The College Hill Independent — Vol 49 Issue 3

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Plum Luard: Luca, what is your favorite thing about Jolie?

Luca Suarez: What’s my favorite thing about Jolie? Um, my favorite thing about Jolie is probably her iconic scowl. Whenever Jolie hears something slightly perturbing or, like, alarming, she scrunches up her face like she just ate a lemon. I feel like it’s usually directed at me, though.

PL: I like Jolie too. She always lets me drink her water during copy. She’s so cool. Jolie Barnard: I like you guys also by the way.

LS: What about me? What do you like about me, Plum Luard (aka PL)?

PL: I like your inverted squint. Those crazy eyes you have when you’re walking down the street so that you can take everything in. Yea, yea, exactly like that. Why are you looking at me like that?

LS: Jolie, what’s your favorite thing about Plum. Be real.

JB: My favorite part about Plum is that she bikes and has big earrings. But actually it’s that face she just made like she really wanted something from me but was ashamed to ask when she wanted me to vote to name this the BUZZ issue.

LS: Wait guys, do I like myself? Who am I?

PL: Wait what?

LS: I wish my name was a palindrome. Something like “Luca Acul” would be nice. Late metal. Liam’s mail. If Jolie had a palindrome name, it would be “Jolie Eiloj.” Plum’s name is already a palindrome, but she doesn’t know it yet.

JB: No. It should just be about me.

Andrew Liu: What is an “inverted squint”? - JPL

Masthead

MANAGING

Jolie Barnard

Plum Luard

Luca

WEEK IN

Ilan Brusso

Ben Flaumenhaft

ARTS

Beto Beveridge

Nan Dickerson

Paulina Gąsiorowska

EPHEMERA

Anji Friedbauer

Selim Kutlu

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

FEATURES

Riley Gramley

Angela Lian

Talia Reiss

LITERARY

Sarkis Antonyan

Georgia Turman

METRO

Cameron Leo

Lily Seltz

METABOLICS

Brice Dickerson

Nat Mitchell

Daniel Zheng

SCIENCE + TECH

Emilie Guan

Everest Maya-Tudor

Emily Vesper

SCHEMA

Lucas Galarza

Ash Ma

WORLD

Aboud Ashhab

Ivy Rockmore

DEAR INDY

Kalie Minor

BULLETIN BOARD

Qiaoying Chen

Gabrielle Yuan

DESIGN EDITORS

April S. Lim

Andrew Liu

Anaïs Reiss

DESIGNERS

Mary-Elizabeth Boatey

Jolin Chen

Sejal Gupta

Kay Kim

Minah Kim

Seoyeon Kweon

Saachi Mehta

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Rachel Shin

COVER COORDINATORS

Kian Braulik

Brandon Magloire

STAFF WRITERS

Layla Ahmed

Tanvi Anand

Hisham Awartani

Arman Deendar

Nura Dhar

Keelin Gaughan

Lily Ellman

David Felipe

Audrey He

Martina Herman

Elena Jiang

Daniel Kyte-Zable

Emily Mansfield

Nadia Mazonson

Coby Mulliken

Daphne Mylonas

Naomi Nesmith

Caleb Rader

William Roberts

Caleb Stutman-Shaw

Natalie Svob

Tarini Tipnis

Ange Yeung

Peter Zettl

COPY CHIEF

Samantha Ho

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Justin Bolsen

Jackie Dean

Jason Hwang

Avery Liu

Becca Martin-Welp

Lila Rosen

Bardia Vincent

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Julia Cheng

Izzy Roth-Dishy

ILLUSTRATORS

Mia Cheng

Anna Fischler

Mekala Kumar

Mingjia Li

Ellie Lin

Cindy Liu

Ren Long

Benjamin Natan

Jessica Ruan

Jackson Ruddick

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Meri Sanders

Sofia Schreiber

Elliot Stravato

Luna Tobar

Catie Witherwax

Lily Yanagimoto

Alena Zhang

Nicole Zhu

EDITOR

WEB

Eleanor Park

WEB DESIGNERS

Kenneth Anderson

Jinho Lee

Mai-Anh Nguyen

Annika Singh

Brooke Wangenheim

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Imran Hussain

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

Kalie Minor

Nat Mitchell

Eurie Seo

Emma Zwall

FINANCIAL COORDINATOR

Simon Yang

SENIOR EDITORS

Arman Deendar

Angela Lian

Lily Seltz

MVP

Angela

MISSION STATEMENT

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

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

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

*Our Beloved Staff

Week in Compassion

c On the Quiet Green, life was all suck and sepia. Our stupid moms weren’t texting us back, and no one seemed to care about the new dance move we just invented. The day was dying an easy death when—oh, what was it that made us turn our heads? The jangle of the junk on her carabiner? The whispering brush of her naked feet against the grass? The easy laughter of her dirty cronies across the way? Our ears munched on these delights as she shimmered in the space before us. Ridin’ High Rachel, the coolest stoner around.

“Hey freaks. We’re righting wrongs and ripping bongs at my place this PM. Last week, that fucked philosophy dean kicked us off the roof of the department building, so this week we’re holding our seance in her damn office. Up yours, Prof Carol! Anyways, you two should stop by.” HOT POTATO! THEE Ridin’ High Rachel just invited us to a smoke sesh! Are we officially stoners? Are we Bushwick baddies, tattoo-ready, dirty couch, fire escape? Call us hippies, ripped jeans, peace signs, sex on the beach but no sand gets in! Or maybe we’re just hot. Finally. HOT.

In unison: “sounds chill.”

Ridin’ High Rachel nodded, floating away in a cloud of smoke and effortless grunge. But now we had a problem. You see, fire makes us feel unsafe and like Mom is far away. Thusly (SAT word), we’d (heh) never even smoked, even at all. And lighters. Lighters are bad. Light and cumbersome, like first kisses. Flames are like first kisses too, because they’re always almost on the lips. But for Ridin’ High Rachel we needed to commit. We needed to show her and all her cool friends with good pants and occasionally lackluster personalities that we are actually BIG now, and are not gonna let a little oxygen-hungry heat whore determine our lives. Not anymore.

So, that’s when we decided to venture forth and buy …wait, maybe we don’t feel good saying that word…okay we’ll say it but only a little bit: weed. So we had to procure (SAT word) some weed, but we didn’t know where to find it. When we asked our friend Regina Spektor, she was, frankly, a bit snippy, but ultimately offered: “just look up the

shows you how good of a person they are.

I skipped on over.

“Hiya Pat!”

Pretty Pat is obviously really cool, and love is obviously about two opposites attracting, so I wanted to come across as not that cool, or even, more specifically, awkward.

Pretty Pat knew just how to greet me: “What’s good, my liege? Fancy a cigarette?”

“Oh, that’s okay. It’s sort of a long story, but I actually don’t really…”

That’s when I remembered: I am with Ilan and we are supposed to be buying weed for Ridin’ High Rachel’s epic smoke sesh.

Feelings aren’t numbers. Yesterday, my sister called and asked me if I had had any big feelings lately. F you sister! Feelings are not just big or small. Size is a stupid way to understand feelings. What if a feeling is small but dense or massive but diffuse. What if a feeling is sticky, bouncy or tight. What if a feeling is like that goo I once made with cornstarch and water AGHHH!

Ooh a flower. It grows by my feet. I love you, flower. Your petals are perfect. You remind us men (gender neutral) that nothing we create, no tower or trinket, will ever rival divinity.

Oh god, you really are a messy lady. Giving man the power to craft the bomb but not the wisdom to know not to use them. We really are all just Eve, picking that fruit, doing that thing we know we shouldn’t, but powerless in resisting our devilish curiosity. But why demonize curiosity. Wait! Maybe Eve was unrelatedly lesbian! Woah– Not me queering the bible! Oooh! Queering the bible, I bet Ben would like that phrase—BEN! Where did he go? PANIC! I know I left him by that church, but had I seen him since? Wasn’t he telling me about an iPhone call with his sister–wait, that was my sister. Oh no, how long had it been??

A long ramp led us to a door. In psychedelic scrawl, the most divine of sayings was rendered: “Compassion is difficult, weed helps!” This was our place! Our lips spread into a smile, one that was soon shared by a figure beside the door, a man who approached us and inquired, “Hey boys, how are ya? You two have identification by any chance?” We proudly pulled out our Brown IDs, which featured original bedazzled artwork by our friend Wobbly Wendy, and handed them to the man. “Ehhh, this is not uh, this doesn’t have your birth year on it. Here at TCSCC, we only accept people over 21 and under 12…like for a youth drug prevention thing, and on the weekends they play hide and seek.” We look at each other. We had an idea. A crazy one, but it just might work.

In unison, channeling Principal Emily: “Our apologies, we thought it would be self-evident. You see, we’re actually journalists for the College Hill Independent, Southern New England’s largest alt-weekly publication. We’d hate to inconvenience you, but if you don’t let us in, we will tell Plum. Plum’s our boss. And don’t be fooled by her fruity little name. She’s a nasty woman.” The man fell to the floor and whimpered like a big baby whose Mom was us. We were like Mom when she’s mad. “So, if we were you, Mr. Door Fucker, we’d let us through.” He relented and, trembling, he reached for the handle. The door was opened, and so were our hearts, and we rushed into the store like water that suddenly had a new place to go.

We approached the woman at the counter, demanding “the best weed in this joint” (heh). She responded: “Ok. Flower or pre-rolls?” Our mushy hearts begged us to say flower, one of our most favorite words. But, no. We were now rockin’ with Ridin’ High herself, and Ridin’ High would think flowers are stupid, dumb, and stupid. So we didn’t even add a please: “Pre-rolls.”

Back at campus, we slipped into the requisite gear before dancing our way to the Philosophy Department, stopping occasionally to catch our breath and look at bushes. This was a long afternoon, but our hearts were ready. So, when Ridin’ High Rachel opened the door, high, hot, and horny, we three melted into a forever hug.

BEN FLAUMENHAFT B’27 and ILAN BRUSSO B’27 are high on life.

Paint it Green

How the Fossil Fuel Industry is Using “Net-Zero” to Its Advantage

( TEXT CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW DESIGN JOLIN CHEN ILLUSTRATION MIA CHENG )

“A few degrees’ rise in the earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps. And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through one hundred and fifty feet of tropical water. For, in weather, we’re not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself.”

—Dr. Research (Frank Baxter) in

The Unchained Goddess, 1958

c Why would a young liberal college grad agree to work for a multinational oil company?

It’s not a lead-up to a joke, but it is an interesting question. A good friend of mine told me this story recently, about a friend of hers who, after graduating college with a degree in geoscience, took a job to work at ExxonMobil. My friend pushed back, and prodded for an explanation. It was perplexing: engaging with the fossil fuel industry had long been considered taboo in their circles, and it was unlike this friend to turn on their beliefs.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be doing good work,” they told my friend with a shrug and a smile. “I’m working for Exxon’s sustainability division!”

In what seems like an outrageous oxymoron, oil companies are currently spending incredible amounts of money and work power to preach environmental consciousness and “sustainability.” Their websites and advertisements are flooded with large-font claims of their devotion to the “health of the planet,” the “energy transition,” and “net-zero.” Americans increasingly view the climate crisis as an important political issue, with younger people significantly more likely than their elders to embrace the phasing out of fossil fuels. The industry has certainly recognized this trend; where once they were intent on spreading misinformation about the realities of the climate crisis, they now largely acknowledge it and advertise themselves as leaders in progress.

After decades of consciously and recklessly deceiving and misinforming the public, when did the industry make the rhetorical switch? What claims are they making to persuade us to trust them? And why is it crucial that we don’t?

If we stay on our current emissive trajectory, our species is headed for unimaginable disaster. Greenhouse gasses that we ceaselessly pump into the atmosphere are heating our planet and altering the climate, leading to increasingly intense and destructive heat waves, water scarcity, disease, crop failure and subsequent famine, war, sea level rising and acidification, strengthening of storms, and air pollution. Any one of these alone amounts to a disaster and a humanitarian crisis. All of these effects compounding would bring about the end of human civilization.

Researchers have been fully aware of the dangers of unabated fossil fuel use since at least the 1970s. It’s telling that despite their assertive warnings, those in power have continuously neglected to make significant changes to our energy systems. While the genesis and evolution of this crisis is incredibly complex,

one constant has been large-scale corporate devotion to profit at the expense of environmental responsibility. Oil and natural gas distributors such as Shell, BP, and Chevron are primarily faithful to their shareholders; it thus makes sense that they would act in the best interests of the company, rather than some abstract entity like “the health and stability of the environment.” They haven’t been acting in the interest of humanity, contrary to what many corporate mission statements might lead one to believe. In fact, some consider the perpetuation of the climate crisis to be a crime against humanity in itself.

Much of this early research on the dangerous effects of carbon input into the atmosphere was funded and conducted by oil companies themselves. Back in 1957, researchers at Humble Oil, which would be bought by Standard Oil and rebranded as Exxon in 1973, published a paper that analyzed the “enormous quantity of carbon dioxide… from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Similar research initiatives would continue for the following decades: in 1979, Exxon would devote $600,000 per year to find how its carbon contributions would impact the environment. “It behooves us to start a very aggressive defense program,” an Exxon researcher would

write in a memo, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.” This knowledge was crucially important for the industry, not to adjust its practices but to protect them. Research on the dangers of emissions was so clear that eventual action seemed inevitable; they just wanted to get ahead of the field.

In his book Losing Earth, Nathaniel Rich details this tumultuous decade of 1979-89, during which aggressive climate legislation was continuously introduced, debated, and largely rejected on the global stage. Even though most of what we know now about how our environment will react to continuous fossil fuel use was largely settled science in ‘79 (Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science has argued that there have not been any major breakthroughs in climate physics since that very year), organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute (API) spent the ‘80s cautioning against taking aggressive action in a kind of temporal passing of the buck. The API was adamant that “premature actions taken to address this issue could be disruptive and a potential waste of society’s resources.” Building on their cautioning against hastiness and emphasis on the “divergence of expert opinion,” the industry took on an aggressive misinformation campaign. The following decades would see fossil fuel companies pouring incredible amounts of money into publicizing the constructed fallibility of climate research. In 1998, a leaked memo from within the API claimed that “victory will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science... Unless ‘climate change’ becomes a non-issue... there may be no moment when we can declare victory.” Between 2000 and 2016, the fossil fuel industry spent around $2 billion to directly interfere with the passing of climate focused legislation.

Once climate change became prominent enough of a public concern that the industry’s “we don’t know enough yet” strategy was deemed no longer viable, they pivoted to acceptance, and then feigned enthusiastic embrace, of the sustainability cause. This certainly doesn’t mean that their devotion to the wealth of their shareholders became any less important. They just disguised it differently.

On the homepage of ExxonMobil’s corporate website, the company makes the claim that they are “helping accelerate society’s path to net zero by scaling up emission-reduction solutions.” Their green pledge goes further still: Exxon claims to be “creating sustainable solutions that improve quality of life and meet society’s evolving needs,” and “driv[ing] meaningful change.” It doesn’t take very much digging at all to find that the company is equally as proud of this as they are of their recent corporate merger that “combines Pioneer’s more than 850,000 net acres in the Midland Basin with ExxonMobil’s 570,000 net acres in the Delaware and Midland Basins.” This brag-worthy accomplishment will see their “Permian production volume” more than double, they claim. Projecting a 730,000,000 barrels of oil per year increase in crude oil extraction three years into the future certainly does not follow their stated environmental sustainability goals.

BP (formerly British Petroleum) is no better. Another of the largest extractors of crude oil from our planet, BP is using very similar rhetoric to Exxon. “We are embedding sustainability in the way we do business and across our strategy. Our sustainability frame sets out our aims for getting to net zero, improving people’s lives and caring for our planet,” their website states, though elsewhere on their website they can be found flaunting the news that “one of bp’s 1 biggest-ever projects… is coming together in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of West Africa.” They similarly announce a project elsewhere that “unlocks potential for development of 10 billion barrels of discovered resources,” a project that “represents bp’s ongoing commitment to invest in this prolific high-margin basin, an important element of growing the value of bp.” At the very same time, BP strongly states a commitment to sustainability and “caring for our planet,” as well as an “ongoing commitment” to “[grow] the value

1 BP rebranded with a lowercase stylization in 2002

of bp” through continuous fossil fuel extraction. Shell, another oil powerhouse, also commits to “become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050, generating value for our shareholders, our customers and wider society.” Their proposal is “designed to integrate sustainability with our business strategy.”

What each of these companies have in common is that alongside their stated commitment to sustainability and getting to “net-zero,” they claim in the same breath to prioritize financial growth and shareholder profit. In our contemporary hyper-capitalist economy, it is unlikely that these two priorities can meaningfully coexist. They each attest their plan to embed practices of sustainability within their strategic business models; in their eyes–or, rather, from their mouths–the goals of both sustainable development and their pre-existing value-driven continuous-growth models are mutually attainable.

Exxon, BP, and Shell are three of the top 10 oil companies in the world by production, together responsible for the extraction of over five million barrels of oil every single day. These resources are used to supply much of the energy that we have settled on as the modern consumptive status quo. This is why the posed helplessness that the companies portray is so baffling. When Exxon references the “resiliency of our plans under a wide range of future scenarios” in their green pledge, they fail to (publically) recognize that they are, in large part, responsible for which of those “range of scenarios” we as a species continue towards. Of course, this admission would not be great for the company’s bottom line. They want to wield the power without the responsibility. Uncle Ben would not approve. Does all this sound familiar? Just as they did back in the mid-20th century, the fossil fuel industry is attempting to get ahead of the curve. They want to preserve the status-quo as much as possible, know ahead of time where the field is going, and capitalize on their foresight. +++

There’s a reason that each of these companies parrot the specific buzzword “net-zero.” The term, which became popular after its use in the Paris Agreement, refers to the goal of achieving atmospheric carbon removal equal to that which humans continue to emit. Crucially, the net-zero goal implies that the continuous emission of greenhouse gasses will continue (which can be interpreted to include the burning of fossil fuels). The onus, then, is primarily on the adoption of drawdown technologies to offset that which is (however unfortunately) released.

“Net-zero” is, in a sense, a trisyllabic manifestation of oil companies’ proposed growth-sustainability “compromise.”

Oil companies have near-universally jumped on this term in their declarations of sustainability because a world in which even environmentalists are pushing for release-drawdown equality–as seen in the Paris Agreement–is one in which sustained burning of fossil fuels is inherently permissible. It is a world in which BP can send greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as long as they are appropriately resolute about their commitment to draw down just as much.

Many of the sustainability proposals made by the fossil fuel industry involve Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) technology. The idea is to draw

down (basically vacuum) carbon from the atmosphere and put it back into the earth where it can no longer act as a greenhouse gas. The problem is that this technology doesn’t exist in an even close to useful capacity. The US government has spent billions funding the development of CSS technology, with little to show for it. There are active plants, but operating them is unbelievably expensive: it is estimated that offsetting the US’s greenhouse gas production with existing CSS tech would cost over $6 trillion each year. To advance this technology to a viable level will take time and absurd resources, neither of which are functionally available to us.

This is certainly not to say that net-zero emissions is in itself a goal unworthy of aspiration. In a healthy, stable environment, there is both constant input and drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere. The nature and severity of the input and drawdown has varied greatly throughout our planet’s history, however, and with it the state of the climate (though never this quickly). In this sense, what is historical and “natural” is not necessarily desirable. If we want to continue to live and thrive on this planet, we must ensure stability for ourselves and all other forms of life. We must not go the way of the trilobites, doomed to extinction by a massive climatic shift 252 million years ago. It is crucial that, as soon as possible, we release the grasp held by the fossil fuel industry, and take our energy future into our own hands.

Is it possible that some researchers at Exxon, BP, and Shell are working in earnest to advance sustainable energy technologies? Yes. Is it possible that technologies developed by these companies could have a place in a socially and environmentally responsible future? Also yes. But can we trust them to be leaders, or even major players, in our society’s transition to inevitable carbon-neutrality? Absolutely not.

The only responsible action that our leaders can take at this point in time is to orchestrate an aggressive, complete, and uncompromising transition to renewable energy alongside a similarly aggressive restriction of the burning of fossil fuels. Humans are using more energy today than ever before. It is a level of consumption that is not sustainable now; it is not yet clear exactly how destructive it could become in the following years, decades, centuries. What is clear is that it will prove disastrous.

It is our responsibility, it is a moral obligation, to heed the warnings of Dr. Research on a popular children’s program way back in 1958. It will forever be a moral obligation, no matter what happens in the near future. “We know that 2 degrees of warming is considerably worse than 1.5 degrees, and that the use of half-degree intervals is itself euphemistic; every gradient is worse than the last: 2.1 degrees is considerably better than 2.2 degrees, which is dramatically better than 2.3 degrees,” Rich writes. Every barrel of oil extracted from the earth, every excess molecule of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is an atrocity. Just as it was never too early to begin the fight for our environment, it will never be too late.

CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW B’25 is on a hike.

Paper Cuts Pen on paper, 2024

A crowd gathers from the shadows to watch a portrait cut from paper. Drawn on site at NYC Chinatown’s Night Market.

AMELIA JEOUNG R’26

( TEXT LILIANA GREYF

DESIGN NICOLE ZHU ILLUSTRATION ELLIOT STRAVATO )

c THE SETTING:

In the early days of the new arrangement, it was decided that silence (it had no edges) was no longer in fashion. A hum and buzz was installed, to remedy the absence of sound. What began as a fad grew to a fever. Now it’s a fable for these old folk who still remember the world when it had silence in it. In a room with no doors in a town with no name, they have assembled a meeting. The actors in a half-circle of chairs. The audience in the other half.

We begin on Sunday morning, seven minutes to ten. Outside it is June.

THE CHARACTERS:

In the far chair sits RUSSELL (that’s how he wrote his name, capitalized through the end of fourth grade, steady and slow. Then he learned the lowercase. Then he arrived here. Now it is summer, the trees through the two windows in the meetinghouse are trees again, they are green and he is 83). On his right knee, a handkerchief.

By his side, CASEY, in the middle of her life.

DENNIS, 76, his fingers chewed, carrying hot milk or iced tea or whatever it is he likes.

JOY, in a polyester dress.

LIONEL, for the first time in many weeks, busy as he was with all that dying. Now ghost, he glides wry and smooth, leg-crossed onto the center of the circle. So as not to disturb the light he sits mostly motionless, intermittently waters his toes or wipes a dribble of peach juice from his lips.

SILENT M EETING — SCRIPT

LIGHTS UP.

The meeting settles a few minutes before the appointed time. Eyes are closed, some. RUSSELL clears his throat into a handkerchief. A member of the audience thinks, who are we to want what from whom? Another suppresses a cough.

Silence and stillness—earthly thoughts—as still as is possible in the kaleidoscope of the religious. A fidget, a phlegm, a swarm of infinitely small gods cartwheel over the dustmites in the rug. LIONEL becomes the rug’s fibers. CASEY lets her eyes rest on the rug, a circle in the center of the circle. The color of a car driving out of a city. Oh, how soft it seems! From where this cloth arrived, how long it traveled, what touched its what: neither here nor there. CASEY wants to put her tough face against it, her tough hands. Wants to unzip herself, fold the rug up and put it inside. At sleepaway camp her bunkmate Lulu had a rug so soft she used it as a bed fleece. She had let Patricia do the same, and Gabriella, and sometimes CASEY CASEY loved this, Lulu’s fairness, and loved even more the nights she spent holding the thing under her shirt on her belly, her boychest. Back then the cicadas came out every year to chirp the night to safety and CASEY had stayed up listening.

Now CASEY falls asleep easy in the early evening, dreamless, despite the skitter and crash and moan and thrum, the music playing downstairs and down from the heavens. Now she wears herself in soft black cottons and cargo; like a boy in pubescent rebellion, her mother had once remarked after a drink, or like an underdressed mourner. CASEY hasn’t kissed a man since she was a girl, but she loves the way they come into the hardware store where she works the

register, looking for ugly paint or custom-cut window shades or a thin plank of dark wood. Despite their varieties—some tall, some bald, some bagged under the eyes, some gums almost purple—it seems to her that they all have a string that tugs at them, from their forehead or some at the nose, pulling them steadily into an inevitable next step. In these, her boxy pants, she feels almost light enough to be towed along like that, to ride the crests and spirals of this dazzled silence, of the sun’s unending churn, as if being dragged in a wagon or on a leash.

RUSSELL wonders whether he will be the first to stand and speak—to bring his one voice into the cave, to cry out from a narrow place and be answered with expanse. All week he misses it, this speaking into the silence, it tastes so deep, like a silty drink from the bottom of a well. Last week he stood first, and the week before, and the week before his wife’s kids were staying the weekend and so he had missed the meeting.

DENNIS with closed eyes knows how many ways there are into prayer, and so imagines himself wrapped around the neck of a giraffe. (He has never before seen a giraffe but imagines they feared — despite their size—the growing sound of the globe, got on some otherworldly arc and now live by a silent sea.) The creature turns its head and DENNIS sways, clasping his chewed fingers into each other, pressing his thighs tight against the spotted velvet column. Their bodies wobble together, something crumpled falls out of his pocket and down to the hooves, DENNIS forgets his place in his own mind, feels the warm thunder of thick blood rushing discoid up and up to the ears, the boned ossicones in their fur covers. A lurch, and the giraffe begins its noble gallop. DENNIS pushes deep into the incense of its tousle, flying slant into some other orient.

What is unfed in RUSSELL the silence feeds. As a boy he had worn on his shoulder some other parrot of a god, one that asked him to mutter in an ancient language and rock back on his heels three times a day, to cover his head as soon as it left the pillow. This was when the generation of noise was beginning, and (desiring inclusion) he had snapped his heels harder and faster into the sidewalk with each step, until he was stomprunning through the schooldoors, through the temples. He was not particularly fond of noisemaking—though he was congratulated for his skillful clucks and mutters— nor of being young, the mess and color of it, and had blamed this misfortune on that all-powerful creature. He would never have admitted it, but what he had liked best was not the singing but the pauses between the songs, when for a moment the prayer was still a wordless desire, the language not yet there to winnow and cleave the chestful feeling of being in need together.

LIONEL, that good good dead man, finds the silence more colorful than when he was visible to it. Those many weeks of sitting still in this meeting, which once was both haven and cornerstone, appear redundant, the linty excess of aliveness. A potent memory: after he turned 30, LIONEL had gone downtown every Wednesday in his red glitter heels and a touch of blush, to expel with glamor and heat the yarn that kept him knotted. Silence was still plentiful, then, and they ran to escape it; inside the club it was crowded with babble, towering sound, the beat or the bass hollering its boom, inviting all to scream. How had he embraced this? And when had the sweat dried, turned cold? At the end of the night they would all end up on orange couches with pillows in between, licking their fingers of caramel from all that dancing. Their eardrums ringing tinny. He had been told by a past lover that his chin was remarkably round, and so he always sat with it in his hand, his elbow against another’s knee or the dampness of his nighttime belly. How had he been so young? LIONEL opens his mouth as if to laugh with himself, then gets up to pirouette, glinting.

Today’s additional absences: not only of sound, but of the urge to hold it; of the usual birds in their own circle beyond the window; and of LIONEL’s almond bars in the kitchen. Still JOY waits for them, the hunk of gummed nut cracking like heaven away from earth between her teeth. Once, after all that silence, she and LIONEL had stood laughing in the din on the corner, watching a pigeon approach and evade the dingy jaw of a chihuahua roped and collared to a backyard’s central tree. The noise was always strongest where streets met each other. She wishes LIONEL were here (though he is—what is it, he thinks, with all this wishing?) to remark on the way the sound was exiting and entering their open throats. That was back when she had just arrived in town and painted her walls white, a non-sonic rhyme. Her own walls, for the first time in her adult life they were utterly hers, their emboldened corners singing in chorus the sharp hymns of her aloneness.

RUSSELL coughs, inaudibly, into his handkerchief. The door of the theater opens, or someone opens it—a child? What’s left of LIONEL? From this orifice we get dust, light, and the awkward entrance of an invisible bird. Followed by its father and its father’s father. They have come, those winged tittering things, to escape the sound. DENNIS crouches down and feeds them silence from his empty hands. And they pour in, hovering crooked in hopped bites, small havoc in the scene as it grows to finish. JOY gets ahead of herself, puts her two hands up against her chest, and pushes back. The birds sit on the rafters, crowd the rug, eat the air, think birdthoughts thick and swivel their beaks crowded. The audience allows desire to pass, as if on a conveyor belt. CASEY watches herself land, hover, land again. LIONEL stands up and shows us his wings. They are transcendent and obvious—how have we never noticed?

RUSSELL (standing to speak) BLACKOUT.

LILIANA GREYF B’26 is

In Conversation with Jackie Wang

( TEXT ANGELA LIAN DESIGN RACHEL SHIN ILLUSTRATION MINGJIA LI )

Here is my review of Jackie Wang’s Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun:

c Which is to say, I closed the book feeling everything in a way that could only be captured by saying hardly anything at all.

After years in the theoretical periphery of works like Carceral Capitalism, the first Jackie Wang book I picked up was her essay collection, field guide, and “almanac of extreme girlhood”: Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun. It wasn’t even for me—it was a gift for my girlfriend. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d gleaned from a cursory flip through its contents, and so it wasn’t long before I got a copy of my own.

Jackie’s writing is intimate, expansive, and perfectly weird. It at once comforts you and forces you to face the discomforts of being. That I would eventually follow the bends of her girlhood and the threads of her mind, her subconscious and travels and self-education, felt inevitable. She has built a book that flickers, that nearly lives and breathes.

When I contacted Jackie for an interview, I didn’t expect a reply. I got one the next day. Jackie is casual and brief. Her email sign-off says “Sent from my space phone.” Face to face, she is smiling and thoughtful; our forty-minute-turned-hour-anda-quarter conversation covered Chilean literature, writing for the hypothetical audience, and grappling with belonging.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Angela Lian: In 2010, a newspaper at your college did an interview where you said you’re “most passionate about experimental memoir, travel writing, lyrical essay writing, poetic theorizing, and epistolary stories.” Thirteen years later, you published Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun, which spans 2006-2016 and contains—or is—all of those things. So you had this process of going back into your personal archive of so many years and so many versions of yourself, with writing that may be dissonant in big or small ways from who you are and how you write and even what you believe. What was it like, then, to go through and publish it all, and can you tell me more about the relationship you have with older writing?

Jackie Wang: Yeah, I initially was mortified by the thoughts of publishing what you could call my “juvenilia,” and even though I had made this giant Word doc of my old writings, I actually turned it in as my final project for a[n] [autobiography] class I took with Jamaica Kincaid in grad school. So that was the impetus for me assembling this document, and I had actually pitched to Semiotext(e) this essay collection

before Carceral Capitalism. Chris Kraus [editor] really wanted to do a book on carceral studies and prisons before the essay collection, which I think was the right idea in the end, because why would anyone care about my early writings? I hadn’t even published a book [yet]. And then at one point I thought maybe I could take these writings and rewrite the pieces into something like a memoir or autobiography, but over time, I felt like it was important to preserve the energy, tone, and context of the actual pieces, rather than trying to create a cohesive narrative. So I was collecting the pieces, and I think once I really dug into the process… I mean, it was a very long process. And this book went through so many different drafts. One was a more comprehensive draft that was organized thematically. There was another draft that was organized as encyclopedia entries. As I was getting into it, I’m like, I’m an academic now, am I really going to go through with publishing my juvenilia? But I think in the end, I respect the wisdom that is contained in the essays, and there are lessons in the art of living that I felt like were important—lessons that even now I forget and have to remind myself of.

AL: When you were writing the [Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun] pieces originally, then compared to now, do you feel like there’s anything different in terms of having an audience and knowing that your work will reach an audience in a different way?

JW: The hypothetical audience is difficult to deal with psychically. Getting yourself to write is all about playing psychic games with yourself, creating the right headspace and the right atmosphere to allow writing to happen. So the intrusion of the hypothetical audience is tough, because when you go to write, the stakes are higher than when you’re just toiling anonymously. There’s a freedom to being anonymous, to being unpublished. You don’t have to speak to the lowest common denominator audience member. So it is tricky. One way that I get around this problem is writing without a purpose, doing my thinking, not for any project or any aim in particular,

but just collecting ideas, thoughts, essays, fragments, writings, either in a journal or just in random Word documents. And then I find that after about five or 10 years of doing this, like, Oh, this is potentially a book. When I was writing Alien Daughters, I was just writing for my blog or for zines that I would self publish or for these low circulation outlets, and I would just do my writing everywhere, because I was not really rooted anywhere. I would write in hotel lobbies like in Sarasota, even though I wasn’t staying in them, or in a casino, or just on the side of the road while hitchhiking and bicycling around. So it was just this compulsion to write, and I would just make it happen wherever it needed to happen. All my books that I’ve published thus far have been originally composed longhand. I would always use my notebooks as the starting point for essays that appeared in Alien Daughters and Carceral Capitalism. I composed on index cards. I just have stacks and stacks of books and articles that I’ve printed out, because I do all my thinking on paper. It’s like an auxiliary brain for me, and it’s a problem now that I’m traveling a lot over the next year. I can’t bring suitcases full of books to Italy.

AL: While putting together any of your three books, is there anything that surprised you, that you didn’t expect from the process or from yourself?

JW: It’s funny because sometimes I’m surprised by how predictable I am. I’ll have the same revelation over and over and over again, and I experience it like it’s the first time, every time. So with the Alien Daughters project, I had a view of a pretty long period of time. It was, you know, almost my whole adult life. And so, yeah, it is kind of funny. I say I’m repetitive. My partner says, “You’re just consistent.” Even my politics have been basically the same since I was, like, 14. With the Alien Daughters book, seeing all of the materials assembled into one file, I was like, Man, there’s a lot of really different stuff that I was thinking about. There’s Eastern European cinema. There’s the writings of Zora Neale Hurston. There’s like this schizophrenic internet personality from Russia. There’s some pieces that didn’t even make it into the final draft that were about the Egyptian revolution. It’s kind of surprising to me that I’ve managed to follow the thread of my curiosity wherever it goes, and it goes through really weird and unexpected places sometimes. And that was something that I think is captured in Alien Daughters as well, a kind of openness to whatever you might encounter, whether it’s in a book or a person. You know, a lot of these things I can’t even anticipate. I met a Czech film student while traveling, and we really connected. And isn’t that strange that I would be able to relate to a stranger in Prague? I think about that quite a bit. I had this thought once where I saw this very tall older man with gray hair and a short Asian woman walking by him, and I was like, You know what’s funny, it’s possible that they could have the same soul. I was thinking about this guy who’s the director of and one of the founders of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, this really weird museum in LA that I’m obsessed with. I think he’s in his 70s. His name is David. I just felt like my soul was tuned to the same wavelength as his. But he’s just a guy from

Colorado who’s in his 70s. And I just think that that’s kind of funny, that across time and space, you can have these really deep connections. And I feel that even with books that I read, you know, I read Sappho, and I feel that as well. I can’t even anticipate the kinds of connections that I’ll have to people or art, and it’s surprising that it seems to transcend time and place.

AL: Is there anything specific you’ve read lately that you felt a connection to?

JW: I’ve been reading a lot of Chilean literature lately. I read Bolaño’s 2666. Chile is also a place that’s very distant from where I’m located, but I feel a very deep connection to. Like, land of poets and leftists, what’s not to like? I’ve definitely really enjoyed digging into a lot of Chilean literature, a lot of poetry as well. Vicente Huidobro, I read his book Altazor when I was in Chile. I’ve been reading a lot of mystical texts because I’m preparing a book manuscript now for Coffee House Press, and the title is The Collected Graces It’s about quotidian grace, or everyday mysticism. But the backdrop of some of the thinking that I’ve been doing in that book is my engagement with a lot of classics of the mystical canon, so mostly Islamic and Christian mystical texts. I audited some classes on Persian Islamic literature in the Sufi tradition. And, yeah, I just became obsessed with the book The Conference of the Birds by Attar. That’s, you know, medieval Persian poetry, but it’s funny, it’s profound. I think Attar is a great psychologist as well. All the birds have their own particular psychology, so [it’s a] completely different context, but still something there to connect to.

AL: Something else I was thinking about was the title essay of Alien Daughters, where you write that “the place where the woman of color lives and writes does not yet exist (she is making it all the time),” which reminds me, in a way, of A Room of One’s Own. You also write that “it’s never been easy for [you] to claim the title ‘writer,’” and that “many young women of color do not identify as “writers” because they feel illegitimate and unworthy.” Do you think these ideas or feelings of belonging and worth and diffidence have changed, for you personally or for women of color who like to write in general, since 2013?

JW: I feel like I was much more anguished about my sense of non-belonging when I was younger. I read Todd McGowan’s book, Embracing Alienation, as a manifesto for non-joiners, and it kind of affirmed the peace I feel like I’ve made with not feeling a sense

of belonging. I don’t know. Nowadays I feel a sense of ease in not really feeling like I fit in anywhere. When I first entered grad school, I felt a constant chafing against my context. When I experienced microaggressions or people not taking me seriously, I think in the past, I would have mentally spiraled and gotten really existential, like, I don’t belong here, nobody takes me seriously as a thinker, as a writer, and I would have felt a deep sense of frustration. But now, like, it’s a paycheck. And all I care about is the deep connection I feel with my books or the people I care about. And it’s not that the adversarial energy coming at me has lessened. It’s probably even increased as I’ve moved into this other context, namely academia. But I feel like I relate to it differently.

I guess the fact that I don’t feel a sense of belonging anywhere could be related to the feeling of openness that I have to whatever I encounter. I think when I was younger, I would read a lot more narcissistically, like I would look for myself reflected in what I was reading. And now I feel very stimulated by difference. The foreignness or opacity of the other is very exciting to me. I don’t know if that’s connected to the sense of not feeling particularly attached to belonging anywhere. I’m just kind of curious about what other people are up to.

I still think it’s important to construct spaces where [experimentation and collaboration] can happen. And a lot of that work is about creating relationships as well. That was the main takeaway of the essay that I wrote to my friend Lily, which is titled Aliens as a Form of Life.

AL: Is there any advice you would have in terms of building those spaces, or just getting into your mindset?

JW: Don’t listen to people who think they know what you should be doing and are trying to impose their perspective onto you. Keeping that voice inside you alive is very important, and that’s something that can be smothered by the internalization of the voices of others and other people telling you what you should be doing. For me, the question of whether or not I had the authority to claim the title “writer” used to anguish me a lot, and now I just feel like no matter what happens, I’m going to write. It kind of doesn’t matter if I’m published or not. But I can understand, I mean, it’s a rat race. It’s very hard to survive materially as a writer, and it’s becoming harder over time given the political economy of the publishing industry. I know it’s good to also be realistic about expectations around whether or not it’s possible to monetize writing, which, in an ideal world we would have all of our

basic needs taken care of, and we would be able to engage in artistic production without that art being a commodity. I think it’s kind of tragic that writing and other forms of art are commoditized because it could do so much more if you didn’t have the question of sales hanging over your head.

AL: You’ve talked about the impact of the pandemic on how people use, or even subsist on, the Internet. Do you think that this has shaped writing as a whole?

JW: Yeah, genie’s not going back in the bottle. With the pandemic, it did feel like we passed through a door of no return, in terms of not only the ability to exist mostly online, but also the portion of our everyday life that now lives on the internet or is digitally mediated. It seems like there’s been a little bit of a snapback in terms of people wanting to go out and have real world experiences. I feel like a lot of people were socially recalibrated such that it feels more onerous now to socialize than it did pre-pandemic. But I think certainly the effect that the Internet has had on our attention span, on the rhythm of thought, writing and being is very particular. The fragmentation that we experience with internet consciousness is a very real thing, and is palpable in our writing as well. I think now there’s also this phenomenon of people trying to write erudite novels that are peppered with lots of references, but it can read almost like Wikipedia surfing in some ways, and that, to me, seems like a feature of contemporary writing—like, the ability to look up anything at any time, and the temptation to load writing up with references is very great for that reason. The Internet is so ubiquitous, it’s definitely working inside us in a very deep way. The way that I try to work around it is [that] I just block the internet when I’m trying to get anything done. I don’t want to constantly be regulated by the rhythm of the steady stream of interruptions, which really forces you to the surface over and over again. I want to be able to sink in deep when I’m doing a work session.

AL: It really does feel like there’s no return. How do you envision the future?

JW: Oh my gosh, the future. I don’t know. I go back and forth between feeling very bleak about the future and feeling very hopeful about the future. I feel pretty bleak when I think about the environment. That’s constantly in the background. I’ve been doing some work on deep sea mining recently, so I’ve been thinking about ecology a lot. I think about the state of the oceans and I feel pretty fucking depressed.

I’m not really sure what the future will bring. I feel a sense of epistemological whiplash about how fast things are moving and changing. I think a lot about what would happen if the US and China went to war. This is, like, one of my biggest fears. I feel a sense of background anxiety about the state of the world. The fast evolution of events on the ground has really humbled me in terms of realizing my inability to predict what will happen, and feeling like there are so many factors at play that create historical conditions of possibility or foreclose possibility. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I hope that it moves in a positive direction. I’m more structural and deterministic in my thinking, which usually leads to a dark place. So I like to be challenged on that, because I’m like, Well, you know, it’s very rare that a rising superpower and legacy superpower don’t go to war. I guess I’m kind of gloomy naturally, but I am, I would say, pretty optimistic about people in an interpersonal sense. I think young people give me a lot of hope, and I even felt this just observing the campus protests that have happened over the last year, people organizing around Palestine. I even shed tears when the students at Harvard rolled out the tents and set up the camp. It gave me a feeling like, Okay, young people are throwing down, everything is going to be okay. That was how I felt in the moment.

ANGELA LIAN B’26 wants to throw down.

In Pursuit of a Process A Conversation with Anoka Faruqee

( TEXT NURA DHAR

DESIGN SEJAL GUPTA

ILLUSTRATION ANOKA FARUQEE )

c I was introduced to Anoka Faruqee’s work through my first-year printmaking course. My professor brought in The Visible Spectrum, Faruqee’s handbound artist book, to our studio. The book juxtaposed her paintings with Mughal miniatures, images of the Alhambra, and photographs of fabric bazaars. These were images I recognized. Her paintings felt different though. Faruqee’s paintings depicted Moiré patterns that embodied precision and craftsmanship, like the perfect brushstrokes in a miniature painting, but also had a sense of movement and dynamism. They were technological and modern—beautiful yet disorienting. It was clear that a transformation took place in her process, where a kind of magic occurred between Faruqee’s hand and the material.

Anoka Faruqee is an artist-educator and an American painter of Bangladeshi descent. Farquee is also the Associate Dean and Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Yale University’s School of Art. Farquee’s paintings are highly detailed, and evoke textile-like optical illusions. Her work can be understood through the lens of abstraction, color, pixelation, and decorative art practices in the Islamic world.

While working on my thesis collection, I found myself thinking a lot about Faruqee, her artist book, and how she engaged in a methodology to express her ideas. How did she combine her experiences and curiosities to create new ideas that served as expressions of herself? I wanted to ask her. In my hour-long conversation with Anoka Faruqee, she reveals her contemplations, intuitions, affinities, and frameworks that have built her practice and process, starting from her journey as a young artist at university.

NURA DHAR: Before we discuss your current practice, I’d love to know what you were exploring academically and artistically as an undergraduate student at Yale when you were my age! What was the atmosphere like, and how did it affect you?

ANOKA FARUQEE: I was an undergraduate Art major at Yale, although I was doing course credits for architecture as well as for art. I enjoyed the architecture classes a lot, and they were very influential. But as soon as they started to be more specific to buildings, I started to lose interest. One of the architecture classes I took that was really influential was about Islamic tiling and geometry. We made paper models that were abstract, and later I learned that the paper folding exercises were also something that had been at the Bauhaus. You don’t realize where things are going to lead, but you’re just taking it in. Then I decided to just pursue the Art major in my junior year.

The summer after my junior year, I went to Yale Norfolk, a summer residency program. During that time, my brother got married, and he had two weddings. One was in a mosque, and one was more of an American wedding outdoors. I left Norfolk to go to the wedding. I was really immersed in the architecture and patterning of the mosque. When I came back, I was trying to do a painting based on the wedding. It was a kind of a flat pattern background. When I was in high school, there was a major Matisse exhibition at the National Gallery. It was called Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, and I

remember being very taken by it. There were a lot of paintings of interiors, and in the interior spaces, there were patterns and rugs. When I was going back to Yale in my senior year, one of my professors, David Pease, pointed out that Matisse had been influenced by Islamic art. Matisse had been somebody who had spent time in Morocco, collected ceramics and textiles, and was very interested in miniature painting. Pease also encouraged me to look at Indian and Persian miniatures. So I started to look at that, and that became an influence. Then my work changed to a flatter type of painting, and I started to do more imaginative work, like scenes from my life, but as interior spaces that were inspired by miniature painting.

ND: You’re speaking a lot about the intuitions that you had and your mentors’ guidance. Could you describe how you came to these intuitions and the kinds of ideas you were untangling?

AF: I think people have affinities. They have aesthetic affinities. I’m interested in pleasure and visual pleasure. I’ve always loved color. I’ve always loved pattern. When I was in the mosque, it just felt familiar to me. I think that familiarity might be from my own background, my own upbringing.

I was born in the States, and my parents came to the United States from Bangladesh. When they decorated our house in Bethesda, they had rugs everywhere. My dad was really into rugs. He traveled a lot, so he would buy things from Turkey and buy things from Pakistan, and buy different rugs. They had some wall hangings from Bangladesh that were embroidered. There was also 70’s designed wallpaper in the house, which was very patterned. I had grown up with lots of patterns, and patterns on top of patterns. Between clothing and decoration in the home, that was the world—the visual aesthetic world that I was surrounded by. When I saw the architecture of the mosque or the miniature paintings, they just felt familiar. It felt like what I’d like. It felt like what I have affinity toward.

I entered Matisse not knowing that Islamic art was also his influence. I think part of why I was attracted to his paintings was because he had similar source material. Culture is not a fixed thing, right? It’s always intersecting with other cultures. Certainly, there’s the history of colonialism, where Matisse, as a French person, and Morocco, being colonized, was participating as a European in a colonial history. Picasso was looking at African masks, Van Gogh was looking at Japanese woodblock prints, and Matisse was looking at Islamic art. They were all looking toward other cultures to understand abstraction because they had come out of a European painting tradition. Maybe I related to that because I was painting still lifes [in school]. Abstraction was part of my life, but I had never named it as abstraction because it had been part of decoration and clothing.

ND: You touched on your engagement with your source material and your research. You also write about studying different movements and references as a young artist in your book. What does it mean to you to ‘study,’ and what were the active processes of study that you engaged in?

AF: There’s more traditional ways of studying, like an academic study often has to do with reading about a history, using primary source materials, or traveling. I think for an artist, a lot of study is through experience. You’re not just reading about it; you’re going to the sites, you’re experiencing the space, you’re experiencing the color. You’re at the museum, spending time with the work. I think that looking is a kind of study

Then, in terms of the research as an artist, you want to do something with it. It’s not just about writing something, quoting it, or thinking about it more theoretically, but you want to actually engage and use the material. I was appropriating and copying textiles and Islamic geometries to learn about them. But the goal was always so that it could be something different from the original thing, so it could be transformed through a different process. That’s always been the goal, not just to be someone quoting the forms, but to enact some of the principles or some of the learning behind the forms.

So finding a book that showed me how to construct geometries by using a compass and a ruler was super helpful. You realize that if you draw many circles, the points of intersection help you construct shapes. Seeing that laid out, I started to become very interested in a shape that’s based on a hexagon. I learned that Islamic tile geometry is based on isometric geometry, meaning that it’s more triangular and hexagonal, so it has multiple axes of symmetry. It’s radial symmetry as opposed to bilateral symmetry; the latter is based on a rectangular grid. That realization was really important for me as an artist. I started drawing the grid onto the canvas, hand painting the star shapes in repetitive marks using a brush and using shifting colors. I realized that my work was responding to the digital and the idea of building images through modules. That was the connection between the Islamic tile geometry and the digital, and it also linked my interests in technology and textiles together. A textile is also made up of modules through the woven structure. I was interested in the structure of geometries, and how it could yield something that was visual and optical.

ND: You mentioned your desire to transform your source material, rather than literally translating the aesthetics of your references. How did you achieve visual convergence instead of literalism in your work? I always liked your paintings because they are a representation of taking very seminal ideas and pushing them a step further.

AF: I think it just happens through playing with the material. As an artist or a designer, there’s just a certain amount of time that you put in, tinkering, trial and error, and seeing what the material can do that slowly gets you to a place where it feels transformed from the original source. I don’t have one clear way to describe how it actually happened, but I think being open to learning from the sources—and also analyzing the sources visually and materially—means you actually have to do the stuff. I had to construct. I had to use a circle. I had to use a compass. It wasn’t enough for me just to look at the paper; I had to do it myself. I had to enact it. I think that embodiment, the enacting, is really important. Sometimes the embodied way of learning can get lost in a more academic setting or in a culture that privileges information. We forget that there’s this notion of embodied reality of learning which has to do with using your hands, your eyes, your body, and doing the thing. When you start to do the thing, when I started to draw and construct the circles, that’s when I started to see different possibilities or different shapes. Then follow that. In some ways, it was initially mindless because it was rote. But it became more mindful in the sense that I started to think about the act of making the gesture as having some kind of possibility or some kind of meaning for me. That’s when I started to work freehand, without the grid drawn underneath. Then the shapes started to change and morph. I discovered things in that process, in that embodied process, about math, and about fractals, and I would come out of the studio and say, “Oh, now I understand how a tree grows.”

ND: Earlier you spoke about the idea of aesthetic heritage, and how we have proclivities that lead us and link us to our heritage or ancestral past. We can decide whether to accept it or reject it, I think. Can you talk about your acceptance of your aesthetic heritage?

AF: I have these interests that have to do with the culture that my family came from, but I was also growing up in the United States and being educated in institutions that were influenced by European histories. Even painting on a stretcher-bar—that’s a particular tradition that came out of Europe with the development of easel painting. Even choosing to do paintings on a wall is participating in a tradition that has its own specific lineage. Artists from the 70’s were making “Allover” paintings. This idea of the “Allover”—it’s compositionally decentered, so there isn’t a focal point, unlike a portrait where you have a single figure. The “Allover” came out of multiple traditions both within European modernism and also other traditions where the idea of a decentered composition is important spiritually. In grad school, I was reading more about Islamic art and the ideas behind it: the concepts

of unity and multiplicity. Even though my family is Muslim, I hadn’t studied the religion. Reading more about it, I learned about the concept of God as being ever-present. I came to that through art more than anything else. [The tradition of Islamic art] is not just an aesthetic; it’s presenting and relating to a worldview. The structure of a mosque is different from the structure of a church in terms of direction, symmetry, and being decentered, right? So doing a comparative study can help you understand what you’re interested in.

ND: You discovered miniature paintings via Matisse. What’s interesting about this is that you’ve arrived at the source by first exploring derivative works. There’s the colonial aspect of knowledge production that we’re exposed to since we’re in the West, so it makes sense that the Western canon is prioritized in our education first. That aspect aside, I am curious about this idea of looking at things inadvertently or backwards. What does this do to your work and process?

AF: One of the things about being an artist is you don’t always know where you’re going to end up. The whole reason you are in a creative field is because you want to be surprised and you want to learn. That’s the definition of learning—you’re constantly surprising yourself. That’s why I think I kind of back into things, because I never quite planned it. As an artist, you have to be in the present. You have to be responsive to what’s influencing you and what you’re gravitating toward, what you’re feeling right in that moment. You can’t always articulate it. Sometimes I’ll tell my students to go to the museum and just notice where your affinities are or what you want to spend time with. Because you’re listening to your body, you’re listening to your eyes and your ears. I just feel that as a culture, we don’t train ourselves to do that enough. If you have a desire and you don’t know why, you should just trust that you should do it because something is telling you to go there. If you can give yourself permission to do it, then you can learn more about why. I think that’s what helps to make the work transform.

ND: Your recent work is co-authored between yourself and your partner, David Driscoll, who is also a painter. How does this decision relate to your individual process and perspective?

AF: In some ways, it’s kind of the embodiment of the approach that I had even before [the work] was co-authored. Being a daughter of immigrants, you see the world as multiple. You don’t see the world as singular. You don’t see that there’s only one point of view. From day one, growing up in a household where your family came from another place, your parents speak a different language, they do things differently and eat different foods, you always know from the beginning that there’s many worlds out there. I would travel back to Bangladesh and see my extended family. I had a very religious grandmother. They would say to me, when she asks you what your friends’ names are, just tell her some good Muslim names. And I’m like, what are some good Muslim names? You know that there’s multiple time spaces, multiple historical spaces, and multiple cultures out there, and so you’re constantly navigating and reconciling, “well, who am I?” If I have all these influences and all these people telling me what to do, what do I believe in? Where do I fall? And so you’re used to that act of juggling multiple things. So in that sense, I think it makes sense that we started to co-author because it’s two different subjectivities. It’s two different people, two different backgrounds. We have to talk about that, and we figure out the work we’re going to make based on that.

ND: What does a personal archive mean to you? Do you find compiling a personal archive helpful for your practice?

AF: I always have my students make an archive of source material because I think it gets you out of your own headspace, and it inspires you. We’re the sum of all the things around us, right? We’re not just separate. The more we lean into the things that make us excited, the more we can understand what we want to put in the model. I encourage everybody, every artist, to have some kind of archive of imagery

and a physical archive. Knowing that the archive isn’t just purely text-based information, but it involves physical material and visual objects is really helpful.

ND: So you would say an archive is just what makes you excited?

AF: I would say it’s what inspires me, what influences me. It’s what you gravitate toward, what you have affinity toward, what you love.

ND: What advice do you have for me in my last year of university, while I work on my thesis collection, and as I approach graduation?

AF: Following your hunches. Waking up in the morning, before everything else can get into your brain, and just trying to feel what it is you want to do and what gets you up out of bed? What makes you excited? What is your purpose and are you following that? Because it’s not easy to know. Sometimes there’s other people’s voices in our heads that tell us what we think we should be doing, but ultimately, I feel like that first moment in the morning can be very clarifying.

Another one is to immerse yourself. It’s a special state of being that I think artists understand, where you lose track of time. It’s more embodied in terms of your searching, less passive. Finding your space of immersion will help you just feel confident in what you’re doing and excited about it, and that leads to other opportunities. It’s natural that you want to share the excitement that you have about the direction your work is going in, and it feels much more authentic when you’re presenting your work. Also, establishing self-awareness and self-criticality—being able to critique your own work. Listen to your own criticism. You’re trying to get out of the experience of making and see your work with a little distance. It’s hard to do that, but it’s an important skill to develop. You don’t always need others to do it for you. You have to develop the muscle to be self-critical in general, in life. That’s an important skill for everything, not just art, for interpersonal relationships, etc. It comes from knowing yourself and understanding yourself and understanding your motivations. It’s a certain kind of self-realization. That’s what bell hooks calls it—a kind of self-realization. In order to be a good teacher, to be a good human, to be an artist, you need to spend time understanding yourself and being aware of yourself and realizing who you are.

NURA DHAR B/R’25 hopes you will come to her thesis showcase in the spring.

“I’M NOT GOING TO LOWER MY EXPECTATIONS”:

Inside the experiences of student-parents at Brown

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TEXT NAOMI NESMITH DESIGN KAY KIM ILLUSTRATION ELLIE LIN )

c How do you balance a full course load, a job, taking care of a home, and parenting a young child without losing sleep—or hope? For student-parents at Brown, this is not just a hypothetical question, but a daily challenge. Meet Lauren Ward, a thirty-two-year-old undergraduate student at Brown with a four-year-old daughter. Lauren was admitted to Brown through the Resumed Undergraduate Education (RUE) program. I met her at Convocation in September 2023, as we walked through the Van Wickle Gates. She and I were both freshmen that year, though this wasn’t her first time starting college. Lauren matriculated to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 2012, where she was enrolled for five years before taking an extended break. In 2021, she spent two years working towards an associates degree in psychology at the Santa Fe Community College in New Mexico, but never graduated. Now a Visual Arts concentrator in her sophomore year, Lauren told the Indy that as a student-parent, she initially didn’t think it would be feasible to attend an institution like Brown. But something her current boyfriend said made her reconsider. “My boyfriend would always tell me, ‘You’re brilliant’ and ‘You can do whatever you want,’” she said. “And I thought about that… And I was like, hmm. Let me dream a little bit. I looked into [Brown’s] applications and stumbled upon the RUE program. And the way it was written was very much like, You’re not going to be the only parent here.” Based on the RUE application, Lauren

believed that Brown would provide necessary support in obtaining housing, childcare, healthcare, and meals. So she applied—and was thrilled when Brown admitted her into the class of 2027.

But her excitement was stopped short. On campus, she quickly learned what the Student-Parent Committee would later affirm in their own words; when it came to Brown’s support for student-parents, she would have to “lower her expectations.”

The Resumed Undergraduate Education program, or RUE, is a “small, highly competitive program” for students with a high school diploma or equivalent whose formal education was “interrupted or delayed” by at least six years, according to the RUE admissions page on the Brown University website. RUE debuted in 1973 as an “experimental program,” and became a permanent fixture at Brown in 1979. According to the website, RUE students “have access to the full range of opportunities as all Brown undergraduates.” Today, its cohort includes about 40 students; many of them are veterans, and the remainder include both U.S.born and international students. Those who have previously earned a bachelor’s degree or who have completed more than two years of full-time college experience do not qualify for RUE. Need-blind RUE admissions are only available for U.S.-born first-year applicants, whereas all traditional applicants are evaluated on a need-blind basis. However, financial aid is available for both domestic and international RUE students. As a low-income applicant, Lauren receives financial aid for her education. However, Lauren claims that outside of that aid, Brown’s support for herself and other student-parents has been shamefully insufficient—especially when it comes to housing, childcare, meals, and healthcare.

For this article, I interviewed three student-parents: Lauren, Camila Molina, and Alexa Knight. Camila and Alexa are two first-generation PhD students studying Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology, and Biochemistry at Brown with a five- and six-year-old respectively. Each of them described to me their overlapping frustrations with how Brown has continuously neglected their basic needs. The University could not be immediately reached for comment on their claims.

In a time where the cost of living is climbing—and college degrees have become a must to secure jobs that pay a livable wage—student-parents at Brown such as Lauren are forced into a paradoxical choice: prioritizing their education and future income, or the immediate well-being

of their families. But when attending an institution with a $6.6 billion endowment and more than enough resources to provide for the diverse needs of its student body, shouldn’t student-parents at Brown be able to demand more?

“Brown simply did not provide for that at all.”

According to Lauren, one of the most dire issues affecting student-parents at Brown is housing. As a past recipient of publicly assisted reduced rent in Santa Fe (where her monthly rent was just $50), Lauren knew that a move to Providence would only be feasible if she could secure affordable housing for her family. Lauren told the Indy that because of the wording of the RUE application, she assumed that she would be able to live on Brown’s campus with her child. On its website, Brown states that RUE students “may apply to the Office of Residential Life if they would like on-campus housing.” However, after being accepted, Lauren found herself struggling to find anyone who could give her a straight answer on what Brown’s housing provisions were for student-parents.

“I had to make at least ten phone calls, and, you know, at least ten annoying emails…the buck was getting passed from person to person. Go to ResLife. Go to accommodations. [Go to] Student Accessibility Services,” Lauren said. “I actually filled out a student accommodations form that declared my daughter as a disability. I said, are you serious? So I should just fill out an accommodations form? And they said, yeah, just do that.”

After being bounced around by the administration, Lauren was faced with upsetting news from Brown’s Auxiliary Housing department: Brown currently does not offer housing for students with young children. A source within the department, who has requested to remain anonymous for fear of professional repercussions, offered the Indy several explanations for this gap in support. First, they stated that Brown’s only housing offerings for “family units” are studio apartments—but counterintuitively, according to Rhode Island housing laws, children (“with the possible exception of infants”) are not allowed to live in a studio. Second, the source admitted that Brown does not wish to mix traditional college students with student-parents and their families, and places spouses in off-campus housing for the same reason. Lauren believes this separation could have been maintained by offering better housing infrastructure to student-parents and their families—not by leaving them to fend for themselves.

The third and most frightening reason that Brown does not house “young children” is because Brown’s dormitories currently “don’t have all of

their lead paint certifications up to date,” according to the source in Auxiliary Housing. For this reason, children below the age of six are legally not allowed to live in them, though the source claimed that visiting scholars traveling with their children can stay in certain dorms depending on the duration of their stay. Lead paint is definitively present in at least some dorms: after Harkness Hall residents received an email last fall stating lead paint had been found in the building’s laundry room, one student tested his room and lounge. The test came up positive. The university neither confirmed nor denied the presence of lead paint in the rest of Harkness, but did offer to repaint the rooms, the source says.

All of this has led Lauren to believe that the University is guilty of willful neglect towards student-parents. “[Brown has] like, literary enthusiast dorms and sorority houses and things like that… but they don’t have family housing,” she said. “There are no further accommodations [other than financial aid] towards parenting students.” When a school as wealthy as Brown fails to provide something so glaringly necessary as adequate housing for student-parents and their families, Lauren believes it sends an elitist, exclusionary message about the type of student that Brown ultimately serves.

Graduate student-parents have voiced similar frustrations. Camila and Alexa told the Indy that Brown’s support options for student-parents are lacking—especially considering the amenities of comparable universities such as Yale, whose resources are well-documented online and were cited frequently by Camila and Alexa. Yale has both the Whitehall and the Esplanade apartment complexes for graduate student-families on campus, which feature a parking space per family unit, utilities factored into the rent at a fixed price, child-friendly playrooms, backyard space, and close proximity to a myriad of childcare facilities (seven of which are directly affiliated with Yale). A directory

of these facilities is available on Yale website. Comparatively, Brown offers no on-campus housing for student-parents, no child-friendly amenities on campus, and no guarantee of housing near necessary childcare centers. Though low-income full-need student-parents such as Lauren do receive a $20,000 housing refund for rent each year, the average rent of a two-bedroom apartment on College Hill is about $3,000 per month, or $36,000 per year, according to Zillow. She looked into living in a neighborhood off College Hill where rent would be lower, but the distance would have brought with it a slew of additional expenses, like gas and parking. No matter what, living in Providence would prove to be expensive. After finally finding an apartment at the edge of College Hill that accepted her application, she created a GoFundMe that amassed about $5,000 to help the transition. Lauren and her boyfriend also decided to live together in Providence, and his new job as a research assistant at Brown’s School of Public Health allowed them to share expenses. Though she admits she got lucky, Lauren expressed deep frustration at the precarious position the school left her in, as she was virtually dependent on the grace of others to survive. “I packed everything I owned into my Volkswagen Jetta. The $5,000 is what I used to get out here. I had to pay my [half of the] deposit on the rent, which was like $2,200,” Lauren said—the other half of the $4,400 deposit total was paid by her boyfriend. By the time Lauren had paid all the expenses required to move her family to Providence, Lauren had spent all of the GoFundMe money. “Gas to get up here was like $500. Hotel costs, it took like five nights. That’s like $70 to $100 every night. And then food, you know, it’s expensive to move across the country. So, Brown simply did not provide for that at all.” Her current rent total is $3,400, with Lauren and her boyfriend each paying $1,200 of the total and her mother, who has just moved to Providence to support

Lauren, contributing $800. Without her family’s help, Lauren’s refund from Brown would not have covered even half of her annual rent. As is, Lauren has to stretch the refund—her only source of income—to cover not just housing but daycare, car insurance, gasoline, phone and internet bills, and food.

“Just because we’re a small community doesn’t mean we’re too small to be helped.”

Finding and affording childcare was the next pressing concern for student-parents such as Lauren, Camila, and Alexa. Unlike several of its peer institutions, Brown does not have any childcare facilities of its own for the children of student-parents. Instead, they suggest on the undergraduate student-parent resources website that student-parents and faculty submit an application for child care to Fox Point Academy, without offering alternative options. (The graduate student website offers a more helpful and expansive guide to local childcare). Fox Point is a private childcare center at the southeastern edge of campus. It is independent from Brown, meaning the university can’t directly determine the center’s tuition policies. However, the website claims that children of Brown students and faculty are prioritized in the application and waitlist process, which Lauren surmises is a result of the donations Brown has made to the center.

Even with prioritization, the wait-time for acceptance into Fox Point Academy is one to two years according to Camila, meaning that a student-parent would need to apply for childcare before they even submitted their application to Brown if they wanted to enroll their child upon arrival. In practice, most student-parents are forced to find childcare alternatives until a spot opens up.

Fox Point Academy is also incredibly expensive. According to Fox Point’s website, the unaided tuition is $390 per week, or $1,625 per month, plus

the initial application and registration fees, $75 and $250 respectively. The $75 can be reduced to $35 if the applicant is Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) eligible, but according to Lauren, the $250 is “non-negotiable.” And though Fox Point provides financial aid for tuition on a sliding scale, according to Lauren, that financial aid for RUE student-parents comes in the form of a “childcare allowance scholarship,” with a maximum grant of $4,000 funded by Brown. The scholarship is dispersed in halves and only covers the academic year: $2,000 released in September for the fall term and $2,000 released in January for the spring term. This leaves student-parents paying the vast majority of the tuition out of pocket. Student-parents are also on their own when procuring childcare for the summer. Furthermore, Lauren says that student-parents must have the money upfront to pay the fee so that Brown can reimburse them after proof of their child’s enrollment is shown, citing this as “an example of the privilege of money in higher education.”

Camila and Alexa also expressed frustration at the exorbitant pricing of childcare at Fox Point. “At one point I was paying over $300 a week in expenses while attending Brown, a large part of that number being for childcare,” Alexa said. The childcare allowance subsidy for doctoral and MFA student-parents provides up to $6,000 each for up to three children ages six and below, $2,000 greater than the one made available to RUE students and Medical Students. It is similarly a school-year-only program.

At her wits end, Lauren tried to apply to the CCAP as a means of affording childcare for her daughter, but was told by the CCAP office that because she attends a private university, the office cannot help her. Had she attended a public institution, she said, the cost “would have been covered.” This, of course, was another example to Lauren of the “assumption that you will have money because you’re going to [Brown], or you will get aid because you’re going to [Brown].” Providence organizations assume that Brown will pay; Brown assumes the reverse. “It’s like a gun fight,” she said. “...everybody’s got their hand in their pocket, and nobody’s pulling the gun, because it’s a standoff.”

Now out of options, Lauren was advised by a Brown professor to try the YMCA on Mount Hope Eastside, which she claims “was more affordable and accommodating.” Though the YMCA daycare is typically $1,800 per month, they were able to charge her only $130 a week based on a sliding scale tuition rate—far cheaper than what she was told she would have paid at Fox Point. Though she was thankful, Lauren lamented the situation again as an “inconvenient way of finding [necessary] information.” She added, “I’m trying to arrange all of this while balancing classes and taking care of a kid.”

Camila and Alexa emphasized that the University could easily make accessible childcare for student-parents a priority without coming close to breaking the bank. The pair brought up Yale again as an example: in addition to the directory of childcare facilities in the area, Yale offers a childcare subsidy of up to $6000 per year for undergraduates and at least $7500 per year for graduate students. They also host a website that connects Yale student-parents with other Yale students charging for babysitting. Rather than implement these simple support systems, Brown places the onus onto students to invest their time and resources into navigating the complicated world of childcare. Camila views this as another example of Brown’s failure to account for “financial barrier[s] [present] for people who want to get into higher education.”

“The whole world isn’t just an Ivy League. Or a yacht club. Or a golf course.”

Lauren also mentioned healthcare and food insecurity as pressing concerns for herself and her children. Lauren is covered for free by Brown’s insurance, United Healthcare Student Resources. However, she said that shortly after receiving the healthcare, she “went to the Human Services Department and got on Medicaid as well.” She then learned that under Brown’s insurance, she would still have to pay a weekly copay for therapy and a

monthly copay for her essential medications. These payments went beyond what she could afford. “My thyroid medication is $15 a month. It’s a simple little pill [I take] because I developed hypothyroidism after I gave birth… Also, I’ve been seeing a therapist for like four years and I was like, I need to find a therapist [when arriving in Providence],” Lauren explained. “You know, I’m on antidepressants. [I have a psychiatrist] which I actually saw yesterday because it took like seven weeks to get an appointment with her [because of insurance-related delays]. But all those kinds of things, like a psychiatrist, Brown health insurance doesn’t cover the expenses of.” Nor does Brown’s pharmacy accept Medicaid, so Lauren has to acquire her prescriptions from elsewhere. Lauren would have to pay an additional fee to enroll her daughter in United Healthcare Student Resources insurance—paying more for what to her is still spotty coverage. Lauren also struggled immensely with securing money for food. Lauren opted out of the meal plan for the sake of affordability, but often found herself hungry during the time she spent on campus. Her BWell Advocate fought to get Lauren access to a free 20 meal/week plan for one semester, but the deal was only a “one time thing.” Lauren applied for SNAP benefits to afford food for her family, but just as when she applied and was rejected from the Childcare Assistance Program, she ran into obstacles because of the assumption that Brown was already supporting her. “Human Services messed up because they were looking at Brown’s scholarship refunds and counted it as income instead of a stipend,” Lauren said. As such, she was originally given $375 a month in food stamps; after more administrative hassle, she was able to receive a corrected monthly food stamp total of $530 a month. According to Camila and Alexa, Brown does have a food insecurity grant to help struggling students afford meals. This was the program that Lauren benefited from, although she wouldn’t have known of its existence without her advocate’s help. But Camila tells me that the application process is very long, and—as Lauren also noted—“usually only qualifies [you] for one semester.” As we spoke at the Sharpe Refectory, Lauren stocked up a to-go plate with grilled chicken, french fries, and ketchup—a meal she was saving for her and her daughter.

“We have our own villages. Without them, it would be impossible.”

When asked what provisions could be made to the lives of student-parents at Brown, all three women proposed a greater investment by the university into the issues affecting both graduate and undergraduate student-parents—something they want done before they have to complain about it.“We both had to fight to be here, so we’re passionate about [helping people] fight [for a place here as well],” Alexa said in reference to herself and Camila. “People deserve to be here just because they’re passionate about something.”

The three of them want better child care support—a stipend, rather than a subsidy, which would fully cover the cost of child care and wouldn’t rely on the student’s ability to front money at the start of the year. They want childcare centers on campus directly affiliated with Brown. They want student-parent housing for their families without the fear of lead paint poisoning or price-gouging landlords. They want family healthcare with full coverage. And they want accessible food grants and other resources that can aid student-parents at any given point for as long as they need. “The whole world isn’t just an Ivy League. Or a yacht club. Or a golf course,” Lauren said. “People have needs.”

According to Vanessa Ryan, Senior Associate Dean of Student Development at the Graduate School at Brown University, many of the provisions present on campus for student-parents (such as the food insecurity grant and childcare subsidy) were created either in response to COVID-19 and the precarious “balancing [of] school and [childcare]” that student-parents had to perform, or the personal initiatives student-parents have undertaken to form a more solid community for

themselves and their children. For instance, Dean Ryan noted, the creation of the graduate student-parent listserv was a response to a student-parent Facebook community page created during the pandemic. “[Brown is] a trailblazer, but that doesn’t mean there still isn’t more that we can do,” Dean Ryan says.However, student-parents such as Lauren are tired of the broken promises and the weight of having to continuously fight for adequate support.

“I’m not going to lower my expectations just because I’m a parent,” Lauren said firmly.Camila agreed, stating, “Just because we’re a small community doesn’t mean we’re too small to be helped.” Alexa summarized, “As a student-parent you’re constantly gauging, how much I can advocate [for myself] and how much should I be quiet?”

They also called for a more transparent portrayal of the offerings Brown provides studentparents. Camila noted: “People can be very verbally supportive especially in the interview process trying to recruit student-parents, but if there is no student parent support [thereafter] then all the promises are really fake.”

When asked how they manage their workload, Camila and Alexa answered that they were transparent with faculty and advisers about their situation, relied on the support of their spouses, and built community on campus to fill in the gaps. “I was forward and honest about being a parent,” Alexa said. Lauren and Camila agreed, Camila stating, “When meeting with advisors, the first thing out of my mouth is ‘I’m a parent.’”

Lauren praised the BWell Center and the staff there, stating that “without their kindness,” she doesn’t know how she “would have survived this place.” Camila and Alexa also listed their research lab as a beacon of support for them.Still, they acknowledged that while they have been able to adapt to their situation, there have been many stories of people buckling without that level of support. “I get told all the time by people ‘I don’t know how you do it, I could never do that,’” Alexa said.

“The same expectations are put onto us as graduate students even though we have extra responsibilities. Children get sick then you get sick—but still it’s the same expectations,” Camila said.

Despite everything, Alexa struck an optimistic tone. “I think Brown can and will do better, and that gives me a lot of hope. I think it will just take time.”

Lauren, however, says she has “lost all hope for Brown”—except for in the possibility of this story being shared widely, and sparking discussion and understanding. “[I spend] all [this] energy getting [my daughter] and my basic needs met, while juggling school, cleaning, cooking, potty training, etc… all while other students dance around on the Main Green taking five classes and complaining about how the cafeteria food sucks. My problems are mostly unrelatable to my undergrad peers.” But the gulf between traditional and student-parent experiences at Brown is, to Lauren, no excuse to ignore the need for change. “This is still a form of discrimination,” she says. “When you go to other universities and other community colleges and other spaces there are offerings of support.” Alexa says, “We have our own villages. Without it it would be impossible.” But, she adds: “Without that village of support, you still deserve to be here.”

NAOMI NESMITH B‘26 would like you to donate to Lauren’s GoFundMe, linked online at the Indy!

c Much of my summer was spent eating lentils with lesbians.

Saffron rice with some sultanas. I washed it down with a “soli-beer,” of which a portion of the proceeds fund feminist demonstrations in Switzerland. I was a regular at the Feministischer Streikhaus in Zürich (a hub for feminist community-building and organizing in the city), which hosts weekly pay-what-you-can solidarity dinners. The menu often includes some sort of lentil dish (daal, mujaddara, misir wat) and a carbohydrate (rice, pasta, injera). A side salad of iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, and bargainbin supermarket dressing. People are free to cook what they want. The only constraint is that the meal has to be vegan.

This is a somewhat stereotypical image of veganism and vegetarianism: of course the leftist feminist lesbians serving up a solidarity meal in the feminist-organizing-space-slash-ephemeral-lesbian-bar-slash-TINFA-bike-workshop-FLINTA-DJcollective-slash-screenprinting-studio would insist that no meat be served at their sliding-scale dinners.

In a 1991 interview, Jacques Derrida asks the question of how likely it is that one could be elected as a “chef d’Etat [head of State] … by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him- or herself to be a vegetarian?” Western society, according to Derrida, has an expectation for a leader to be “an eater of flesh.” He continues, “to say nothing of celibacy, of homosexuality, and even of femininity (which for the moment, and rarely, is only admitted to the head of whatever it might be, especially the State, if it lets itself be translated into a virile and heroic schema).”

YAS, Chicken?

My beef with vegetarianism

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TEXT TANVI ANAND DESIGN MINAH KIM ILLUSTRATION ANNA FISCHLER )

Here, Derrida defines “the dominant scheme of subjectivity itself,” which he labels as the “carnophallogocentric” subject. The addition of the prefix carno to phallogocentric implies a certain privileged relation between meat (carno), words (logos), and patriarchy (phallus). Therefore, the homosexual, the woman, and the celibate are excluded from carnivorous virility, and by extension, the dominant subject.

Derrida is not saying anything new—just a year prior, Carol J. Adams had published her influential vegetarian manifesto The Sexual Politics of Meat She interrogates the relationship between language, patriarchy, and meat consumption to make the moral argument against carnivores. Adams introduces the concept of the “absent referent” in which “animals are made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them.” Take, for example, a rack of lamb.

The naming of this object obscures it from what it really is: the flesh on the ribs of a dead baby sheep. Adams extends the “absent referent” in her discussion of sexual violence against women, citing the example of how women feel like “pieces of meat” after experiencing the violence of rape. Adams goes as far as to argue that “plant-based economies are more likely to be egalitarian…because women are and have been the gatherers of vegetable foods…” While Adams argues that vegetarian societies are more likely to be “egalitarian,” Derrida reminds us that “vegetarians, too, partake of animals, even of men. They practice a different mode of denegation.” Adams’ argument is too convenient: aligning vegetarianism with a “egalitarian” utopia is a naïve fantasy. Derrida continues, “the moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good [du bien], how for goodness’ sake should one eat well [bien manger]?”

A few months earlier, I’m in Bangalore, India. Late December. Lounging around my uncle’s apartment,

bored out of my mind. I flick through the classifieds in the local paper. I turn to the apartment listings:

LUXURIOUS 3BHK FLAT VEG ONLY, 2BHK 100MBPS WIFI VEG ONLY: PERFECT FOR YOUNG FAMILY, 2BHK FLAT IN STANDALONE

BUILDING ONLY VEGETARIAN NO PETS.

I have lunch. My extended family in India, devout Brahmins, take us to a “pure veg” restaurant. I look at the corners of the signs around me: the “pure veg” restaurants have a green box with a circle in the middle and the “non veg” restaurants have a red box with a triangle: a mandatory practice imposed by the Indian food safety authorities. In Ahmedabad, some 1500 kilometers away from Bangalore, non-vegetarian food stalls are banned from main roads. When pressed about the reasons behind this measure, the city spokesperson (of India’s BJP party) mentioned the unsightliness of viewing hanging meat, fish, and eggs (which are also considered non-vegetarian in India) from the side of the road. The issue, according to them, is not about “object[ing] to non-vegetarian food per se” but rather to “food that is not very hygienic.” In the nearby town of Palitana, the sale or consumption of non-vegetarian food is outright banned, leading to the closure of over 250 butcher shops. Most of these

shops were run by Muslims and Dalits—groups facing immeasurable violence (including lynchings under the premise of “beef smuggling”) following many years of Brahminical Hindutva fascism.

In a perverse sense, the BJP spokesperson is somewhat correct. The issue is not about “non-vegetarianism.” It is about cleanliness, the “pure” self and the “polluting” Other. For example, if you gave a devout Brahmin an impossible meat burger, he would not eat it despite your insistence that it contains no meat. The burger ‘bleeds.’ The fat ‘renders.’ You can feel each fiber of the ‘flesh’ as you chew this coagulated-coconut-pea protein blend. Unclean. Impure.

This conflict lies in what Julia Kristeva, in her 1980 essay Powers of Horror, terms the abject: “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.” The abject is something disgusting: a boundary between nature and culture, the human and non-human. The most archaic form of this “abjection,” according to Kristeva, is “food loathing”—“all food” is “liable to defile.” When food pollutes, it does so through its nature as an “oral object.” The mouth itself is the boundary between the ‘pure’ body and the inscrutable object that we often label as “food.” The feeling after mixing the skin that forms on warm milk, tasting the leftover crust of yogurt that has formed on the side of your lips a few hours after eating, leaving remnants of a raw egg-white in your bowl and watching it slither down the drain. If we understand food as inherently polluted, the Brahmin (alleged to be the marker of purity par excellence) must undergo extensive purification rituals before handling food. In some cases (where ‘utmost of purity’ is required), it is even forbidden to speak while consuming a meal. This relation—between utterance and consumption, pure and impure—is sacred.

If Derrida’s carnophallogocentric model defines the dominant Western subject through the privileging of meat, language, and patriarchy, Kristeva substitutes “purity” for Derrida’s “meat” in this tripartite scheme: purity, language, and patriarchy. The Brahmin speaking subject codes his “repulsion in relation to the Other in order to autotomize himself.” It is this pure/impure opposition by which the hegemonic Brahmin identity is defined, and thus displaces the hierarchy of sexual difference which binds the carnophallogocentric subject.

What makes the abject so powerful for Kristeva is that it cannot be situated in the structure of language. Yet, attempting to write (as I am here) about the abject regurgitates it to the linguistic level, even if the first encounter escapes it. Indeed, the relationship between eating, sexual difference, and language is established from birth. It is the infant’s mouth which first encounters breast milk from the mother’s body and also repeats paternal words. Yet, this dependence on the mother’s breast for nourishment is repressed as it is transformed into the abject. The breast is thus (unsuccessfully) displaced with words as the infant becomes a speaking subject while the unconscious desire remains. The mother’s breast, and by extension her body, is generative—essential

for the production of life itself, an in-between space from self and Other. The generative inscrutability of the mother instills fear within the child and her body becomes uneatable, abjected. The impurity of meat consumption thus rests on the abjection of the maternal body through linguistic taboo.

And meat can be vegetarian. If language can create abject “impure” objects, it can also purify. Hindus believe in the purifying force of mantras, repeated utterances which have ‘cosmic frequencies’ that can bring about inner peace. An obscure verse in the Manusmirti, an ancient set of Hindu laws, claims that “one may eat meat when it has been sprinkled with water, while Mantras were

There is a certain borderlessness to (dominant) food cultures. A 1999 issue of Vancouver’s X-Tra Magazine, a now-defunct local gay and lesbian newspaper, features an advertisement for “Krishna Pure Vegetarian Restaurant.” There is a sense, especially in the West, that the illusion of a primarily vegetarian food culture in India (which, in reality, is as low as 4% in some regions) renders the Brahmin subject as ‘more peaceful’ or even ‘feminist’ through their disruption of (Western) culinary norms. Yet, it would be reductive to say that vegetarianism is minoritized, queer, or even “egalitarian” in one part of the world while being an ideological state apparatus to maintain Brahmin hegemony in another.

recited, when [Brahmins] desire.”

The notion of Hinduism as a markedly queer counter-discourse to the perceived ‘homophobia’ of Islam is especially pernicious—the fact that homosexuality and transness are present, if not celebrated within Hindu scripture (such as the Mahabaratha, Kama Sutra, or even invoking the ‘Divine Feminine’) further the image of Hinduism as an especially ‘progressive’ religion in the West. Yet, this ‘progressive’ identification with Hinduism still rests on an anxious identity formed in relation to the Muslim Other. The Other is non-vegetarian, is thus violent because they kill animals, and therefore wants to erase people ‘like us.’ Therefore, the Western queer subject adopts Brahminical notions of purity (and thus, caste and Islamophobic violence).

“It would be reductive to say that vegetarianism is minoritized, queer, or even “egalitarian” in one part of the world while being an ideological state apparatus to maintain Brahmin hegemony in another.”

For feminists like Carol Adams, the abjection of the woman’s body as it collapses into the animal body (an act that is figurative and implied through the language of purity in the Brahmin sense) is made literal through her concept of the “absent referent”—the “rack of lamb.” Adams’ ‘feminism’ thus lies in rendering the woman’s body as abject once it has been violated by an impure, repulsive

Other. Citing Kate Millett, Adams argues that (cis) women undergo “sexual cannibalism” in which one can substitute the “knife for a penis and penetration, the cave for a womb, and for a bed, place for execution.” The “impurity” rests on the moment of penetration, the entrance of the penis into the otherwise pristine body. This gender essentialist discourse again rests on an anxious identity formed (through language) in relation to a constructed (and, in this case, penised) Other. Being a vegetarian de facto does not make you moral. Producing a ‘moral vegetarian subject’ rests on the creation of an imaginary Other, and this has lethal implications. In Madhya Pradesh, India, where consuming and preparing beef is banned, over 11 Muslim households have been demolished under suspicions of beef consumption. Hindu “Cow Vigilante” mobs have been responsible for the violent lynchings of over fifty Muslims and Dalits in the past five years. There is a perverse irony here: under the imagined threat of being erased by the ‘violent’ Other, what do the Hindutva fascists become?

I’m eating lentils again. This time, though, it’s my reheated Trader Joe’s lentil soup struggle meal. All my other food has expired. I have some stale crackers on the side. I eat it alone in the dingy kitchen of my unrenovated 1970s concrete block. I think about my time in Zürich, at the Streikhaus, eating the communal meals. Their politics was one that was deeply trans-inclusive, anti-caste, and intersectional. Why then, did they insist the meals remain vegan? I look back into my fridge at the fuzzy, mold-covered block of halloumi cheese. A classic case of lesbian practicality. Probably because vegan food takes longer to expire.

ANAND B’26 accidentally ate chicken once and then cried.

TANVI

BENJAMIN NATAN R’27 forgot to do his injection on time, again.

WHEREVER YOUTHEREGO,

AND INDIE SHE’S EVERYWHERE

Hester

QDear Indie,

I’ve had enough. Recent events have fashioned me a sort of pariah, and I feel that my fifty closest friends (and various nemeses) are now essentially the eyes of one giant panopticon. I turned my Find My location off. It is that serious. I feel I cannot walk out the door without The Eyes sticking to me. How do I heal and release myself from the shackles of that security camera on the main green that is recording at all times. They are watching. And soon I will gouge out my own eyes.

It’s time we have a talk.

–Hester Prynne

In fact, it’s time we all have a little sit down. Indie has good sense about things—like when it’s about to rain (the knee), or who those three skyscrapers in the middle of down-

town Providence are (the three most popular girls, of course)—it’s why she’s Indie. But there are times when Indie is at a loss, and it’s moments like those when she needs to take stock. To sit down and think. Truly, actually, productively think. Indie doesn’t like to do that much. Indie has spent years forging peace of mind from whatever it was that God gave her. Hence, Indie finds it hard to force herself to admit that, perchance, everything is not as peachy keen as she’d like to imagine. Nevertheless, Indie has been thinking hard and she, too, in her analysis of that which surrounds her, has uncovered the Panopticon.

Pride. Greed. Wrath. Envy. Lust. Gluttony. Sloth. Some would argue that a liberal arts college campus is riddled with sin, our days filled with salacious indulgence. In shadowy rendezvous behind the mysterious glass at the back of Jo’s, whispers in the catacombs of Stephen Roberts’ Campus Center. From the surface it would appear that we are one big, joyous family, consisting of countless iterations of the eccentric cousin. But if you, like Indie, choose to watch, and as consequence, come to know, you would see that not only do we embody sin, one through unlucky seven, but that we are ravaged with a secret eighth one. Indie’s not afraid to say it. This campus’ cardinal sin? Vanity.

Now, before you toss your arms up in protest, stacked bangles clanging, expertly cut shirt collar draping awkwardly, allow me to say my peace. Or rather, allow Jennet Connat to speak hers. In her 1998 article, School for Glamour, written for Vanity Fair (I’ll allow you the pleasure of the irony), Connant details a Brown not much different from the one I know today. Her interviews with alums bring to life the image of a school that’s found an esoteric, unique, dare I say glamorous, identity by which to define itself. Toe rings and moto jackets. Tasteful portfolio bags strewn on the green, surrounding the outskirts of nepo-babies and to-be-famous RISD students seated in an ever exclusive circle. We are the castle on the hill. We are its pretty pretty princess, delighted in her gowns, crowns, and gilded banisters down which she descends to the common people, facing their calls for bread with lips sticky from frosting. “Indie?” you inquire, “What does that have to do with the panopticon? So Brown is hot, and awesome, and always has been. What about it?” To that I say: don’t you see it?

The panopticon. Jeremy Bentham and later Michael Foucault’s theory of discipline and observation. The watcher in the tower may always be observing us. We will never know, so you better be on your best behavior. Last year I picked up a copy of Foucault’s History of Sexuality from Nostalgia because I was in college and it seemed like something I should do, but I never read it, nor do I have any pressing plans of doing so. Now it just sits on my bookshelf, staring at me with the accusing eyes of someone who knows that I, Indie, am a poser. Anyway, I have realized that we live in a perfect storm of consciousness, and that it is our very nature here that sustains it. Maybe it’s because we have a cherished reputation to keep among this cursed league we’re subject to. Maybe it’s because it’s so easy to see oneself in others here. Maybe it’s just because we boast a measly population on an even measlier plot of land. Regardless of the reason, the School for Glamour has fought, clawing and kicking, to maintain our reputation as such. I’ve found it traps me in body and spirit, I’ve found that no matter how much certainty of self I boast, I yearn for the image of it all. Indie often wishes she could don a BDG graphic sweatshirt and feel like the baddest ho in this place. Instead, I’m forced to traverse Ruth J. Simmons Quad to class because I always bump into ***** ****** outside Sayles, and I know something they know. But they don’t know that I know. And I can’t bear to know as much as I do. Hester, I myself have been mentioned in a not-so-cryptic Sidechat post. I know the eyes of which you speak. I feel them too. And you, reader, do you feel them? Do you oblige to a sly 360° before you begin a story in Ivy Room? Do you?

Sometimes I wonder if the Panopticon is self-imposed. If instead of being stuck in cells, beholden to the mercy of a centralized watcher, we are the watcher. What if we’re trapped in a tower, surrounded by mirrors, forced at every waking moment to consider all angles of ourselves, their undying truth, their grotesque reality. When the sun is shining and there is joy in the world, that’s pretty epic, and I look pretty good. But when I am stressed, and tired, and I just keep running into acquaintances, I can’t help but feel as if everyone knows some big secret I never told them. That there is someone behind me, watching, and they too know the secret. Sometimes it is so exhausting to be linked to everyone around you, and even when you think you’re not, you are, and then it feels like you’re in a polycule so large you don’t know who’s on the other side. Hester, I get it. I really do.

But what is a mirror if not man’s most vain invention?

The door to your cell is unlocked. No one is in the tower. You can put one foot in front of the other. You can walk out, and er in your most bodacious Lululemon getup, glamour be damned. That security camera on the green? I’m pretty sure its power cord is public access— which could mean nothing. As I write this, my Find My is off, and when I want to be seen again, I’ll turn it on. There used to be a smoking section in the Ratty called “The Cave.” We have Jazz Jams, and texts from the SV promotional team that keep coming even after I’ve texted them STOPSTOPSTOP STOP. Haven’t you seen the sci-li glow in the late fall sun? Would you want to be anywhere else?