The College Hill Independent Vol. 32 Issue 8 by College Hill Independent

the college hill independent Volume 32

•

a Brown/RISD weekly

April 15, 2016

•

Issue 08

the

NEWS 02 Week in Short Supply Piper French & Corey Hébert

Volume 32 No. 8

03 A Fresh Start in Myanmar Khin Su METRO 04 Help Thy Neighbor Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa 05 Said On Arrival Ben Berke ARTS 13 Bombay Fornicators Club Maya Sorabjee 16 Meet the Gang Jonah Max

From the editors: On April 6, hundreds of RISD students participated in a demonstration on Market Square, sharing their daily experiences of marginalization and calling out administrators’ lack of progress in addresssing demands for greater diversity and inclusivity on campus. The Black Artists and Designers (BAAD) student group issued a list of demands prompted by a “lack of cultural competency in classes, critique culture, [and] student and faculty relationships.” Not Your Token, as the movement came to be called, continued on April 13 with a faculty teach-in centered on navigating disenfranchisement in art and academia. We stand in solidarity with RISD’s marginalized students.

FEATURES 07 My Life Is Changing Every Day Ivan Rios-Fetchko 11 The Legend of Toiletman Dominique Pariso

As active and concerned members of our university communities, we see their actions as essential in combatting the systems of power and privilege that devalue their experiences, work, and identities. It is not the job of students to educate their school’s professors and administrators, but it is certainly the institution’s responsibility to listen to them when they do—and to respond by enacting meaninful change. –CAF

OCCULT 08 Losing My Religion Kelton Ellis METABOLICS 09 Got Lactase? Dolma Ombadykow LITERARY 17 It’s Dark and Hell is Hot Dieter Livik Gorky EPHEMERA 15 Cut It Out ;) Jake Brodsky X 18 Bully Sarula Bao

Managing Editors Camera Ford Alec Mapes-Frances Francis Torres News Jane Argodale Piper French Julia Tompkins Metro Sophie Kasakove Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Lisa Borst Jonah Max Eli Neuman-Hammond Features Gabrielle Hick Patrick McMenamin Dominique Pariso Science Fatima Husain Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Tech Kamille Johnson

Occult Lance Gloss Literary Marcus Mamourian Metabolics Sam Samore Ephemera Mark Benz Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoﬀ List Alec Mapes-Frances Rick Salamé Cover Polina Godz Design & Illustration Celeste Matsui Alexa Terfloth Zak Ziebell

Interviews Elias Bresnick P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

theindy.org

Staﬀ Writers Ben Berke Jack Brook Liz Cory Kelton Ellis Liby Hays Corey Hébert Hannah Maier-Katkin Madeleine Matsui Kimberley Meilun Ryan Rosenberg Will Tavlin Staﬀ Illustrators Frans van Hoek Gabriel Matesanz Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Web Charlie Windolf Senior Editors Sebastian Clark Rick Salamé Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee Special Projects Yousef Hilmy Maya Sorabjee Henry Staley

@theindy_tweets

WEEK

SHORT

SUPPLY by Piper French & Corey Hébert

Blowing it Off Venezuela is currently experiencing one of the worst energy crises in recent history. Though the South American nation possesses the largest oil reserves in the entire world, it sources nearly three-quarters of its electricity from hydroelectric power plants, which are being hit hard by a prolonged drought caused by El Niño. With the drought showing no signs of letting up, and water levels at the plants at an all-time low, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has come up with a novel solution to the energy shortage: ask women to stop blow drying their hair. The president framed this as an aesthetic preference: “I always think a woman looks better when she just runs her fingers through her hair and lets it dry naturally.” He added that at the very least, women could consider reducing their hairdryer use to “special occasions.” “It’s just an idea I have,” he added modestly. To many frustrated Venezuelans, Maduro is barely more qualified to be running the country than dispensing beauty advice. Since he took office following Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013, the country has been rocked by political turmoil, including widespread protests against his administration throughout 2014. The country is no stranger to unexpected losses of electricity–one ostensibly partisan blackout even caught Maduro during a national address on live television. And energy levels aren’t the only thing in crisis in Venezuela: already weak during the Chavez years, the economy’s gone even further down the tubes, shrinking 10% last year alone. Furthermore, infrastructure is crumbling, violence is high, and basic goods are often hard to come by. Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Maduro’s latest “solution” to the energy shortage has been met with derision. “If the President thinks that not blow drying our hair is going to help, then the problem is far worse than we thought,” one woman told Al Jazeera. To be fair, though, President Maduro’s energy-saving tips weren’t limited to ladies with long hair—he also suggested that Venezuelans cut down on their use of air conditioners and clothes dryers and make sure to unplug devices when not in use. “Dryers use a lot of electricity,” he said, adding, “Irons, too. We need to create awareness about that.” Raising electricity prices seems to be the only response to the crisis totally beyond consideration. Maduro most recently announced that every Friday for the next two months would be a government holiday in the public sector. “We’ll have long weekends,” he promised the nation. One thing the president may not have considered: Longer weekends = more time to go out = more demand for blow dryers…on the other hand, if the energy crisis continues long enough, there may be no point in putting effort into one’s hair at all—the room will be too dark to notice. -PF

April 15, 2016

Más Beer, Por Favor Where Americans go in large numbers, beer must follow. It is a well-known fact that your average warm-blooded American traveler likes to get wrecked on the beach after 5 or 10 cold brews. In Cuba of late, the American penchant for boozeladen vacations has even become a source of economic imbalance. Now that the end of the embargo has given rise to vast increases in U.S. tourism to the island, state-owned bars are struggling to keep up with demand for beer. Bucanero brewery, a joint venture between the Cuban government and Anheuser-Busch InBev, is the largest supplier of beer on the island. It supplies all of the state-owned bars, cafés, and restaurants with the amber nectar that tourists desire, but recently it has had to compete with a growing number of private bars. No, Cuba does not have micro brews or IPA—yet. According to the Guardian, since “president Raul Castro five years ago formalized changes designed to remove the Communist state from many small-scale economic activities,” private bars and restaurants have popped up left and right. Unlike state-owned establishments, private restaurants and bars can get alcohol from anywhere, whereas state bars have to source their beer from the government. This past year, Cuba saw 77 percent more American tourists than in 2014, or 161,000 Americans in total. Rates are projected to climb even higher in coming years, which means Bucanero is going to have to start pulling its weight to keep up with the thirsty American tourists flooding its shores. This year alone, Bucanero had to import 3 million cases of cerveza from Dominica—which ranks fourth in the world in terms of alcohol consumption per capita—in order to satisfy our eager compatriots. Word on the street is that Havana has plans for a new Bucanero brewery in the works. Many American tourists claim they want to make it to Cuba before the island nation becomes overly commercialized and loses its charm. However, they fail to acknowledge that by going there, getting trashed on Cristal, and blowing chunks in an alley in Old Havana, they are driving that process. Is the logical next step a Starbucks in Plaza Vieja? A McDonalds under the Che mural? The power of the American dollar knows no bounds, especially in its search for ice cold beer. -CH

NEWS

DEMOCRACY NOW Regime Change and Renewal in Myanmar by Khin Su illustration by Yuko Okabe

After years of military dictatorship, Myanmar is finally embracing democracy. On March 30, 2016, U Htin Kyaw of the National League for Democracy (NLD) was sworn in as Myanmar’s first democratically-elected, non-military head of government in over five decades. The event took place after months of secrecy from the NLD, who had refused to publicize their choice for presidential candidate after winning the general elections on November 8, 2015, which also marks the first time I was able to vote as a Myanmar citizen. Citizens voted in November for Parliament members representing their township, but the Lower house, Upper house, and military sections of Parliament each selected their Presidential candidates before voting last month. In 1964, General Ne Win led a coup d’état that placed Myanmar under an authoritarian regime characterized by isolationism, human rights abuses, and repression of freedom of speech. During its rule, the military junta imprisoned more than 2,000 activists and journalists. In 1990, in an effort to revise the Constitution, the junta held elections to form a constitutional committee. The NLD, led by party leader, democratic icon, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory but was denied the right to rule. Following the elections, Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest and was finally released in 2010. Facing increasing pressure from the international community and feeling the burden of economic sanctions, the military regime began transferring power over to a “civilian government” by holding general elections in 2010; however, the elections were denounced as corrupt by the international community, and the NLD boycotted the elections in protest. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a statement, expressing their “deep regret that the Burmese authorities failed to hold free, fair and genuinely inclusive elections.” In 2011, after the highlycriticized general elections, the junta was officially dissolved but 25 percent of seats in the new “civilian government” were reserved strictly for the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Now, in 2016, the NLD has earned yet another landslide victory over the USDP in truly free and fair elections and is actually being given the right to rule. As someone who was born and raised in the midst of Myanmar’s oppressive military rule, the historic turn of events last month feels almost too good to be true. Article 59F of the Constitution, which was most likely written especially for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, bars anyone with children holding foreign passports from being elected as President, thus preventing Suu Kyi from running for the position. Consequently, Suu Kyi picked her close friend and loyal party member, U Htin Kyaw, to serve as a puppet President while she rules by proxy. Suu Kyi stated during a press conference following the November elections that she intends to be “above the President” and that she will remain at the center of all major decision-making—all of which sounds undemocratic, yet there has been little public concern. Just this week, the Parliament passed a bill giving Suu Kyi the newly-created role of “State Counsellor,” which translates to a Prime Minister-esque position superseded only by President Htin Kyaw himself. These moves by Parliament have rendered the law barring Suu Kyi from office meaningless. There is no question that Suu Kyi’s leadership will be at the forefront of the new government, as she has been elected into four cabinet positions in the current government, most importantly as minister of foreign affairs, but also as ministers of education, electricity and energy, and the President’s office. The stakes are high for U Htin Kyaw and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as the people of Myanmar have for so long placed their hope (and very high expectations) on the NLD. Already, there are some signs of improvement: as her first action as State Counsellor, Suu Kyi announced amnesty for remaining political prisoners; the International Relations Committee within the Parliament is drafting a bill that addresses migrant worker concerns; Suu Kyi has banned gifts to civil servants

NEWS

as a first step against corruption; and the NLD has begun to abolish laws that infringe on human rights, including a law that requires people to report overnight guests to local authorities. So far, the NLD’s first week in power has been mostly successful. But much larger issues loom ahead. +++ As we wait to see how the proxy President setup will play out in the long run, the newly-elected Parliament faces the additional challenges of addressing the continuing civil war and rising persecution of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority while at the same time working towards overall economic development to reverse the decades of corruption, mismanagement, and elite dominance.

Myanmar’s civil war, which began after the country gained independence from British colonial rule in 1948, has been one of the longest in the world. Of the 135 different ethnic groups within Myanmar, many are actively fighting against the Myanmar Armed Forces, the national army, for either independence or for more autonomy. It is uncertain whether or not the various ethnic groups will be more willing now than in the past to negotiate, even with the new civilian government. Regardless, it will take more than a few peace treaties to end the civil conflict. The NLD does—and should continue to—place an emphasis on pluralism and greater ethnic minority inclusion in Parliament, national institutions, and civil society. The problem stems from a larger narrative of ethnic, religious, and cultural intolerance and rising religious extremism. Burmese nationalists recently demonstrated against the NLD for selecting Henry Van Thio, who is an ethnic Chin and a Christian, as one of two vice presidents. Others, like the radical Burmese monk Ashin Wirathu, epitomize this growing religious conflict; he is affiliated with Burmese nationalist groups such as 969 and Ma Ba Tha, who openly incite hatred and violence against the Muslim population in Myanmar. Wirathu has called for restricting marriages between Buddhists and Muslims and boycotting Muslim-owned businesses. “If we are weak, our land will become Muslim,” he said in a 2013 sermon. Violence escalated in 2012, when Buddhist extremists

burned down homes in Rohingya Muslim-majority villages in western Myanmar. With extremist nationalist groups gaining popularity and legislation openly discriminating against the Muslim minority, the fate of the Rohingya in Myanmar continues to worsen. About 1.3 million Rohingya are denied legal citizenship and more than 140,000 are internally displaced and forced to settle in heavily surveilled camps. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that over 160,000 Rohingya have fled to the seas to migrate to neighboring countries, but many are fatally unsuccessful. So far, Suu Kyi has been alarmingly silent regarding the Rohingya crisis. If the NLD aims to work towards a democratic and equal state, it certainly should not be turning a blind eye to the plight of the Rohingya. +++ On January 13, 2012, Daw Sandar Min, my aunt, was released from Myaung Mya prison after serving five years (of the 65 to which she was sentenced) in solitary confinement. She, along with 37 other political activists, were arrested without trial in 2007 for their participation in the Saffron Revolution, in which civilians and monks peacefully protested rising oil prices in the country. Previously, she had spent three years in prison with hard labor from 1989 to 1992 for her role as a student leader in 1988’s pro-democratic “8888 Uprising,” the biggest civilian demonstration in Myanmar’s history, which was followed by a violent military crackdown that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3,000 students and activists and the incarceration of thousands more. Daw Sandar Min now serves as a member of Parliament representing the NLD party. In a statement issued the day of President U Htin Kyaw’s inauguration, President Obama says: "This extraordinary moment in Burma’s history is a testament to its people, institutions, and leaders who have worked together to ensure a peaceful transfer of power." This resonated deeply with me. I thought of individuals like my aunt who have sacrificed themselves time and time again for the country and yet remain unbroken in their fight for democracy and freedom. “We suffered so greatly in prison. But instead of becoming scared into submission, we used these feelings of anger and pain to strike back,” my aunt said when asked about the resilience of political activists in Myanmar. “You need to know how people have suffered and what people have overcome to get to where we are today,” she added. November 2015 was the first time in a very long time that the people of Myanmar were given the chance to vote for the future leaders of their nation in free and fair elections. True, Myanmar’s transition to democracy is not yet complete, given that the Constitution still allots the military 25 percent of seats in Parliament, thus giving them veto power over most constitutional changes. For the newly-elected government to succeed, a more sustainable foundation for long-term democracy—without a proxy president system—needs to be adopted. Furthermore, the grave underlying ethnic and religious conflicts need to prioritized so that democratic freedoms are extended beyond the Burmese Buddhist majority. However, there is an overwhelming sense of victory and relief to see Myanmar being pulled out of decades of fear, oppression, and injustice. On the whole, the citizens of Myanmar—myself included—are optimistic, knowing that the future of Myanmar is finally in the right hands. In the words of my aunt, “the most important thing to remember is that change will not come overnight. It was not just Daw Aung San Suu Kyi but everyone—all political activists and our supporters—who helped free our people from the oppressive boots of the military regime.” KHIN SU B’16 didn’t feel the 6.9 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar on Wednesday afternoon.

The College Hill Independent

PAIN KILLERS Opioid Use and Overuse in Rhode Island by Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa illustration by Teri Minogue

“We have a public health crisis that cannot be resolved by the criminal justice system.” July 9, 2015: Dr. Peter Karczmar, President of the Rhode Island Medical Society, along with addiction specialists Dr. David Lewis and Dr. John Femino, sent a letter to the state’s police chiefs. Just the previous week, on July 1, Rhode Island’s Good Samaritan laws had expired. These laws prevented evidence obtained at the scene of an overdose from being used to charge someone, eliminating the worry that a revived overdose victim could be held accountable for the drugs present. In his letter, Karczmar strongly urged the police to honor the voided law. Without the Good Samaritan protections there is a strong incentive not to call for help, leading to an increased likelihood of an overdose becoming fatal. In Rhode Island in 2014, 239 people died of accidental drug overdoses. According to the Rhode Island Strategic Plan, 90 percent of those deaths involved an opioid, and 37 percent of those involved fentanyl, a painkiller dozens of times more powerful than morphine that has recently been appearing in heroin doses, dramatically increasing both the effects of the high and the likelihood of death. Anti-overdose medication exists—Naloxone is an emergency medication capable of reversing overdoses that starts working within five minutes of being injected. It is to a potentially fatal overdose what an inhaler is to an asthma attack, and the automatic injection device it comes with is equipped with an electronic voice that reads out instructions on how to use it. Rhode Island legislature requires it to be available in all school environments, and police are trained in its administration. However, it can be prohibitively expensive when bought over the counter, and especially without insurance. And police training is for naught if someone present at an overdose does not have the confidence to dial 911 and risk felony convictions. On January 6 of this year, the State Senate re-approved the bill, 35-1. The reinstated bill expanded the law to include others present at the scene of the overdose. Former Senator Rhonda Perry, a strong proponent of the original law, returned to witness the vote. Her son, Alexander, had died of an overdose a month prior, during the six-month interim. +++ Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed has introduced a bill to Congress, the Overdose Prevention Act, that addresses the growing use of opioid narcotics. “The Overdose Prevention Act emphasizes collaboration between state and federal officials and employs best practices from the medical community,” Reed stated. “And it invests in programs and treatments that have been proven effective to combat this startling national trend. According to a CDC study, the programs and treatments that are most effective are those that increase access to overdose preventers such as Naloxone. The Overdose Prevention Act would have the US Department of Health

April 15, 2016

and Human Services offer funding to entities such as public health agencies and community organizations deemed eligible to help counter the rise of overdose deaths. Each entity would accordingly use the funding to administer training on the use of Naloxone for first responders and to purchase and stock the medication. It would also re-prioritize the National Institute on Drug Abuse towards research on drug overdoses. This comes in concert with President Obama’s plan to allocate $1.1 billion to combat heroin abuse nationally, an amount equal to federal spending on cancer research. It has become a major policy point in the current presidential election cycle, with a focus on the Democratic side being to treat addiction as an issue of public health, and on the Republican side to stymie drug trafficking from across the southern border of the country. The heroin epidemic has seen new demographics of users over the last decade, particular in young adults. 669,000 US citizens reported heroin use in 2012, significantly higher than 2007’s report of 373,000. 156,000 of those who used in 2012 had used it for the first time that year. +++ The Good Samaritan bill’s return in Rhode Island is a victory, to be sure, but functions as an emergency measure. It does not address the roots of heroin’s comeback in recent years. A Vicodin or similar painkiller habit started in a hospital room all too easily follows a patient back home, and from home to the streets, where buying the pills illegally can become far too expensive a habit to maintain. But the addiction must be fed, and heroin guarantees the same high for much cheaper—at first. “Say an 80mg Oxy is like 80 bucks a pop and you can get a 1/2 gram of heroin for like $40, which will get you further than the Oxy would.” Former heroin addict Kristen S. (last name withheld) said in a 2014 interview for website Motif RI. “It’s half the price and more potent.” An extreme habit, as tolerance to the drug builds, can cost the user $400 a day, which in turn explains the lure of dealing. Drug dealing is enormously lucrative—some dealers, according to the Providence Police Department, have grossed in the neighborhood of $20,000 daily servicing their clientele. There were three million painkiller doses prescribed in the US this past May. Heroin addiction as a successor to prescription painkiller use could help explain why use and overdose has been occurring in new demographics of race and gender. Heroin, a drug historically used by lower-income, urban males of color, has seen a twofold rise in use by women and whites, according to a 2015 CDC study. The class gap between users has also shrunk in recent years, as older and higher-income, medically insured patients turn to the drug after being prescribed legal opioids.

The rise of heroin and opioid deaths shadows the long history of drugs and prohibition in the United States. After a string of overdoses in the early months of 2015, the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts began a new strategy to face addiction. Starting in May of that year, all addicts who turn themselves in to the police will receive amnesty and rehabilitation. Launched through a police-run non-profit called the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative, the measure has received deep support in the town, and across the country. Introduced by Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello, the program attracted dozens of people seeking help on the first day. At this point, over a hundred former users have turned themselves in, one of every six making the trip to Gloucester from out of state. Three more cities in Massachusetts are planning on starting similar initiatives, along with two in Illinois. This approach demonstrates what approaching addiction as a crisis of public health looks like—treating users as patients instead of criminals. The police in Gloucester absorb the cost of Naloxone for those without insurance, using money seized during raids on drug dealers, turning dollars spent on fatal addiction into life-saving resources. +++ My father grew up around heroin users, in 1960s Hell’s Kitchen, New York. He told me about the sick half-sleep of a smack addict, how someone high will tilt and tilt further over as they fade from consciousness but never fall down. Two months ago a friend of mine told me about administrators at her old high school finding discarded needles on the property. Between my father’s time and today, heroin has cyclically become chic. Right now, it is an epidemic with an annual death toll in the tens of thousands. The problem reached peak media presence in the recent past, but has only gotten worse as reporting has dwindled since. “We’ve been fighting it for 50 years,” Chief Campanello said. “The only thing that has happened is heroin has become cheaper and more people are dying.” “The war on drugs is over. And we lost.” The attention received by the success of Gloucester’s program and the presidential policies around heroin can and ought to reinforce the message of Dr. Karczmar’s letter. Addiction is an issue of public health, and on the individual level, of mental health. To treat it as such, to turn the war into a medical mission, is to respect the complexity of addiction as a crossroads of biology and society. MARCELO RIVERA-FIGUEROA B’18 was prescribed Vicodin after his wisdom teeth extraction.

+++

METRO

GENERAL Misremembering Roger Williams’s Arrival in Providence by Ben Berke

Anyone with a Rhode Island driver’s license can tell you the story of Roger Williams’ arrival. In 1636, Puritan Massachusetts decides to punish Williams for preaching religious freedom. He flees south in the dead of winter and arrives in Providence to a warm greeting from the local Indians: “What cheer, nétop?” The Indians kindly give him some land and Williams founds Providence, a city that strives to embody the spirit of hospitality and open-mindedness which enabled its creation. The first two words of that legendary greeting are now emblazoned on Providence’s official seal, along with an etching of Williams and some fellow settlers approaching the Narragansett in a canoe. Today, more than 300 years since its supposed utterance, ‘What Cheer’ can be found on signage in almost any neighborhood in Providence: Thayer Street’s What Cheer Records + Vintage, named out of gratitude for the hospitality the owners were shown by the local rock scene when they arrived in Providence; RISD’s What Cheer Studios, who inherited the name from the garage that formerly occupied the building; Washington Park’s What Cheer Tavern, named by a Vermont transplant who simply wanted to associate with Rhode Island culture “without using the term Ocean State.” In the last century, the name has been used by an airport, a printing press, a bank, a laundromat, and more restaurants and bars than a casual researcher would care to tally. Yet strangely enough, the actual park on Gano Street touted as the site of Roger Williams’ arrival remains fairly obscure. Despite the phrase’s popularity, Roger Williams Landing, once known colloquially as the ‘What Cheer’ tract, is usually empty of visitors. From the park, the view of the river Williams crossed is mostly blocked by a Dunkin’ Donuts, a plant shop, and the austere meeting hall of an International Union of Operating Engineers post. A plaque mounted on a stout stone pillar in the center of the park reads, “Below this spot, then at the water’s edge, stood the rock on which according to tradition Roger Williams, an exile for his devotion to freedom of conscience, landed 1636.” The pillar was erected in 1906, but the rock it commemorates has been missing since 1877, when the city blew it up in a botched excavation involving excessive dynamite. Plans to build a Plymouth Rock-like pavilion on the hallowed site were quickly abandoned. Entrepreneurial locals began selling shards of what had recently been dubbed Slate Rock. Community Church on Wayland Avenue bought a few pieces and embedded them in their floor. Brown University purchased a shard as well, which now resides in the pedestal of a bear statue on the university’s Main Green. When Florence Simister published Streets of the City: An Anecdotal History of Providence in 1968, the Natural History Store on Westminster Street still sold pieces of the rock in its catalog. There is absolutely no evidence that Williams ever stepped foot on such a rock. Even in 1877, a writer for the Providence Journal suspected that Slate Rock’s memorialization had been the plot of a few nearby property owners who stood to gain from the waterfront alterations needed to excavate it. Furthermore, it would be impossible to distinguish the shards of Slate Rock from the shards of the other slate rocks that exploded during the excavation. Yet despite the obvious doubts regarding their historical significance, shards of Slate Rock are still

METRO

prominently displayed around Providence and actively fictionalize Roger Williams’ arrival. The dissemination of Slate Rock under false pretenses brings forth questions about the dissemination of ‘What Cheer’. Is Rhode Island’s quirky slogan for local hospitality actually rooted in colonial history? And do we level with that history in its usage, or do we ignore it? +++ The deviation of the ‘What Cheer’ legend from its history is not surprising. The popularized account of the ‘What Cheer’ welcoming is a concise and entertaining story. The facts behind it are difficult to parse out. In his manuscript for the first attempted history of Rhode Island, four-time Governor Stephen Hopkins makes it clear that even by 1762—the time of his writing—no first-hand accounts of Williams’ arrival in Providence had survived. Speculating on why the early settlers kept so few written records, Hopkins writes: “this total neglect of writing for so long a time must be attributed to their necessitous condition; and perhaps to the want of even paper to write on…the first of their writings, that are to be found, appear on small scraps of paper, wrote as thick and crowded as full as possible.” Hopkins also suggests that even if an account had been recorded, it was likely destroyed during King Philip’s War, when Narragansett and Wampanoag warriors burned most of Providence to the ground. In the absence of a first-hand account, piecing together even a rough sense of Williams’ arrival requires rigorous detective work. A popular English greeting in the 1600s, the earliest mention of ‘What Cheer’ in a Rhode Island context is by Roger Williams himself, in his 1642 dictionary of the Narragansett language A Key Into the Language of America. However, its mention does little to clarify the historical record. “What cheare, Nétop?” is the first entry in the dictionary proper and, in keeping with the rest of the book, Williams defines the phrase with an academic distance: “the generall salutation of all English toward [the Narragansett], Nétop is friend.” The lack of an acknowledgement of the What Cheer legend in Williams’s dictionary has led some historians to dismiss its veracity. An 1898 pamphlet published by Sidney Rider, a local bookseller who owned a vast collection of historical Rhode Island ephemera, cites Williams’ definition of What Cheer as proof that “this salutation came not from the Indians to Williams, but from Williams to the Indians.” The pamphlet is pasted into the John Hay Library’s copy of Job Durfee’s 1896 epic poem What Cheer, or, Roger Williams in Banishment, a seminal text in the fictionalization of Williams’s arrival. The first written account of Roger Williams’ arrival in Providence appears well over a hundred years after the event took place. As told by Governor Hopkins to Theodore Foster, a lawyer who attempted (but ultimately failed) to complete Hopkins’ unfinished history, the account differs from the modern legend in one key regard: Roger Williams doesn’t land at Roger Wil-

The College Hill Independent

SALUTATION

liams Landing on the eastern shore of the Seekonk. The account, confined to a footnote in Early Attempts at Rhode Island History, Comprising those of Stephen Hopkins and Theodore Foster, reads: “Mr. Williams made signs to the Indians that he would meet them on the western shore of the neck of land on which they (the Indians) then were; going himself in the canoe, by water, round Fox Point. Which he accordingly did and met the Indians at the famous rock and spring.” Hopkins’ account places Roger Williams’ landing on the eastern shore of the Moshassuck River, not at the Roger Williams Landing on Gano Street. But a 1657 reference by Williams to “two Indian fields called What Cheare and Saxifrax hill” points us back towards the park as the true landing site. According to an 1886 rendering of Providence’s layout in 1640, cobbled together by Charles Wyman Hopkins from information he found in a resolution for a land dispute that occurred four years after Providence’s founding, “What Cheare field” is in the precise plot that Roger Williams Landing currently occupies. Coupled with the map, the quote appears to be an affirmation by Williams himself that an event involving the phrase ‘What Cheer’ deserved commemoration on the very site touted as Williams’ landing spot today. It’s hard to know which accounts of Williams’ landing are worth ignoring and which are worth speculating on. Suffice it to say that the history behind the ‘What Cheer’ legend is unclear and without a definitive account of Williams’s landing, the facts of who said what where are impossible to confirm. +++ However, there are other important discrepancies to highlight between What Cheer’s history and its legend. A common misunderstanding is that the Narragansett gave Roger Williams and his fellow settlers free land. Stephen Hopkins, whose early history of Rhode Island is ever-influential regardless of its accuracy, wrote that Canonicus, the elder Narragansett sachem at the time Williams and his party arrived, “generously made them a present of all that neck of land lying between the mouths of Pawtucket and Moshasuck rivers, that they might sit down in peace upon it and enjoy it forever”. In reality, the land deed was part of a mutual exchange between Williams and the Narragansett tribe. In a handwritten affidavit that now resides in the Rhode Island Historical Society, Williams wrote, “I never got anything out of Canonicus but by gift…I never denied him nor Miantonomi whatever they desired of me as to goods or gifts or use of my boats & pinnance & the travails of my owne person day and night.” The Narragansett never asked for money through a land deed, which from a European-American perspective makes the land Williams acquired look free. However, the gift giving that Williams references was an essential part of Indian diplomacy across the Northeast. Negotiations were often abandoned if a European party arrived with insufficient gifts. The Narragansett

April 15, 2016

gave Williams land under the conditions that he pay them tributes regularly and act as a diplomat on their behalf. Under this agreement, Williams and company would receive the land and agricultural support they needed after severing ties with powerful Massachusetts. Meanwhile, the Narragansett would reap the benefits of Williams’ gifts, diplomacy and the neutral buffer his settlement provided between the Narragansett and the Wampanoag across the Seekonk. For the most part, this bargain was upheld for decades. Yet, when the ‘What Cheer’ story is told today, there is no mention of a bargain, only a gift from the Narragansett to the colonists. This is a self-serving alteration from a European-American perspective. If the unwritten conditions of the land deal can be forgotten, so too can Rhode Island’s subsequent violations of them. Following the breakout of King Philip’s War in 1676, the violations stacked up quickly. When the Wampanoag first waged war on Massachusetts and Plymouth in retaliation for their persistent seizure of Indian lands and resources, Providence and the Narragansett nation remained neutral, a testament to their peaceful relationship. However, the localized skirmishes quickly devolved into a race war that spread across New England. Soldiers from the Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut colonies sieged the Narragansett stronghold near present-day Kingstown and killed an estimated 600 Narragansett, galvanizing the Narragansett to join what historian Charles Mann called the bloodiest war in American history proportional to population. At the close of the war, even Roger Williams regressed into destructive behavior, facilitating a meeting where Providence decided to sell its Indian captives into the transatlantic slave trade. +++ In modern Rhode Island, using the ‘What Cheer’ legend to frame Rhode Island’s treatment of Indians encourages a selective look at history. Though we revere Roger Williams’ progressive beliefs today, his tenets of Indian rights to land ownership and freedom of religion did not characterize Rhode Island’s subsequent treatment of the neighboring Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Niantic nations. Today, most references to ‘What Cheer’ exclude the third word that once followed: nétop. Without nétop, ‘What Cheer’ is just a dated English greeting. Many Rhode Islanders now use the truncated phrase to extend hospitality to other non-indigenous Rhode Islanders, a relationship that bears little resemblance to the one Williams tried to memorialize when he commemorated ‘What Cheare field’ more than 300 years earlier. Business owners and city officials who use the phrase likely do so with good intentions, attempting to honor the positive diplomatic relationship maintained by Providence and the Narragansett nation prior to King Philip’s War. However, ‘What Cheer’ can only represent that discrete historical moment. Using the phrase to conjure a false legacy of this relationship merely serves to soothe the local conscience through the erasure of colonial aggression. BEN BERKE B’16 thinks ‘What Cheer’ by itself is still a cool greeting.

METRO

CEILINGS a

By Iv

If I were to go up Waterman St.—preferably excited and apprehensive, on a bike with The Cranberries playing and one beer in my backpack and one in my belly—there’d be a house on the left side that looks like it is going through both the quick process of tear-down and the slow labor of rebuilding. It’s a house I’ve been to before: walked into its living room and kitchen with my friends and the rotating cast of strangers who live there or who sleep there or do whatever they do there. It’s a house with an unknown (so it seems) number of bedrooms, of which I have seen none. Rooms I have not seen because I have always walked to the house in a group instead of biking alone—always treating them as tangential to the festivities. But, if I were to bike to the house (excitedly, apprehensively) I would be greeted on the steps by a Beautiful Boy who is waiting for me, expecting an embrace and half of one of my cigarettes like when we first met, before and after a long bus ride from Manhattan’s bright to the brisk air of Providence. The Beautiful Boy will smoke alternating drags and touch my hand softly in the in-betweens, as he did on the bus, as he did the night I said “No No I cannot go up to your room with you No No I have never done anything like that before and besides there is a girl No No not tonight there are too many things,” even though I didn’t sleep that night anyway because I was thinking of his palm resting on my knee as red tail lights illuminated the reflection of his face, not looking at me, but speaking to me as though we were alone, totally and without question. And then that night went on and “not tonight” became this night and I have arrived on said bicycle and he has opened the door and now I (alone, completely, without question) am inside this familiar living room whose familiarity is negated by the open door that leads out of it and into his bedroom. Or, rather, the facsimile of a bedroom in which his shoes are already off, placed by the mattress on the floor by the uncurtained window and facing a desk which is surely not his—a desk that is at this point, like the room, likely owned by no one at all—with a few books and a camera with which, weeks later, he will be taking photographs of me; in bed and not in bed, but always of me and never of him because all the polaroids I try to take of him come out blank, except one of him one morning tying his shoes—the same shoes, the only shoes—that are by the mattress in that picture, as in that moment—his body a blur and I only making out the planted, solitary, shoes. But I do not know this yet, all I know is that I should take off my shoes and so I do and, finally, I say hello (or something resembling hello) and he puts on some easily forgettable music

(that I try to remember for months afterwards) and comes over to me with his unforgettable scent (that I try for years, am still trying, to efface from my senses) and he simply lies in the bed as if it was nothing and then he begins to speak and I speak back—about lives and histories and dreams and pictures and beds and shoes and nothings—and we are lovers in this fashion. But, for now, our two mouths move in the orange-night light of the city that comes through the window, not breathing the same air quite yet. Not breathing, just as—though I did not know it then—two mouths, one of which is, again, my own, will breathe in tandem much later in an attic bedroom of this same house with another person with whom I should not be, although this time because it is the Beautiful Girl who has a lover far from the moment. The Beautiful Girl with whom I also had my things-to-forget and my things-to-remember and, because of these, with whom I desired a space and a night and for whom I convinced a friend to steal the keys from his own lover and give them to me and, with them, his lover’s room in this same house, for the night and, even, the night itself (even though, I find out in the midst of all this, they were the wrong keys and I had to break a screen to enter the house; all while the Beautiful Girl is laughing, waiting). Then—upstairs, downstairs—her words appear as subconscious (maybe pre-conscious) echoes of this moment and I find myself in both rooms at once, almost as if the orange city-lit light and the warmth of these neighboring bodies ignored time itself. Ignored it just as I did in that first night because I find that it is now three in the morning and the city has stopped moving and the talking has stopped and the Beautiful Boy’s hand is on my cheek and suddenly we are breathing the same air and the goosebumps are no longer from the cold of the poorly insulated pseudo-bedroom but from the unexpected warmth of flesh upon flesh. (Unexpected, I say to myself, as if I can pretend that this is not exactly what I had hoped for and dreaded, in equal portions.) Yet I do not consummate, as it were, the warmth. Maybe, I think initially, it is because I couldn’t bear to have to answer with a lie when my cousins uncles godfather etc, all those Latin-American machistas, when I am drunk and they are drunk, when I have just, like I have for years and always will, turned down the brothel’s call, when their “bueno, ¿es que sos un puto?” is inevitably asked, when I answer with my own No No and my ingratiating laugh, even though my earrings and tattoos and American Clothes sow doubt. Maybe it is simply intimidation in front of the Beautiful Boy, who is reflecting (perfectly) the orange-night glow on his otherwise pale, sinewy,

taut, smooth and unbreasted, flesh. Maybe I am overwhelmed and hoping for the parallel lips to remain unblemished by further transgression. Maybe it is nothing at all. Regardless—in the moment—I pick one of these (or maybe I pick nothing) and I think “Yes Yes this is why you must keep love-making to the touch of hands and chest and nipples (!) and mouths and hair and words” but this does not explain why, in the same moment but three stories above, I also refrain in the face of the affirmation contained within the Beautiful Girl and her own otherwise-pale, sinewy, taut, smooth but breasted, flesh. I do not know in the moment of pause (I do not even associate one hesitation with the other or, even, the two rooms of this house with one another until much later, when the two moments are seen to be, were, one) but I know that the decision to refrain is final—will remain so—when the action of love and non-love moves to the stillness of embrace and my eyes are on the ceiling—unsure if I am alone in wakefulness or not. The parallel lovers on parallel mattresses are now just touch; they could be awake or asleep but it is now a moment beyond that distinction (and maybe time) in which all that matters is the changing light on the ceiling which could be—and I hope this is the case because it adds to the myth, to the story, to the depth of emotion—the sunrise’s yellow slowly approaching, but could also simply be the eyes hoping for and imagining it. It is then, seeing this same ceiling and slow-shifting-light that countless, uncountable, lovers have looked at from this same patch of floor with this same warm arm (it is now Yes Yes the same arm) wrapped tightly around them, that I begin to realize that the moment was consummated, as it were, from the first word and first glance and that it will be so again and in this room and others (just like it was with the Beautiful Boy and the Beautiful girl and I) and I realize we were lovers as soon as we spoke on the bus, anywhere; for it is not the flesh that makes you a lover but the mouth’s labor. And now I know that I will have to lie to the machistas, but can’t to myself anymore, and, maybe, I wish (or maybe I wish that I wish) that I had not ridden that bicycle up Waterman St. or taken the bus there or the bus back or maybe, even, that I had never moved at all to anywhere that might have been so perfectly ready to lead me through the living room and into that orange citylight-glow, now inescapable, unforgettable.

IVA

FEATURES

etch

s-F n Rio

IOS

-FE

TC H

KO i

orri

ed t

hat

som

eon

igh

t re

ad t

his.

The College Hill Independent

Y Faith (and Lack Thereof)

by Kelton Ellis

I was the youngest evangelical you never knew. No, seriously! Bar those clerical prodigies you may have seen on television, spreading the good word before they’ve finished grammar school, no one had me beat for precocious piety. My uncle has told me, though I don’t remember, that while I was in pre-K at Children’s Sesame in Macon, Georgia, I’d ask other toddlers whether they’d been “saved by the Lord today.” My hometown is one of those Southern cities, deeply faithful, in which you can find a church on just about every corner—usually Baptist, sometimes Methodist, occasionally Presbyterian or Episcopalian, rarely Catholic. There is one Eastern Orthodox temple downtown and one Mormon temple down the street from my childhood home. You sometimes have the impression that you’re surrounded by all Christendom, collapsed into a city of just over 100,000. No matter the denomination, I would sit in the car during crosscity trips and excitedly yell “Church!” at all the ones I saw. With so many places of worship about, my devout relatives must have been alternately proud and annoyed. After pre-K, I attended Progressive Christian Academy for kindergarten and first grade. My birthday comes in late November, way past the cut-off date for entering public school, but my mother sensed my curiosity and decided that I couldn’t wait another year to begin my education. The school’s name sounds like astonishing irony to me now. Progressive it was anything but, with its frequent paddlings, mandatory Friday service in the gymnasium across the parking lot from the schoolhouse, and science lessons consisting of teaching five-year-olds that the Earth was forged by godly hands in six days. I still have the powder blue workbooks somewhere at home. I like to flip through them occasionally, marvelling at how little my handwriting has changed since then, and at how far I have fallen from the Eden of naive youth. +++ I mean to say that my indoctrination was complete and thorough by the time I was six. My uncle was a Methodist minister (raised Baptist, now Presbyterian), my greatgrandmother preached too. And if you had asked my family what they thought I would be in twenty years’ time, they would doubtless have postulated: a preacher. I knew the Bible much better than most kids my age, relished its tales of scandal, warfare, and godliness. On any given Sunday, you would’ve found me at my mother’s neighborhood church, tiny Mount Vernon Baptist on Pansy Avenue. And when my parents began living together, I sat in the immense sanctuary of my father’s Beulahland Bible Church more often. It’s the closest thing sleepy old Macon has to a megachurch. The couple sometimes battled over which was more authentic a worship experience—the cozy or the grandiloquent? I loved both. And to this day I retain a secret, purely aesthetic fondness for the sort of thumping gospel music that was the soundtrack to our praise. I can also trace my love of books to church. Sunday morning service was my first encounter with storytelling; few literary modes will ever be as passionate and sincere as the sermon or the Bible, which deal with life, death, and morality in ways that the artifice of secular writing won’t touch. So I don’t resent my parents for this childhood in the church. While I resolve to raise my own children to discover their own convictions, Christ is essential to my people: Southern Black folks. He was there when Emily

April 15, 2016

Ellis toiled in Crawford County in the mid-1800s; He was there through Jim Crow and beyond, giving us hopeful refuge during our protracted struggle for civil rights. Even today, churchgoing is a vital element of our political and social lives. As far as my native region’s history goes, what Black heritage is coherent without the church? +++ First doubts. I am no older than ten, on a trip to the Atlanta Zoo with Beulahland’s children’s church. This represents a more innocent time when I loved both science and Jesus, there being no contradiction in my mind. My group has stopped to admire the chimpanzees. Noticing their thumbs, their faces, so like ours that I briefly believe that they shouldn’t be held captive behind the glass, I tell the chaperone, “They are our cousins!” She responds: “No, because then you start getting into evolution and all that nonsense, and that ain’t true.” Bafflement. My impulses toward rationality and my faith continued to fight it out. I had few friends in middle school, which left me to spend way too much time on the Internet. It must have been during one of my late-night Wikipedia crawls that I came across the problem of evil, first described by Epicurus three centuries before the birth of Christ. If a benevolent, omnipotent God exists, the philosopher asks, how can He allow human evils to plague His beloved creations? No apologia, not even the terrifying beauty of our free will, saved my faith from that question. More doubts: another episode comes to mind. I think I am twelve, sitting in the pews with my family at high noon— nothing unusual there—but that I’ve reached that age at which I’m coming into myself most swiftly and surely. There are a few noticeably effete men at Beulahland, many of whom sing a skillfully high alto in the choir; I remember one in particular, who wore his hair styled into a curly mohawk, his eyebrows sculpted, his clothes hewing close to his body. I look up to these men for reasons I don’t quite understand at the moment. Pastor Watson calls the congregation’s attention to the whole tribe of them this Sunday. He says something like, “Now, we all sinners. All of us. But you can’t walk in here, flaunting your sin, wearing makeup and having your hair all done up. Keep it outside.” Applause and amens. I decide immediately that this sanctuary is too perilous, really the opposite of sanctuary to boys like me, and that I must get out. With all the zeal of a new convert, I became a militant nonbeliever around that time, saving all of my antitheist scorn for the Christianity I felt had betrayed me in so many ways. I picked theological fights with my parents each and every Sunday they forced me to go to church until they dropped the issue. Paradoxically, though, other faiths nearly persuaded me, as if any spirituality but the church were compatible with my sensibilities. I anticipated my future monkishness when I briefly called myself a Buddhist after my seventh grade class’ world religions unit, because Gautama demonstrated no pretense of divinity but was merely an enlightened man who had searched for a fulfilling way of life. I gave up pork after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I went to my best friend’s bar mitzvah, feeling curiously at home in a yarmulke despite having no comprehension of the Hebrew that sprung from the cantor’s mouth. Later, my religious convictions settled into a comfortable apathy—agnosticism wouldn’t be

the proper term. I just didn’t care, tried to avoid discussions that veered into spiritual dimensions instead of seriously considering what I believed. Lately, though, I find myself acting like a person with some degree of faith, as if I miss my religion. I think I do, a little bit. It was important to me, and I’ve been running from it for years. It’s tiring. The time might be here for resting by the road, pondering that journey. Such inner conflict manifests itself in odd ways; anyone who grew up embedded in a religion they have left behind knows what I mean, that we don’t totally get rid of it despite all our efforts. On occasion, when I’m desperately anxious or grateful for a day’s hard-won successes, I commit something like prayer. Whenever someone suggests I get a tattoo, I joke that I can’t make myself do it because of a Christian upbringing, but I’m only half-joking: my father told me once that the Bible says “You must not put tattoo markings upon yourselves,” and perhaps that directive is still somewhere in my mind, making me uncomfortable with the idea. My uncle, the minister, who gave me part of my name, who is often more my twin than my uncle, brings up Jesus in every single conversation we have. He holds on to some hope that I’ll return to the church. “You need to have a relationship with God,” he told me blankly one day. I come closest to believing him when I view a sunset’s striking palette or when my bare feet plant themselves upon the ground when I walk, just so, heels then arch then ball then toes, with a perfectly light touch that really does seem to have been made by God’s hands. I took up faithlessness mostly because I fancy myself a rationalist who trusts only what we can empirically measure. The institutions of religion, moreover, epitomized an archaic mode of thought that I wanted nothing to do with as a selfappointed progressive. Yet, in this cynical, suspicious era, I stand convinced that belief takes far more courage than skepticism requires. As I’ve gotten older and gone to college, I’ve noticed that fewer and fewer of my friends identify as religious, as if to parallel the rapid decline in the number of Americans who consider themselves believers. There shouldn’t be this conflict, two discrete systems of knowledge competing for our attention, but I think that we’ve shifted much of that displaced faith toward science and technology as we barrel on with the mission of engineering our world. Religion originated from a need to explain phenomena when we didn’t have such ready access to those tools of discovery. I worry about this trend, though, even as I count myself among the broadening cohort of faithless millennials. I’ve come to realize that reason and religion’s mystique are not as opposed as I thought. Rather, they perform vastly different functions for humanity, neither working at the expense of the other. Life is enriched by the things faith gives us, whether or not our belief is objectively true. String theory cannot tell us how to live a good life. No optimism or systematized ethics will come of our ubiquitous machines. For all we know—and it seems to still be very little, compared against the universe’s infinite backdrop—the face of God lies beyond the event horizon of the black hole that sucks all particles inevitably into its center and which no human will ever comprehend. Existence is bizarre, random, and on some level unknowable, despite our carefully calibrated equations. But there I am, straining toward what is, ultimately, ineffable. KELTON ELLIS B’18 doesn’t know.

OCCULT

THE

MILK

MYTH Mapping Dairy, Forging Intolerance by Dolma Ombadykow

As a child, I vividly remember avoiding a bowl of fermenting mare’s milk at the foot of our kitchen pantry. So foul that even our most fearless cat Patrick wouldn’t go near it, the airag and its creamy stench was a treat just for my father. A far cry from his father’s childhood ger and the leather bladder that hung at its entrance filled with the fluid, my dad would toil with this vat, stirring it hundreds of times over the course of a week in a process that broke the lactose milk sugars down into a mild alcohol. Along with much of Asia and Africa, the Mongols are an overwhelmingly lactose intolerant people, and for them, the process of making airag became a staple of nomadic life. When Mongolian herdsmen domesticated the wild horse nearly 5,500 years ago, they established a seasonal diet of wintertime meat, which was replaced by dairy staples during the summer foaling season, when meat consumption was rare. Mare’s milk (which holds significantly more lactose per serving than cow’s milk) became the essential contributor to the summer’s tsaagan idee, or “white foods,” that the Mongols viewed as “the essence,” containing a purity and health value ritualized through daily and ceremonial consumption. Naturally, the Mongols had to figure out a way to digest the milk, and naturally, we found it in the form of alcohol. Biological evidence dating back to the Neolothic era suggests that lactose intolerance isn’t new, but instead occurred when the gene for producing lactase, the enzyme necessary for digesting breast milk, was turned off (or, significantly diminished) during childhood. Without the lactase enzyme, lactose essentially rots away in the gut, producing the flatulence and diarrhea that we know and love. This wasn’t really an issue, however, until the domestication of the mammal, when adults began consuming mammalian milks for the first time. With the development of farming practices along the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 BCE, a newfound food surplus afforded the promise of specialized labor and a more complex society, and as such, the first cities were born. As these population centers grew dependent on agriculture, life in close proximity to irrigation systems and domesticated animals became a breeding ground for water-borne disease, and combined with the seasonally variable crop, malnutrition in early civilizations became deadly. At the same time, a genetic mutation appeared among some Anatolian farmers in which lactase production was never shut off. Evolutionary geneticist Mark Thomas explains that lactose tolerance provided a ridiculously high selection differential: those with the

METABOLICS

gene mutation survived, and those who couldn’t drink milk either died before they were able to reproduce or produced fewer, sicker children. Malnourishment exacerbated what would soon be the most rapid gene mutation in history: those adults who could digest dairy would live, and all others would die. Within a few centuries of gene mixing and the expansion of Middle Eastern farming practices to western Europe, eighty percent of Europeans became milk-drinkers. The only adults who needed to develop this tolerance for lactose in the first place were those who could safely raise dairy herds and store fresh milk for more than a few hours at a time. Those who wouldn’t develop this gene mutation included populations in extreme weather climates, including tropical, desert, and Arctic communities, in addition to most nomadic traditions, turning lactose tolerance into an essentially European phenomenon. While most herding peoples had by this time discovered that yogurt culturing or cheese aging processes either decreased lactose content or equipped the dairy product with added bacteria and enzymes that aided in digestion, Europeans found themselves able to consume glassfuls of fresh, uncultured dairy without the unpleasant side effects. Today, an ongoing genome-mapping project suggests that 98 percent of the population of Denmark is tolerant while, by contrast, nearly one hundred percent of the population of Zambia remains intolerant. Thus, in response to the scurvy, rickets, and infectious diseases that were the mutual products of agriculture, domestication, and urbanism, lactose tolerance grew proportional to European population density. +++ By the late 16th century, cattle herds were introduced to the United States as an almost immediate product of British colonialism. In its early stages, Post-Columbian settler America relied heavily on dairy products for nutrients that were otherwise made inaccessible due to the new soils of the American continent. According to Andrea Wiley in her book, Cultures of Milk, it was from this dependence on cow’s milk that the now popular understanding of milk as the “idealized food…[an] icon of an equally idealized bucolic lifestyle with fresh, pure air” was cultivated. Soon after pasteurization became a standard sanitizing measure for milk products in the United States, the National Dairy Council (which was established by dairy farmers to “protect the

The College Hill Independent

public’s good image of dairy”) began large-scale advertising efforts to capitalize on the understanding of milk as “the elixir of life,” as one pamphlet suggested. A book of nursery rhymes published by the NDC in 1920 reads, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, but it didn’t hurt him a bit, you see, milk made him healthy, as it has made me!” Along with the NDC, the United States Department of Agriculture published its first children’s food guide in 1916, grouping meat and milk into one of the five recommended food types. One advertisement around this time, which depicts a mother and two children sitting at a breakfast table reads, “Milk makes mentality! Begin today and feed them food that is body-building, mind-developing!” During World War II, the NDC redoubled its advertising efforts, this time aligning its mission with the American identity. One red, white and blue clad poster states, “Toughen up! You have a war to win. Drink Enough milk!” while another image, this time of Uncle Sam’s wrist and hand (index and middle finger shaped into a V) reads, “Victory demands healthy Americans. Eat more dairy foods.” Similarly, a series of posters from 1941 with a shirtless man performing manual labor states, “America needs Muscle. Drink milk.” and, “America needs Power. Drink milk.” Ultimately, the consumption of milk becomes part of a nationalizing effort on the part of the dairy industry. Even the act of naming the ability to digest lactose is political: in the West, lactose intolerance suggests a diversion from the norm; it suggests a stubbornness and ornery lack of acceptance for dairy products. The phrase isn’t entirely accurate, either, and some scientific bodies have suggested a move towards “lactose resistant,” “nonabsorbent,” or even “lactase nonpersistent,” but none of these phrases have rivaled the entrenchment of the term “intolerance.” Collectively, the NDC and USDA have worked together to instill an understanding of milk as an essential (and unique) source of calcium and protein, and as such, claims that milk is the “foundation for a Strong America!” Despite decades of research suggesting that the calcium in milk is actually a product of dairy cows’ grainbased diet—and that our guts don’t absorb the most of the calcium in pasteurized milk in the first place—the myth of milk carries on. +++ The importance of milk was further engrained through the 1946 National School Lunch Act under President Truman, sponsored by the USDA. The National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which standardized local penny milk efforts in Chicago and other urban centers in the early 1940s, provided low-cost lunches that met USDA food guidelines and simultaneously increased demand at the heels of the mid-century’s national milk surplus. Meeting the USDA’s twin goals of “expanding markets for agricultural products” and “improving nutrition and health by providing… nutrition education and promotion,” the NSLP essentialized milk as a core tenant of children’s meals. In 2012, more than 30 million public school children received daily free lunches through the NSLP, and of that, 70 percent were racial minorities. NSLP-participating schools require students to take a carton of milk in accordance with the program, and only students with a physician’s note for a milk allergy are allowed to substitute for soy milk (at a higher cost to the schools), privileging the well-being of children with access to non-emergency medical care in the process. Through a national mandate that effectively demands that all public school children at 130 percent above the poverty line or below take a carton of milk with their lunch, the USDA disproportionately requires historically lactose intolerant bodies to consume fresh dairy milk on a daily basis. The NSLP lunches also instill a habit of dairy consumption among populations significantly impacted by heart disease, obesity and hypertension, which milk has also been associated with. Despite the fact that the majority of the world population is lactose intolerant, the condition is still pathologized and considered a dietary restriction, especially within the Western world. I wasn’t necessarily surprised when my doctor told me I was probably lactose intolerant—the stomach pains I had been feeling after every meal for months had gotten ridiculous, and my older brother has never let me forget my gaseous past—but still, each time I reach for a Lactaid pill before grabbing a bowl of cereal, I can’t help but think I’m letting the dairy industry and its daily calcium recommendation (laced as milk advertisement) win. DOLMA OMBADYKOW B’17 is resistant.

April 15, 2016

METABOLICS

LATE

On the third and fourth floors of an old revival building in the southern tip of Bombay lives an institution so complete, so encased in its own time, that you could consider it a work of art. An utter colonial relic, its wooden furniture is suspended like formaldehyde animals across two floors of dusty air thickened with nostalgia. The place is called the Ripon Club. It is one of several surviving nineteenth-century membersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; clubs designed to answer idle timeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;activities include sipping tea, reading the newspaper, and dozing off in a type of cane lounge chair with armrests extended so invitingly that it has come to be known as the Bombay Fornicator. The difference between the Ripon Club and other Raj-era clubs in Bombay (apart from the fact that the entirety of its sports facilities is limited to one billiards table) is that its membership is reserved exclusively for the Parsi community, an ethnic minority of Persian descendants in South Asia. Though a demographic decimal point, the Parsis have played an integral part in the development of Bombay and its infrastructure. But they are now quite literally a dying breed, their numbers shrinking at such a sharp rate that the idea of a languid afternoon spent in a Bombay Fornicator might not be one of leisure, but of necessity. Known for a mean sense of humor and somewhat problematic Anglophilia, Parsis frequent the Ripon Club with their guests firstly to eat its great Parsi food at uninflated, pre-Independence prices, but mainly to be sucked into an imperial time warp. Waiters dressed in white shirts and black bowties serve bowls of custard on silver trays without a trace of irony. Regal busts of Parsi gentlemen gaze from their pedestals across the long dining room and street-facing windows crop the neo-Gothic High Court building that sits across the road into unsullied rectangles of architectural detail. Steeped in so many comfortable anachronisms, the dated materiality of the Ripon Club is thought rare and wonderful to those who have had the privilege of visiting. That it is tucked, unchanged, amidst the mess of what Bombay has become makes it even more of a miracle of unwitting preservation.

ARTS

The College Hill Independent

LUNCH by Maya Sorabjee

My dad and I went to the Ripon Club on a Friday—pulao dal day, to the hungry and knowing. We ate our lunch—a traditional wedding dish of mutton, lentils, and rice—without hurry, beneath the synchronized whir of sixteen ceiling fans. Afterwards, I drank some mint tea on a Fornicator and, inspired by the sleeping geriatrics all around me, draped myself in an unfolded newspaper and took a nap. When I woke up, the evening traffic had just started outside. Its noise drifted slowly into the room, dulled by the blades of the ceiling fans and folded into 1884.

April 15, 2016

ARTS

Hey kids! Join the College Hill Independent as we explore the NSA’s “CryptoKids,” a website dedicated to informing kids about happenings at the NSA and providing opportunities for them to get involved—

In an effort to promote innovative technology solutions, in 1999 the CIA— with the help of Lockheed Martin and Hasbro executives—set up the venture curity companies, recent leaked documents of ours expose that they also though the company is best known for their Clearista product line, which oped consumer technology which removes a thin layer of skin and reveals seem curious that the CIA would want people to unknowingly leave robust DNA traces wherever they go, but all we know is that the formula leaves you

Here at the NSA, we have a long history of working alongside private defense contractors, but as with any network, sometimes it’s tough to keep tags on all caught word that Erik has in fact been building a private air force of sorts

for, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled!

to hear when our friends turn on each other; here’s to hoping they make up!

Learn more on the World Wide Web! Visit us at https://www.nsa.gov/kids/home.shtml

April 15, 2016

ARTS

Hello Interstice Nefarious links as recipe for Texting from the ambulance

IT'S DARK AND HELL IS HOT by Dieter Livik Gorky

Hello Lucan Icon Half-boy SH cert nr. 1 with 1000 shares sell brandon lee (son of bruce lee) reclines on the set of The Crow (1994) Its all pretty morbid tho

<<Give me a bomb, I have to die>> exclaimed the Russian nihilist begging to be given the suicide attack on Grand-Duke Sergei splatter core plaster/ gore bar/ and pretty clouds that move quickly Unlawful raids on public housing after 9:oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock Im stille preferring unpatterns dont give over to undo fear weeping over self-preservation sounds neochristian Why be ashamed of hatred? :The Pacifiers at Ghent

split more hairs and call a cab Relish in the splendors of Valhalla c vbn9m 0,-p=-\] despair despair Fantesestical <arranging for their own scarcity> Abraham, Absalom, Alhambra

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never seen the west coast Hello Interstice, innocent icu

LITERARY

The College Hill Independent

LIST After Hours Acoustic— Hann Cassady, Soxsux, and Pretz

4.15

Wheeler Clothing and More Sale

Wheeler School, 407 Brook St // 10am - 3pm // free

Malachi’s Café, 134 Ives St // 7pm // free -

Millennials Invade McCoy Stadium

Pizza J Board Game Night

McCoy Stadium // 3–5pm // free

Pizza J, 967 Westminster St // 7pm // free

and

An opportunity to buy second-hand

From Dictatorship to Democracy and Civic Society in Czech Republic

The Wurks, 45 Acorn St // 9pm // price unclear

Marston Hall, 346 Brook St // 3pm // free the

Shape King, Twig Twig, Dan Liparini, The Antonio Forte Process, and Joan Wyand

Network & Chill

Aurora // 6pm–8pm // free -

Shame Michael Broderick, Soft Target, Worth, Creeping, LVMMVX/ CYST

Youth Forum: The Changing Latino Identities

Aeronaut Brewing Co, 14 Tyler St, Somerville, MA // 7.30pm // suggested donation $10

Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad St // 3.30pm // free

identity

Aurora // 9pm // $7

All Day Singing 2016

Providence Friends Meeting, 99 Morris Ave // 10am // free

Aurora // 9pm // price unclear -

Brown U // 3:30pm // $20

Tasting Event

4.20

The Archive of Gestures

The Olive Tap, 485 Angell St // 6pm // $10

RI Rally for Bernie Sanders Supporters Statehouse // free

Spring Weekend: Funkinevil, Tink, Fetty Wap

4.19

Buck Gooter, Black Pus, Finished, Albert DeMuth

Spring Weekend: What Cheer? Brigade, Thundercat, Tinashe, Mac Demarco

4.16

“Metropolis” with Live Music

10am–1pm

Granoff Center at Brown U, 154 Angell St // 5pm // free

Relatives, Susanne Salem Schatz, Martin Grosswendt, Julian Saporiti

tures of oppression and resistance -

186 Carpenter // 7pm // $5

Brown U // 6.15pm // $20

4.17

Food Not Bombs Community Meal Dexter free

Park

2pm

New Urban Arts, 705 Westminster St // 7–10pm // $30–$35 Urban

Machines with Magnets, 400 Main Street, Pawtucket // 6–9pm // free

Rhode Island Fact of the Week: All roads lead into the sea. There is no escape (via car).

Choose Your Own Adventure

¼ Volume Noise Lounge: Mark and Laura Cetilia