Room opened. The shift in sentiment necessary to animate this political move was delayed until the Cold War, when granting statehood to the multiracial territory could serve as a productive PR move that would, as scholar Christine Skwiot articulates, “demonstrate to the people of the… decolonizing and developing world that [the US] was capable of accepting persons of color as equals and first-class citizens.”
However, instead of justifying colonization by painting non-white people(s) as ‘Other’ and
( TEXT BENJAMIN ROZEA
DESIGN LIZ SEPULVEDA
ILLUSTRATION RUBY NEMEROFF )
‘primitive,’ Tiki culture romanticized and commodified aspects of Pacific cultures that transgressed upon the dominant culture’s norms. In this way, Tiki branded the objects of US imperial desire as amenable to the national social order not via assimilation, but through their alluring transgression upon American constructions of ‘civilization,’ namely, sexual excess, vice, and racial heterogeneity. As the constraints of social life tightened in the post-World-War-II era, standardizing family structure, gender roles, and racial classifications, a Tiki-themed cultural boom materialized as Tiki bars and alcoholic drinks, plastic kitsch, topless hula dancers, bowling alleys, and everything in between enabled an American public to indulge in bite-size fragments of an imagined culture beyond the “overcivilization” that limited day-to-day life.
So, having enjoyed a paper parasol in my drink and plastic lei around my neck more than a few times in my life, the aesthetic of the Tiki Room makes me feel right at home, if by suggesting it originated somewhere else. It’s not entirely normative or Western— the unfamiliar idols, totem poles, and tikis could evoke an anthropology museum—but it’s also not uncomfortable; its transgression is constrained by both the spatial boundaries of the Room and its aesthetic valence with Tiki culture. With the sense that I’m aesthetically outside the bounds of civilization, while reassured by the confines of American cultural propriety, I assume the privileged (dominating) role of tourist—I may taste the exotic, but refrain from a full bite. Perhaps, then, I’m in a Tiki-themed utopia, in both etymological lineages of the word. As tourism and mobility theorist Stephanie Malia Hom articulates in her essay “Simulated Imperialism,” we find ourselves in an “ou-topia (nowhere) and eu-topia (the place of happiness).”
However, the Tiki Room, while thoroughly imagined, denies its ou-topic spatiality and makes explicit claims to Hawaiian representation, intimately linking the geographically-ambiguous Tiki aesthetic—and all of its association with vice and excess—to the state of Hawaii. Still, while I know that the Room is not and does not represent Hawaii, I still feel like it does. There’s something beyond the visual at play here. Conveniently, the lights have now dimmed and a quartet of macaws, spotlighted, descend from the ceiling upon their perches. Let the show begin!
Meet the macaw masters of ceremony: José, who speaks in a Mexican accent; Michael, Irish; Pierre, French; and Fritz, German. After some brief birdie banter, we’re launched head first into the opening number of the Tiki Room’s setlist, the titular “Tiki Tiki Tiki Room.” Drawing on a percussive foundation inspired by Afro-Caribbean Calypso and accented by bird calls, the opening earworm evokes the popular mid-20th-century musical genre of Exotica that historian Geoff Alexander defines as a “sound evocative of exotic localities, most generally those associated with the Pacific islands.” Sonically transported beyond the mainland shore, the macaws assuage any
fear that such exoticism may evoke by outlining the “pleasure and glee” that the audience should experience in response to the room. Moreover, the macaws mock-transgress upon the bounds of their perpetual reanimation, crooning that “most little birdies will fly away / but the Tiki Room birds are here every day.” Despite their un-agentive status as animatronics, the macaws suggest an active and semi-agentive choice to remain in the room. Not even three minutes into the performance, the Tiki Room has already begun to soften my grasp on reality.
Following a presumed applause—explicitly scripted by the Macaws—Michael announces, “Here come the Girls!” Six white-plummaged, eyelash-clad cockatoos named Mimi, Fifi, Gigi, Josephine, Colette, and Susette descend from the ceiling upon the Las Vegas showgirl-esque “birdmobile.” Serenading the audience with “Let’s All Sing like the Birdies Sing,” which resembles a jazz standard, the Girls’
performance contrasts the exotic sonic locality that “Tiki Room” establishes, transporting us back to the continental United States. This reterritorialization is made explicit by José’s musing that the song practically serves as the Tiki Room’s “national anthem,” anchoring the mood of the Room to the literal enclosure of the nation state. As with José and crew, the Girls may also be assumed to be semi-agentive. This is evidenced by their individual names, as well as by José’s comment, “I wonder what happened to Rosita,” which implies that the cockatoo Rosita possessed sufficient agency to abstain from joining the performance. And while the Girls do aesthetically evoke show girls, their spatial isolation upon the birdmobile protects them from the grasp—sexual violence—of the audience; the Girls are to be looked at, not touched. As such, the Girls are sexualized only as aesthetic objects rather than material ones, aligning them with cultural conceptions of the white woman as virginal, disembodied, and sexually
But wait! The climax of the show has yet to come! Now, the Room itself comes alive as orchids, totem poles, and “tiki drummers” give us a taste of something enticingly ‘exotic’ and ‘authentic:’ a “musical luau,” direct from “the islands.” As the lustrous tones of a vibraphone waft along the island breeze, a chorus of (remarkably yonic) orchids sing soprano in Hawaiian, while bunches of bird of paradise flowers flesh out the low voices. The botanical bunch sing “Hawaiian War Chant,” originally titled “Kāua I Ka Huahuaʻi” or “We Two in the Spray,” a late-19th-century love song written by Prince Leleiohoku II of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The song became a mainland Exotica staple throughout the first half of the 20th century. Despite its ‘authentic’ origins, in the Tiki Room, the song is performed as a ritualistic chant rather than a romantic melody. After we’ve been sufficiently enchanted by the flora, the mood of the room suddenly becomes hostile: the percussion crescendos as the totem poles and tiki drummers begin to chant and beat drums. Now, the flora join the chorus, the chanting intensifies, and the lights glow red. It’s nothing short of sensory overload: hundreds of little motors slap bird beaks, orchid lips, and tiki teeth together, the musical track intensifies, and the hollow cavity in my chest reverberates with the beating drums. Suddenly—thunder! Lightning! Blackout! A cacophony of bird calls fills the sudden darkness as rain pours outside the faux windows. It’s
an eerie contrast to the intimate mood established moments earlier, one that I was always afraid of as a child.
“Hawaiian War Chant” is a point of inflection within the arc of the Tiki Room on multiple registers. First, I can’t help but compare the orchids and bird of paradise flowers to the similarly-gendered pairing of Girls and macaws that came before. While the Girls are each provided a stable ledge and nameplate on the birdmobile, which is safely hung above the audience, the orchids’ vigor is barely constrained by the canoes they reside in: at the slightest disruption, they might cascade into the audience. This sexed dynamic mirrors the dialogical construction of gender and civilization/savagery binaries in the American cultural vernacular that justified the colonization of Hawaii. Drawing on Christian moral codes, early colonizers of Hawaii interpreted the comparative nudity of Hawaiian women as uncivilized and evidence of the Hawaiian people’s innate inferiority. Early missionaries banned the practice of Hula for its ‘sexuality’ and ‘immorality,’ silencing the generational transmission of oral and somatic histories that the practice embodied. However, as the objectives of Hawaiian colonization shifted from a culturally-assimilated utopia to a vice-laden tourist destination, the supposed sexuality of Hawaiian women became a commodity. As with Tiki, this immorality could be indulged in as long as it remained geographically and culturally isolated from the mainland.
Second, “Hawaiian War Chant” elaborates a hierarchy of agency and animacy within the Room. While the English-speaking avian species are presumed to be semi-agentive and are self-aware of their unreal status, the Hawaiian-speaking flora and tikis do not assume a similar anthropomorphism, nor do they assert their self-awareness. Segregating the room into two orders of reality upon the basis of agency, the birds complicate the attraction’s uniform status as invented or unreal by introducing an intermediate classification: semi- or pseudo-agentive. In complicating the audience’s notions of a real/unreal binary (outside and inside the room), the birds’ comments direct our gaze towards their caste as the most evidently unreal. This, in turn, generates a dangerously porous boundary between the less evidently unreal Hawaiian-speaking components of the Room, and actual representation of Hawaii. In fact, the animacy of the Hawaiianspeaking room—the “colonial subject”—serves not to voice a Hawaiian subjectivity, but plays, as Hom articulates, a “dialectical trick” where the perpetual (re)animation of the colonized creates a “redemptive” illusion of agency, that, engineered by the colonizer, perpetuates the “immobility to which the colonized are always condemned.” The Hawaiian-speaking elements exist on the verge of perpetual disappearance—evidenced by the punishment of the storm— and may only be redeemed via assimilation or erasure.
The experience of “Hawaiian War Chant” is also
the floor and benches. Instead of weakening the simulation’s impact, the tactile quality of the tune affectively reaffirms the physicality of Hawaii: a land beyond the control of Disney’s engineers, so excessively material and embodied that it overflows from the constraints of the show (the soundtrack). The tactile differentiation between the Room’s landscape and birds also mirrors a dualist worldview that privileges the mind over the embodied and the material. While the birds are self-aware enough to purport possessive individualism, the Hawaiian-speaking elements’ totalizing materiality precludes them from the same; they have ‘too much’ body to purport control over it. This link affectively produces the Hawaiian subject as an illiberal, even subhuman ‘Other’ to white civilization, implicitly justifying the colonization and dispossession of Hawaii itself. Paradoxically, the Hawaiian speaking elements of the room are only metaphorically embodied. In practice, the Room is absolutely devoid of actual human representation. Without anthropocentricity, the Tiki Room enacts a vision of Hawaii that is devoid of personhood, where landscape and material culture are a sufficient substitute for Hawaiian people. The ‘essence’ of Hawaii is, therefore, unmoored from both the sovereignty and personhood of Hawaiian subjects, yet anchored intimately to their corporeality. Moreover, the colonizer’s body is obfuscated by an avian metaphor, promulgating colonial ideology while dematerializing the violent presence necessary to its end.
But lo and behold—lights up on the macaws. We’ve been saved from the tikis’ rage, and look! The Girls have returned, marking our safe arrival back to the (mainland) shore. The birds celebrate our return to the normative bounds of the Tiki Room by initiating the show’s finale, “Closing Bow.” Before bidding us “farewell and Aloha,” each of the Room’s performers provides a snippet of the most memorable aspect of their act, all incorporated into the familiar musical style established by the first two selections. Even the tikis and the flowers, while still singing in Hawaiian, alter their performance to accommodate the finale’s rhythm and melody. Redeemed for the disruptive thunderstorm caused by their ‘exotic’ and ‘pagan’ chanting, the flora and tikis are amenable to the social order—that is, the melody of “Closing Bow”—after all!
The narrative of “Closing Bow” maps intimately onto the incorporation of Hawaiian people into the realm of the United States as citizens in 1959. Although they still deemed Hawaiian culture non-normative, politicians qualified such culture as sufficiently politically and commercially advantageous in the Cold War era to grant the territory statehood. “Closing Bow” materializes this narrative transformation
by offering the possibility of assimilation to the order of whiteness—citizenship—to Hawaiian people, symbolically redeeming their ‘uncivilization.’ “Closing Bow,” then, lets us perform an act of forgetting. As Hawaiian statehood showcased United Statesian global benevolence by extending citizenship to a racially-diverse society, “Closing Bow” orients our attention toward inclusion—excerpts sung in Hawaiian—to obscure the restrictive strategies that foreclose the agency of the Hawaiian-speaking elements, such as a familiar melody, segregation from the birds, and excessive materiality. This performative forgetting mirrors the obfuscation of the systematic dispossession and exploitation of Hawaiian land by the tourism industry, racialized violence perpetrated against Native Hawaiians, and cultural erasure in the face of settler colonial lifeways. Opening at a time when the American public was unsure of how to interpret Hawaiian statehood, “Closing Bow” answers without ambiguity: an altruistic move to tame the exotic Hawaiian subject without erasing the enticing transgression that made them commercially viable.
In all my performance analysis, I’ve forgotten to consider the actual function of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, sponsored by United Airlines® (1963-1975) and Dole® (1976-present). The Tiki Room is a literal advertisement to travel to, settle, and materially exploit Hawaii itself.
The Tiki Room’s opening coincided with the first era of affordable air travel to Hawaii, inciting a tourism boom. Advertised side-by-side in newspapers, United Airlines promised family fun via a “Disneyland Passport:” a two-for-one special that included a flight to Los Angeles, admission to 12 attractions plus the Tiki Room—which cost extra at the time—and affordable flights to Hawaii, the “islands of pleasure.” Worse, Sanford B. Dole— cousin of James Dole, the founder of the Dole Food Company, the present sponsor of the Tiki Room—was instrumental in overthrowing the Hawaiian Kingdom’s autonomous government, and securing the islands’ ensuing annexation by the United States. In 1891, Queen Liliʻuokalani rose to the throne with an agenda to re-empower Hawaiian people and limit the sugar plantocracy’s governmental control. Threatened by this action and strained by the repeal of trade protections with the US, in 1893, a group of influential sugar planters and over 150 US Marines allied with Dole to coerce the ‘peaceful’ transfer of power from the Hawaiian monarchy to Dole himself, as the islands’ new president. Not only were the majority of native Hawaiian people disenfranchised, once Hawaii became a US territory in 1898, large
swaths of Hawaiian land were appropriated for use as homesteads, incentivizing white settlement. Moreover, the United States instrumentalized Hawaii as one of its largest military outposts in the Pacific world, extending the nation’s imperial reach far beyond the North American continent. Freed of tariffs and with direct ties to the colonial Hawaiian government, the Dole company became the largest producer of pineapples worldwide within the first 25 years of annexation. When, directly outside the exit to the Tiki Room, guests are invited to enjoy a Dole Whip, they are simultaneously invited to indulge in the literal fruits of empire.
The confluence of tangible and affective ties to Hawiian colonization present in the Tiki Room positions the attraction in a uniquely dangerous interpolative position. The Tiki Room isn’t an allegory, despite the many imperial narratives and tropes it maps onto. An allegory is predicated upon a distinction between the real and the represented—the latter standing in for the former. But when I enter the Tiki Room, I don’t believe that anything is real—it’s a theme park attraction! And yet, as the birds draw my attention to their unreal status via mock-transgression upon reality, they narrow my field of vision and obfuscate that which is less self-consciously unreal: the Hawaiianspeaking elements. Conveniently, those elements are extraordinarily tactile—edging, as felt, closer to the real than I’m comfortable with. Soothed by the air conditioning after a long day in the sun and indulged with a sweet treat afterward, it’s not hard for me to connect this pleasure with that of an imagined Pacific Eden. So, as I’m reassured by the unreality of the birds, the room slips, quietly, back into the realm of the real.
So the Tiki Room does represent Hawaii, that is, the commodified version that settler colonialism perpetually attempts to enact. It’s not my fault that I enjoy the room—that’s actually the point. I’ll just have to hop on a United Airlines flight and sample a Dole pineapple to verify the fantastical abundance of “the islands” myself! So, as generations of Americans have enjoyed the show for over 60 years before me, the Tiki Room continues to enact a Pacific paradise devoid of Hawaiian people, voices, and agency. But this colonial fantasy, wherein culture is salvaged while people(s) disappear, cannot be enacted by the Room alone: it depends on the willingness of a settler public—of me—to realize it.
BENJAMIN ROZEA B’27 is no longer invited to family vacations to Disneyland.
INDIE’S RUNNING OUT OF TIME
:A play in II acts
(TEXT) KALIE MINOR (DESIGN) APRIL SUJEONG LIM
Act I
Sciences Library; 3:30 a.m.; It’s snowing…again MEEK INHERITOR stares at their computer screen. They haven’t typed anything in the last 20 minutes but they refuse to go home. A bitterness that almost tastes like regret sits uncomfortably on their tongue. THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY enters, wearing your cords from highschool graduation.
THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY
Look at you, burning the midnight oil. You’re working so hard, you must be exhausted.
MEEK INHERITOR
I am. I’ve had four coffees, a Redbull, and three Zyns in the last two and a half hours. This project isn’t even half finished.
(They tap listlessly through Instagram stories, sigh, close the app) It’s Friday, all my friends are at some party and I keep hearing shouts of joy off Thayer. All I want is to go to bed.
THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY Leave? Now?
(It leans in close to MEEK INHERITOR. So close that they can smell the rancid heat of its breath) You are the only person in this building right now, that makes you special. Everyone else is having a good time, but you—by virtue of your hard work, your drive, your overlooked greatness—are suffering. That is what makes you good.
MEEK INHERITOR
You’ve been telling me that since I was fourteen. And I used to believe you were right, you know? I used to think this sleepless emptiness was a measure of my own virtue. I don’t know how true that is anymore.
THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY
If you start questioning this part of yourself now you’ll have to question everything else I’ve given you. (It sneers)
How else will you know you’re smart if it doesn’t seep out your pores into a miserable puddle you refuse to mop up? Like it or not, this is who you are.
MEEK INHERITOR puts their head down. The pride that used to warm their belly from telling everyone how little sleep they got, from displaying the rainbow of their double-booked GCal, has faded. Now, they’re just in over their head. If they stop running now, they’ll look down to see the earth gave way hundreds of yards back. You can’t run on air forever, and the faster you fall, the faster you can crawl back to center. THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY doesn’t want MEEK INHERITOR to know this.
THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY I think very highly of you.
(It starts to slink away. Its job here is almost done) You’re oozing with misery. Those are my favorite kind of people, you’re my favorite. Don’t give up on me yet. Soon you’ll be glittering in the water. Soon they’ll all see this price you’ve paid.
MEEK INHERITOR (Meekly)
Yeah alright, I’ll stay.
End of Act One.
DUSKY DAWN
I've been having a hard time winding down in the wee hours where any possibility of peaceful slumber could bless me. After a long day flocking through College Hill, hauling around a tote bag brimming with useless arts/humanities/social sciences *shit*, and running into practically all seven of my campus opps, I regularly find myself skidding abruptly from 60 mph to 0. This just isn’t working out for me, especially now that classes have started. So: how does Indie orchestrate her unique—peaceful?—evenings, and does she have any wisdom to shed onto a hapless, overscheduled, chronic night owl like myself?
INDIE
Dear Dusky Dawn,
I began this semester with a bright-eyed optimism of the soul. I tried this new thing where I would work in the daytime, and I found myself able to go to sleep around 10:30 most nights. It felt like I had won big at the Knowledge Lottery and would be okay forever. Then a week or two passed by and I was forced to reckon with the necessity of a week of late nights. I wanted them to take me kicking and screaming. I wanted 10:30 back. I wanted something for myself. But now I, too, feel the visceral, unstoppable rush of cortisol. At night I lay down and feel my body pound with unadulterated worry and wonder when the treadmill will slow.
Indie told everyone she could that this would be a Year of Wellness. This would be the year of leaving when you’re not welcome, of listening to the tiny voice that is infuriatingly right, and of getting the nine-out-of-ten-doctors-recommended eight hours of sleep. I can’t tell if what I feel is frustration, or bitterness, or disappointment, let alone who those emotions are targeted towards, but I know something must be done about this growing resentment before it eats me up. So grace.
Grace relieves you when you cannot muster the energy to work before your 10a.m.. Grace makes it feasible to stay up late into the night because you know a time will come when what is true now will no longer be so. Grace tells you to make tea and listen to music and pray into the abyss so that you get to feel marginally better. I think asking for a solution to this kind of problem is looking for the wrong sort of answer. Sometimes problems aren’t really problems, just manifestations of the way things are. Sometimes the best we can do is build some comfort around the circumstance, and ourselves. Go to Jahunger with a friend. Down a solo bottle of wine. Find yourself in the gaps of the neverending churn of productivity, so that when it does lull—because it will lull—you’ll have something to return to.
STAR-CROSSED SCHOLAR
There's too many things to do, and too little time to do them and so I have decided the best way to tackle my tasks is through random chance and the hands of fate, such as flipping a coin or rolling some dice. In the 1990s the US government spent billions of dollars testing whether or not college students could manipulate random number generators with their thoughts alone, and honestly, that could be me! I am not advocating for manifesting because it is inherently colonial, but I do think maybe we should write all our essays using monkeys on typewriters. Should I trust my free will, or is that just another set of random numbers being generated? Does pursuing our destiny negate it, or should I just start using GCal to sort my assignments?
INDIE
Dear Star-Crossed Scholar,
Indie is a staunch believer in signs everywhere. Last week, when I found a silver dollar on the ground, then saw a deer wink at me across the Quiet Green, I remembered the discussion post I almost forgot to do. The universe has a way of telling us these sorts of things. I think choosing to believe that our thoughts, actions, and the world that surrounds us are all a result of mere probabilistic coincidence is lame and boring. I prefer to think that the microplastics in my gut biome mean something, and that when I see a hawk perched outside Sears in the early morning it is there to deliver a cosmic message.
What is a life without meaning? What is a busy schedule without purpose? I’ve done the whole ‘trying to organize my responsibilities in my mind palace’ thing. I’ve done the ‘throw your pillow by the door before you go to sleep so that you don't forget to do laundry tomorrow’ thing. I’ve read the signs on billboards, in the cracks of pavement, and in the random number generator that I’ve been guessing with 100% accuracy since ‘08. None of that is any good if it’s tasks without passion, if it’s directive without motive. Gobbling up The Busy purely for the sake of being busy is out; we can never be monkeys on typewriters, we will never write Hamlet by pure chance. StarCrossed Scholar, I implore you to use GCal. Or a journal. Or Notion if you're a freak. It’s important to remember if what you’re remembering is important. If after all that nothing seems to stick, put something on the chopping block. We’re going for quality over quantity. We’re getting good.
End of Interlude.
Act II
Sciences Library; 6:00am; The sun is beginning to rise. MEEK INHERITOR has found a way to open the window on the twelfth floor. They feel the brisk chill of the morning, and they stare out at the harbor. They have wings, the wings are not made of wax. They are made of light. THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY stands behind MEEK INHERITOR. It only looks small and wispy now.
THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS DISGUISED AS PIETY
Think of what they’ll say! Think of who you’ll be! You can’t fly away, you’re nothing but human. You’re nothing but my own. Think, think, think.
MEEK INHERITOR
I have!
(They sound like they are shouting. But that is only because for once they are louder than THE SPIRIT) You’ve made me think for so long that I’ve never stopped to consider! I have wings! You were wrong!
MEEK INHERITOR leaps out of the Sciences Library, bright and warm. Bright against the bright morning sky so that it’s all bright and the only shadow is that of THE SPIRIT OF HUBRIS.
End of Play.
(Busy, busy, busy,) Indie
FOOD IN REVIEW
02/21/2025
The Bulletin
Surveillance Defense Workshop 7 PM, February 26th Friedman Hall 208 How much of your private information is actually public? Join AIRES @ Brown for a Surveillance Defense Workshop to learn practical strategies for reducing your digital footprint. This hands-on session will cover real-world techniques and case studies to enhance your privacy, equipping you with the tools to take control of your digital presence.
c Community Overdose Prevention & Prevention Training
A workshop dedicated to training to prevent drug overdose! Sign up for one of many workshops this spring.
Recovery and Harm Reduction Film Festival
FEATURES Graduate Student Worker Labor Rights, Then and Now
Natalie and Kalie go to Jahunger! At the end of a hellish, work-filled week, all anyone can really ask for is a dish with unmistakable noodle consistency. Kalie Minor B’27 and I had nearly made it out of one of those weeks, and to motivate us in our final stretch, I pitched the idea of “Jahunger Friday?” It was our carrot on a stick, and we were dumb pigs. Jahunger specializes in Uyghur cuisine and is widely regarded for its authenticity. To start, Kalie and I ordered the Kavap, traditionally grilled lamb skewers in a portion well fit for a party of two. The secret family marinade used for the Kavap elevates the well-done lamb and leaves your mouth tingling with spice. For our main course, we indulged in the self-titled Jahunger Noodle. The dish features hand-pulled noodles, thinly sliced beef, a secret Sichuan peppercorn sauce, and fresh chives. To say that this was a textural experience would be speaking lightly. The combination of Uyghur spice, tender meat, and dense noodles makes for a filling meal that leaves you scraping the bottom of the bowl. Upon spotting a Not-So-Good first date in the establishment, one Kalie Minor remarked, “You know, I think I’d be okay with shallow conversation under this white light just because of the chewy tooth of these noodles.” The aromatic uplift provided by the fresh chives makes for a well-balanced dish that still packs a punch. Visit Jahunger on 333 Wickenden St.. Eat you again soon! NATALIE SVOB B’27 would go on a first date at Jahunger.
With graduate student workers’ rights in limbo on the federal level, the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO) is mobilizing to protect students on the state level. Recently, GLO has been working with legislators, workers, and lawyers to introduce and propose the H.B. 5187 Bill, which would amend the Rhode Island State Labor Relations Act. This amendment would explicitly define student workers, and potentially even fellows, as employees of the university, giving them the legal right to organize for collective bargaining in the workplace. This push for state-level legislation had arisen after threats were made against the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) 2016 “Columbia Decision,” which established that students working at private universities and colleges were statutory employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Since Trump’s inauguration, he has fired the NLRB chairperson, the first firing in the board’s 89-year-history, and left it without quorum, making it impossible to enforce legislation to safeguard workers’ rights to unionize. This is not dissimilar to his actions during his first presidency, when he tried to restrict 1.5 million private college and university student workers from unionizing, claiming they were not real “employees.” Brown plays a particularly important role in the history of graduate student worker labor rights. In 2004, an NLRB decision regarding Brown found that graduate students were not employees and thus did not have the right to unionize. This decision was overturned by the 2016 decision at Columbia University, but without state-level protections, these rights to unionize could be revoked. Last Wednesday, Labor Organization of Community Coordinators organizer Anna Ryu and GLO President Michael Ziegler, supported by dozens of student workers, provided testimony about the necessity for robust state-level protection of the union members’ rights to the House Labor Committee. If you live in Rhode Island, write to your representative to support H.B. 5187 and look out for more GLO actions!
10 AM10 PM, February 22nd Smith-Buonanno Hall 106 On Saturday, February 22, 2025, the Donovan Program for Recovery and Substance-Free Initiatives at Brown University will host a Recovery and Harm Reduction Film Festival. The Festival will take place from 10am10pm in Smith-Buonanno Hall, in the first floor lobby and room 106. In addition to film screenings, there will be a panel discussion by experts in addiction and film who will discuss the questions of representation of recovery and harm reduction. Additionally, at 6pm, we will host a mocktail reception with music by Brown students, tabling by local organizations, and naloxone training.
c Mutual Aid & Community Action
Volunteer for the AMOR’s Defense Line Transportation Team Have a car? Help the AMOR’s Defense Line by supporting individuals that need free and timely transport options to court dates, immigration check-ins, visits to family in prison or detention, other immigration appointments, and community events & actions.
c Art Rhody Revue: Burlesque Open Stage 8 PM, February 23rd, 8pm AS220 Black Box
c Events @ Brown Hunger’s Decolonial Modernisms
AMOR (Alliance to Mobilize our Resistance)
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/amor-network
Better Lives Rhode Island Better Lives’ Food Pantry in Downtown Providence is currently empty. They served over 30,000 people in 2024, and with harsh winter conditions, food insecurity is an especially large problem for many Rhode Islanders. They are urgently calling for monetary donations and non-perishable food.
The Vic/Mod Working group is hosting a talk with Alys Moody, an Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, entitled: “Hunger’s Decolonial Modernisms: Dambudzo Marechera and Ngugi wa Thiong’o in the African Writers Series,” on February 25 at 5:30 PM in the Barker Room (70 Brown Street).
Providence French and Francophone Film Festival
BetterLivesRI.org/donate
ANGE YEUNG B’28 would be writing to their rep if they lived in Rhode Island.
To that end of authority, I’m the wave you ride On tides of blue or green or white Get me right and we’ll go through the night Once you enter the bay that’s the end of the way! Who Am I?
The Providence French and Francophone Film Festival is happening at Avon Cinema from February 27th to March 6th! There will be 15 international films shown and Alice Diop, a Franco-Senegalese filmmaker, will be in attendance. Her movie Nous will open the festival on Thursday evening. On Saturday, March 1st, she will present a curated selection of films from her Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World, a project she began in 2020 with the Centre Pompidou and Ateliers Médicis.