The College Hill Independent — Vol. 45 Issue 9

This Issue

From the Editors

I’m stunned by cherry blossoms in November. We joke about how the world is coming to an end—terrible thing to joke about—but all I can real ly think about is creation. How I want to write, to surge, to make like our little part of New England in the vast chill of the northern hemisphere and shock mounds of snow with fresh petals. It’s painfully easy to put down the pen and turn to face Wall Street. The market is volatile these days, you know? But let me scale the wall, I’m tired of it, let me write stories that will not be immediately associated with me, my pain, my small world. I have idols and I need to manufacture a way to meet them, let me break into spontaneous sweat. I feel that my healing is imminent. -JW

Masthead*

MANAGING

EDITORS

Corinne Leong Sacha Sloan Jane Wang

WEEK IN REVIEW Masha Breeze Nora Mathews

ARTS

Cecilia Barron Anabelle Johnston Lola Simon

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Ayça Ülgen

FEATURES

Zachary Braner Ryan Chuang Jenna Cooley

LITERARY Madeline Canfield Tierra Sherlock

METRO

Jack Doughty Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Nicholas Miller

SCIENCE + TECH Justin Scheer Ella Spungen Katherine Xiong

WORLD Priyanka Mahat Alissa Simon

X Lucia Kan-Sperling Seoyoung Kim Maxime Pitchon

DEAR INDY Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD Sofia Barnett Kayla Morrison

SENIOR EDITORS

Alisa Caira Sage Jennings Anabelle Johnston Deb Marini Isaac McKenna Peder Schaefer

STAFF WRITERS

Hanna Aboueid

Madeleine Adriance Maru Attwood Kian Braulik Mark Buckley Swetabh Changkakoti Laura David Emma Eaton

Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber Keelin Gaughan Jonathan Green Faith Griffiths

Eric Guo

Dana Herrnstadt Anushka Kataruka Roza Kavak Nicole Konecke

Cameron Leo Sarah McGrath Charlie Medeiros Kolya Shields Julia Vaz Kathy/Siqi Wang

COPY CHIEF Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Ava Bradley Qiaoying Chen Dun Jian Chin Klara Davidson-Schmich Eleanor Dushin Mack Ford

Zoey Grant Aidan Harbison Doren Hsiao-Wecksler Rahmla Jones

Jasmine Li Rebecca Martin-Welp Everest Maya-Tudor Eleanor Peters

Angelina Rios-Galindo Grace Samaha Shravya Sompalli Jean Wanlass

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Klara Davidson-Schmich Britney De Leon Ayça Ülgen

COVER

Soeun Bae

DESIGN EDITORS

Anna Brinkhuis Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS

Brianna Cheng Ri Choi Addie Clark Amy/Youjin Lim Ash Ma

Jaesun Myung Enya Pan Tanya Qu Jeffrey Tao Floria Tsui Anna Wang

ILLUSTRATION

EDITORS

Sage Jennings Jo Ouyang

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek Noah Bassman

Ashley Castañeda Claire Chasse Julia Cheng Nicholas Edwards Lillyanne Fisher Sophie Foulkes Haimeng Ge Elisa Kim Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz

Sarosh Nadeem Hannah Park Sophia Patti Izzy Roth-Dishy Livia Weiner Iris Wright Jane Zhou Kelly Zhou

DEVELOPMENT COORDINATORS

Anabelle Johnston Bilal Memon

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Rini Singhi Jean Wanlass

MVP Zachary Braner

The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI in Seekonk, MA

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

The CollegeHillIndependent 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 selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

Week in Cousin Walk

As the holidays approach, many of you may be preparing to see your extended family. While this presents its own unique challenges, it’s also the perfect oppor tunity to do the famous fun activity known as smoking weed with your cousin—a.k.a., the cousin walk! We heard about this on twitter.com and are now writing an article about it because we could not think of one other thing! We brainstormed for hours, and stayed up all night trying to name a single noun, but we just ended up sobbing into each other’s bangs in the enormous private writers’ mansion gifted to us by Big Indy! We are not okay! So, without further ado, here’s our funny little listicle detailing the top ten activities to do on your cousin walk—because weed is afabulous (inside joke lol), but there’s no way it’s the only thing that could make hanging out with your cousin bearable.

1. Go to the abandoned quarry and search for Old Man Garv’s hidden treasure! Aside from the fun of finally solving a centuries-old town mystery, maybe you could bond with your cousin as you try to decipher that wily old coot’s riddles, like “What is louder than my dang wife without ever making a sound?”

2. Come out as a member of the LGT community! There’s never a better time than now to be honest with your cousin about who you are, especially when who you are is a gay person who is mostly normal and easy to be around! Personally, I’m bisexual, but with a cute, nonthreatening, assimilation-chic vibe—I’m basically straight actually! One day you will see me managing a bank and say “Hey, didn’t I go to college with you?” and I will start throwing up all over myself probably because eating only dried apricots all the time will have caught up with me by then. Just being me!

3. Rate each other out of ten based on attractiveness! Who better to give you an honest appraisal of your hotness than your cousin–someone who knows you as well as their own family, but is also still allowed to be attracted to you. I will never die!

4. Smoke some of that sweet zaza hahaahahaha… Weed may be poison for your body mind and soul, but boy does it go down nice into MY lungs. I know this list was meant to be things to do instead of smok ing weed, but hey—I can’t lie! Here at Week in Review we’re maaaaajor tokers of the green stuff, in fact we doink our selves some gouda before writing every article. Smoke weed with cousin. Do it. Do it right now or I’ll get so mad I will start shouting like a freaking bird.

5. Claymash sesh? Who better to have a good, old-fashioned claymation hang with than your cousin Patrick! He’s older than you by a few years which means you were never really close as kids, but now you’re both adults which means you’re the same I guess? Nothing the grueling practice of claymation can’t smooth over! You guys should make a short about a boy in 1950s Brooklyn who lost his kite.

6. BREAKFAST BURRITO EATING CONTEST YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!! Grab your cousin by the hand and whisper in their ear, “I have forty break fast burritos sitting on a hotplate in the cargo bed of my (frankly gorgeous) truck—do you want to go out there with me and see how many we can eat in five minutes? Winner gets to take a whole week off from the eel farm we both work at.”

7. Catch up on viral internet sensations! Hear ye hear ye (this is an old timey way to talk, and just a joke! No worries.), gather around your uncle’s cracked iPhone 5c and feast your eyes on an SNL skit from eight years ago! It’s seven minutes long and there’s a musical portion. Two minutes in you can try being like, “oh yeah, I think I saw this,” but your cousins from Bethesda have an inside joke about the last 30 seconds and they want you to have context! The joke is about when a sandwich tastes bad. Quality time IS VITAL!!!!!

8. Compare media diets! Has anyone seen La La Land? …

9. Discuss the supernatural! A good way to break the ice with your cousins who do homeschool math in their free time is to ask if they’ve ever seen anything spooky. Take note of their reaction when you bring up the old clock tower, because maybe you’ll be able to discuss the ghostly bellhop without breaking your vow of silence! The Ghostly Bellhop put a curse on you that will make you talk in Ted Lasso quotes if you tell anyone he took your Nintendo Switch. Uguuggghhhhhh, why does this always happen to you!

10. Exercise your imagination! Your brain is a muscle, and “lifting” can be as simple as imagining something crazy and perverted, like a beard or mus tache on a dog. Try imagining a world without cousins—that means a world without that knit hat that’s a regular beanie but it has a brim…a world without 14-year-olds who know a lot about historical vice presidents…a world without doctors…a world without people who regularly engage with airline rewards programs…Sounds pretty bad right?? Cousins are one of the most sacred and important populations we have, so make sure to take the time to go on your phone in the same room with some of them this holiday season <3

ILLUSTRATION CLAIRE CHASSE DESIGN TANYA QU TEXT MASHA BREEZE & NORA MATHEWS

TOBACCO

TALKS

Brown defends Marlboro-maker rep’s talk, but one professor calls it an “example of corporate influence”

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK

Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School recently hosted a speaker who is a fellow at Altria Client Services, the company that makes Marlboro cigarettes and, until recently, owned a large stake of Juul. The talk raises questions about corporate involvement in the medical school.

Theoretically, the October 12 lecture was about harm reduction for smokers. But medical school professor David Egilman told the College Hill Independent that in reality, it was a promotion of e-cigarettes. Those involved with inviting the speaker, Dr. Mohamadi Sarkar, to talk to the Healthcare in America elective have framed his talk as a way of exposing students to different perspectives. Though medical school policy says students are not allowed to interact with industry representatives, a medical education dean for the school says Sarkar’s talk didn’t violate school policy.

Egilman, who has testified against tobacco companies and has researched some of the chemicals that go into e-cigarettes, said this talk is “another example of corporate influence at Brown.”

It’s a topic he’s familiar with. Several years ago, Brown sent him a cease and desist letter, and his class was canceled after he published a peer-reviewed article about a study by a Johnson and Johnson subsidiary.

“I don’t think you should have someone from Altria come talk unless there’s someone [to make a rebuttal] who’s more neutral about the impact of Altria, which is primarily a cigarette company, on health in America,” Egilman said.

The talk wasn’t recorded, but Egilman said Sarkar—whom he describes as a “represen tative of the company that’s killing more Americans than any other company in existence”—made misleading claims and omissions in his Zoom lecture.

The talk was advertised to the Brown community via a Today@Brown email that did not mention what kind of business Altria conducts. An email invitation for Sarkar’s talk, signed by the Healthcare in America course heads, included an abstract that also does not disclose that Altria is a tobacco company.

Sarkar disclosed that Altria is a tobacco company at the start of his talk, student course leader Alex Philips told the Indy in an email.

The lecture was supposed to be in-person, with dinner after, but someone at the beginning of the Zoom meeting said it was moved online after a Sunrise Movement protest of ExxonMobil the day before led to concern about an additional demonstration, Egilman said.

Isaac Slevin, the head of Sunrise Brown, said in a phone interview that there was no protest planned for the event; his group was unaware of Sarkar’s talk.

At the lecture, Sarkar said that Juuls or e-cigarettes only have nicotine so there are no health effects, according to Egilman. He left out that flavorings—such as diacetyl, which Egilman has researched and which is used for butter flavoring in popcorn—could be toxic, according to Egilman. Sarkar also neglected to mention menthol, which Egilman describes as essentially a way to target Black people.

“The tobacco industry aggressively targets its marketing to certain populations, including young people, women, and racial and ethnic minority groups, particularly Black people,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “These groups are more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes compared to other population groups.”

Sarkar claimed that nicotine doesn’t cause cancer, Egilman said, but omitted that the drug

is likely part of the reason why cigarettes cause heart disease and other cardiovascular disease. “He didn’t mention cardiovascular risk at all, which is I think a major omission in a talk like that,” Egilman said. Sarkar also didn’t talk about how Juuls or e-cigarettes have become a gateway drug to cigarettes, Egilman said.

The abstract for Sarkar’s talk appears to partially corroborate Egilman’s description of it, stating:

“The harm from cigarettes comes from inhaling more than 7,000 toxicants created by the combustion of tobacco. While nico tine is addictive, it’s the exposure to smoke in cigarettes—not nicotine—that causes most tobacco-related diseases … A harm reduction framework of switching adults who are unwilling or unable to quit smoking cigarettes to smoke-free, less risky products should complement—not compete with— the traditional strategies [to help smokers quit].”

What’s more, Egilman said Sarkar didn’t mention that the FDA banned Juul (before a court overturned the ban), until the person who introduced Sarkar asked him about it because of a note Egilman put in the Zoom chat. In

Sarkar’s talk as an exercise in engaging with dissenting speech.

In an email, Healthcare in America faculty liaison Star Hampton said that the course is student-run, but, “As faculty liaison for this course, I support having the opportunity for open discourse with diversity of thought and experience. I believe there was opportunity for thoughtful, respectful questions, comments and discussion during this presentation.”

“We decided to invite Dr. Mohamadi Sarkar to speak so that students could form opinions on and engage with controversial perspectives in an amicable way,” said student leader Juliana Katz via email. “We student leaders discussed the event with our faculty advisors and the Dean of the medical school, and collectively we decided that it was appropriate. Further, since Dr. Sarkar has given lectures in an undergraduate course at Brown in the past without issue, the precedent was already set by the university.”

The medical school’s written industry policy, provided by Associate Dean of Medical Education Sarita Warrier, says that interacting with industry is prohibited, “in any setting.”

“Industry representatives are not allowed on the Brown University [c]ampus,” it says.

But Warrier said in an email that “[g]iven Dr. Sarkar’s academic affiliation [as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University], and that he provided disclosure of his work, we do not believe this was a violation of our industry policy.” +++

As Katz said, this is not the first time Sarkar has spoken at Brown.

He’s visited public health classes taught by Professor Jasjit Ahluwalia, who declined an interview request, but said in an email that Sarkar talked about regulatory issues and “challenged the students to think about an industry that has a long track record of deception and hiding the truth, and whether or not the industry can take mean ingful steps towards harm reduction.”

A student who took Ahluwalia’s seminar last fall, and spoke on the condi tion of anonymity due to a fear of retaliation by university administration, said that after the talk a year ago, students questioned why Sarkar came to the class. “The predatory nature of these companies is, in my mind, something that should raise a lot of red flags if they’re brought to a lecture with students in public health, if they’re brought to a lecture at a medical school,” this student said in an interview.

response, Sarkar said the FDA did an inadequate job of looking at toxicological submissions, according to Egilman.

Altria formerly owned 35 percent of Juul, but in July the company reduced its stake from $12.8 billion to $450 million, according to Reuters. That allowed Altria to end a non-compete agreement with Juul and pursue its own e-vapor products. +++

Reached by phone, Sarkar said he was in a meeting but would call back. He never called. In a subsequent text message, he said, “I checked with our media team and we have a longstanding policy of not responding to media inquiries from college publications. Thanks a bunch for taking the time. But at this time I have no comments.”

The same day of his lecture at the medical school, Sarkar also spoke to a public health seminar with David Sylvia, Altria’s senior director of government affairs outreach. Sylvia did not respond to a request for comment. Students and faculty involved in the Healthcare in America course also declined interviews or did not respond to interview requests. In emailed statements, some of them framed

“Exposing students to this kind of corporate reputation laundering is really dangerous.”

Asked why he spoke out, Egilman said he’s worried about students getting misinformation about health risks. “I’m concerned when corpo rations use their power and money to make more money at the expense of people’s health,” he said. “And I don’t think that it’s appropriate for the university to have them have access to medical students without opposition.”

NOBLE BRIGHAM B’24 believes in putting two spaces after a period.

WHERE ARE THE PARENTS? “ ”

Low-income parents and parents of color have long been denied a seat at the table in deci sion-making processes across Rhode Island, despite their children being failed disproportion ately by the state’s schools. The barriers faced by marginalized groups in school districts like Providence are well-documented; the now-in famous Johns Hopkins report, released in 2019, illustrates an unequal school system that subjects its most vulnerable students to decaying buildings, demoralized school culture, and low learning expectations. Two years before, the Annie E. Casey Foundation released a report showing that Rhode Island was the worst state in the country to raise Latino children, based on an index that tracks indicators for child develop ment in and outside of the classroom.

Ramona Santos Torres, community orga nizer and mother to two children enrolled in Providence public schools, tells me she was not surprised by the Foundation’s report when it was released; she and other Latino parents had been living the experience that the data detail for years. But the channels for parents to address these conditions with the district were virtually nonexistent, particularly for families who had neither the time nor resources to navigate the city’s convoluted bureaucratic structure.

It was in the wake of this damning report that Ramona and her co-founders decided to create something new: a space that placed parents at the center of the fight for better schools—where their voices were not just heard, but amplified and acted upon.

Since its creation in 2018, Parents Leading for Educational Equity (PLEE) has done that and more. The organization works with parents in marginalized communities across Rhode Island such as Providence, Central Falls, and Pawtucket to identify barriers to learning in their children’s schools and harness collective power to initiate change. This year, parent organizers who grad uated from PLEE’s Advocacy 101 training—a five-week long program designed to empower parents with organizing tools and knowledge of the district’s power structures—voted on the issue they wanted to center their advocacy work around: student mental health. Recovering from a pandemic that not only provoked unprece dented emotional challenges for learners, but also illuminated existing injustices in the distri bution and quality of mental health resources, it is a fight that is at once deeply personal and systemically rooted.

It is not easy work. In nearly all of my conversations with Ramona and other parent

organizers, there is a grieving acknowledge ment that the change they’re fighting for may not come soon enough to improve their own children’s experience in the district. Nearly five years have passed since Ramona co-founded PLEE, and her own daughter is about to grad uate from high school. But the parents at PLEE see themselves as a part of something bigger: a sustained, community-based effort to democra tize district decision-making processes and build a more equitable school system in the decades to come. +++

The College Hill Independent: I want to start by learning a bit more about how you began your work as an organizer and how you ended up founding PLEE. Why did you do it? What need were you seeking to fill?

Ramona Santos Torres: I am a parent of two, and my youngest daughter is a young person with disabilities. It first started with my own advocacy as a parent trying to get her the services she needed in Providence, but then I realized that my case [navigating the district]— egregious as it was—was not unique. Other parents had it 10 times worse than I did. That’s what motivated me to go to school for social work and start studying the system in a different way and to understand why this was happening. Then, as I started to serve on boring commis sions and attend these meetings where decisions were being made, I was like, “I am the only person of color here! What’s going on? Where are the parents? Why aren’t parents present in these spaces?”

Based on our experiences as parents and, for my co-founders, as alumni from these districts, we decided that we needed a space for parents— especially parents of color—to come together, to learn together, to cry together, to advocate together. And that’s why PLEE was born. We knew in that moment that we needed to create that space.

The Indy: You and some of your fellow parent advocates have launched a campaign seeking to bolster mental health resources in schools. How did this group of parents decide upon this specific issue among all others in the Providence Public School District (PPSD)? And what are the main priorities of your campaign?

ST: Towards the end of our Advocacy 101

training, there was an agreement that we needed to get to work. What comes next? What are we going to work on after we complete this learning opportunity? There were a lot of discussions about curriculum, about school buildings, about after school programs. We took a vote. And I think at that moment, everyone was struggling with the pandemic. So that was the push that people had—that we needed to work in mental health because we were struggling, and we saw our kids struggling. We knew the school staff was struggling. Mental health was the issue that was decided on, because if we are not well—if the people in our schools and in our communi ties are not well—nothing else in the system is going to function well.

The Indy: I would love to hear more about collaboration within your mental health campaign. Providence Student Union has been doing a lot of work with their Counselors Not Cops campaign, working to shift district resources away from policing in schools in the form of “Student Resource Officers” (SROs), and towards mental health supports. Are you planning on partnering with them? How do you generally think about partnerships within your work?

ST: We are in full support of their campaign. We have testified in the state house against SRO bills and we have been fully on board with partici pating in meetings with leadership to push them to remove SROs from our schools and increase mental health support. We are unequivocally against police in our schools. And we’ve always worked closely with youth organizations—we have done a bunch of statements with them. I hope we can do more work in the future, too, to try to create spaces where intergenerational building can happen. That’s my hope for the future.

The Indy: It seems like coalition-building is a huge part of this work.

ST: It’s huge. And we need to do more of that in Providence, but I think that Providence is dominated by political conversations. I’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re going to do with this problem that we have here in Providence, and I don’t have an answer. I don’t know.

The Indy: What do you see as the biggest barriers to organizing within the system?

A Conversation with Providence parent organizer Ramona Santos Torres

ST: The bureaucracy that we have here in Providence is so profound. That is one of our biggest barriers really. There is no clear set of roles and responsibilities for any of these enti ties. I think that we have an issue of selective accountability. We want to hold certain pieces of the system accountable, and not others.

I would like to participate in a process where every single one of these entities is held account able. We have the Department of Education, we have the district, we have the teacher unions, we have politicians, we have the bureaucracy. We have all of these systems, but we only focus on the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) and PPSD. And that’s a major barrier, because we are not having substantial conver sations about the real challenges we face. Every single one of those systems was complicit in why we are here in a state takeover today. Everybody should own it. But just a few people want to own their responsibility.

The Indy: In the vein of accountability, I want to talk about the state takeover. In 2019, following the release of the Johns Hopkins Report, R.I. Education Commissioner Angélica InfanteGreen announced that the state would take control of PPSD until 2024, though it was recently extended until 2027. How have new power dynamics and bureaucratic structures brought on by the takeover affected parent orga nizing efforts and representation?

ST: The state intervention has definitely sparked a lot of parent involvement. Youth organiza tions existed way before PLEE started—they have history and roots in Providence. But there was this missing space for parents to be orga nized—especially parents of color. We saw this opportunity to grow, to get funding, to do our work, because people recognized that we had a role that needed to be filled, particularly during a state intervention, when we need parents to be at the table and to be participants.

I remember at the beginning of the take over there was a lot of momentum. Community forums happened and people were coming to share their experiences. There was very, very good work done there. The Turnaround Action Plan, [which lays out the specific steps and goals of the takeover], was released; whether people like the turnaround plan or not, that came from the community. From there, things went downhill. The pandemic happened. The teacher contract negotiation was brutal—there were a lot of really toxic conversations happening and not a lot of transparency. That took a toll. Then we lost the governor, then all of these other things …

Still, at least for parents, we have gotten an opportunity to learn a lot about a system that we didn’t understand before. This opened up a space and the resources needed for us to gather and learn. And what that will lead to is more parents showing up to these spaces—to demand, to articulate, to call out, to call in. So the takeover is what opened the door for an organization like PLEE to be alive today.

The Indy: So you feel like, in a way, the takeover helped because it mobilized parents in a way that just hadn’t happened before?

ST: 100 percent. When the takeover happened, I said, “I’m not gonna get sidelined. I’m gonna be in this.” A lot of us were hesitant about the takeover—but this is where I need people to talk to the people on the ground and listen to what it was like before the takeover. People were tired. We said, you know what? Whatever. Let’s just try this thing and see where it leads us, because everything else is so broken. We were out of options in this community.

The takeover made it possible for people to get on the ground to do this work that I don’t think people were going to do otherwise if the [existing power structures] would continue.

The Indy: One thing I remember you saying to me in our last conversation was that the takeover

provides this opportunity for change—but that change really needs to happen. Can you speak to that?

ST: My biggest worry is that we are headed into the end of the takeover in the next two years, but these entities that had control before the take over remain the same. And we don’t talk about that. This is where the selective accountability piece comes into play. Everything is about RIDE and PPSD, but what about these other entities that are going to regain power? What have we—and when I say “we” I’m not putting this on the community—done as a collective to fix the mess that was there before? So that we can at least have something better? Because it’s not better. The city is not ready. The city council is not ready. The district obviously is not ready. So who’s ready for this?

The Indy: We have a new mayor—Brett Smiley— coming into office in just a few months. To what extent does he have power in all of this? Do you have any expectations for him?

ST: Expectations for him are big. You are going to receive the city—what are the structures that you plan to put in place to make sure that fami lies have real and meaningful decision making power? We want to work with him to make sure that those structures are in place.

Before the takeover, parents were bounced around between the mayor, the superintendent, city council, and the school board. Parents were trying to find answers and we were getting bounced around between all of these different structures. So we still need to understand what this is going to look like when control comes back to the city so that we can effectively continue to engage with these folks.

Truthfully, the mayor doesn’t have any power in PPSD right now. The only power that he has is around school buildings because the city owns those buildings. So the upcoming mayor will come with that power, and not all the power.

The Indy: In the most recent election, voters passed a referendum that transforms the school board from a fully appointed model to a hybrid model, where some of the members will be partially elected in 2024. The model was approved to go on the ballot by the City Council in July of this year. How do you think this will affect parent organizing and local democracy?

ST: This hybrid new school board model is going to wreak havoc on the community. That was just a bad, bad, bad decision that is going to come back to haunt this community in really ugly ways. With the way the map was drawn, there is no way people without money are going to be able to run for this. I just don’t know how this is equitable—for anybody.

We know that school boards are going to be battlegrounds for white supremacists and anti-CRT folks. School boards are ground zero for the future of education in the United States— not just Providence, Rhode Island. Providence is gonna become the crown jewel for anti-CRT folks and white supremacists. This new school board model is going to open up the floor for them. We know some of those candidates have money, and they can finance good campaigns.

I am not necessarily opposed to elected school boards, but this model is just terrible. It’s just bad. It’s not equitable.

This just shows how we got into a state intervention—because of decisions being made by entities like the City Council. This was pushed down our throats, even though we— including youth organizations—said, “no, this is not a good idea.” Youth organizations have actually done tons of work doing research and talking about governance, and they proposed their own models to the City Council. They were like, “let us talk to you and show you this good model.” We were not saying we don’t want an elected school board, but we proposed a good

model for it.

Nothing, Cameron. All of a sudden, we’re being alerted that the City Council is planning to do this different hybrid model they came up with. Some of us go to the hearing, some of us go to a press conference. We say, “we have a better proposal. Talk to us about a better proposal.” Oh, no. Nope. Nope. It is mind boggling. That is the perfect example of why we are here in a state takeover in the first place.

What I want to emphasize, again, is that we must be able to hold everybody accountable. That decision is going to have a huge impact on education, and that decision was not made by RIDE or PPSD. So I need us to start looking at every single entity who’s making decisions and understanding those structures so we can hold everyone accountable, because this is going to come back to bite us in a really bad way.

This is going to start in 2024, so people might think, “oh, we have two years”—but we don’t have time. We need to really get organized about who is going to run for these positions. Who are we fighting against and who are we supporting for those five elected positions? Because that’s going to be very close to when the city takes control of the district. So the school board is going to have a lot of power and influ ence again, and we want to make sure that the people there are the right people.

The Indy: This is really hard work, and I’d love to end by bringing some hope into this picture. What pushes you through all of this? What gives you joy in this work?

ST: That is a question that I have to ponder every day, because the last three years have been brutal on me and my health. I have lived and breathed Providence every day for the past three years. I carry a lot of trauma from Providence because I was a parent here. My child, who is going to be a senior next year, is not prepared for college. Who do I hold accountable for my child not being ready to go to college? Who’s going to respond to that—to me, as a parent—and to Rachel, who is ultimately going to have to figure things out in college?

It is hard to do this work, to carry so much trauma, but also to be hopeful about what we are doing. Understanding how long it takes to make change and why we need to continue to push.

What I’ll tell you is that every time I get together with all the parents, that is what keeps me going. There is no other space where I can be as a parent where I feel validated. Because if you’re a parent, you get it. You get the struggle, especially if you’re a parent of color and you are in the system. So the way I’m going to survive this is by continuing to build spaces where parents can come together, even if it’s only to cry. If that’s all we do, that’s good—that’s what we needed to do. And if it’s to fight and to do X, Y, and Z, that’s great, too. But that space needs to be preserved and cared for so that families come and feel safe, feel loved, feel welcome, regardless of their language, their income, or their race. You are welcome. You are loved here. Let’s talk about what’s going on and let’s find ways to change things.

It’s just getting together with families and eating a lot of food. Delicious food needs to be there, and music. That’s a huge priority for us next year: continuing to build those spaces so families come in, because we are having tough conversations. There’s a lot of pain. Families have a lot of pain. So I hope that we can continue to create these spaces to come together. That’s gonna be my way to move forward.

CAMERON LEO B’25 hopes you’ll consider donating to PLEE on their website to support their amazing work!

LILLYANNE FISHER

ARTS

SHLOCK ART SHOCKS CITY

Participatory Potentialities and TV220

I first encountered TV220 at an illegal screening hosted by a naughty Providence Public Library archivist friend. The uninitiated sat in awe in front of a computer screen, dumbstruck by the program’s low-brow tenor and volatile segmentation. One minute the pixels on the screen coalesced into a kaleidoscopic animation called “Mr. Shiney” during which Dr. T flips and distorts the Superman Building, and the next, we were met with a home video called “Rat Circus” during which a rat navigated a tightrope course made of yarn and play structures. Beyond these sketches, at select moments, TV220 presented an unabashed and dirtbag radicalism. Episode 93 featured a segment called “Providence Dirt Newsreel” that explains various pieces of bleak, quirky local politics. A voice actor dubbed over documentary footage about the Foxwoods Casino promotional campaign at the Pequot Research Center, with the garish tone of a salesman: “the commercialization of discourse is the number one thing that binds us together as a society!” So, the episodes rolled along. Every episodes fades in:

“The goal of TV220 is to provide an open forum for the arts on television and to promote the mission of AS220.”

The same screen crawl opens each episode of TV220, a cable-access television show produced and curated by downtown arts collective AS220 from 1996 until 2004. AS220 remains a wellknown feature of Providence’s downcity land scape today and still offers residential studios, galleries, and stage spaces. TV220 began as a weekly, submissions-based television program sometime in 1995 or 1996. It started when AS220 got a $10,000 grant from the Rhode Island School of Design and decided to funnel that money into video artist and then-Gallery Director Richard Goulis. Goulis, whom I inter viewed for this piece, was already working with local TV station Cox Cable at the time, producing a program called Artists Rhode Island Goulis admits some guilt for gradually “glomming on” to the Artists Rhode Island 8 p.m. slot and eventually taking it over from “two elderly ladies” on the east side.

“I think maybe we, sort of, steamrolled them a little bit. Maybe left them out of some of the decision-making at some point. And they felt

a little nudged out, so they sort of of were just saying ‘here you go Richard, just take it, it’s all yours.’”

Once he got Artists Rhode Island rebranded TV220, Goulis began editing, curating, and producing for approximately 50 episodes. Until 2004, when TV220 aired its final episode, the program solicited general submissions at a mailbox at the AS220 studio. While TV220 was always a submissions-based program, during his tenure Goulis often hustled to edit together footage from the backlog of videos in the AS220 archives. When co-producers Amy Z and Heather Sylvester took over, they more actively sought out and featured new work from the Providence community. I had the opportu nity to interview Z for this piece, through which I learned more about the show’s production, process, and community solicitation.

TV220 always stayed a psychedelic, open, and dirty platform. It also offered a constant melee of mediums, variously featuring dance, music, performance art, video art, documentary, and home video. In my interview with Amy Z, she added: “[At TV220] you can be curated but not juried, which is the beauty of it.”

AS220 still runs an unjuried space today, at their Empire Street studio, but the television show (and, with it, the opportunity for mass broadcasting) is long gone.

Another part of “Providence Dirt Newsreel” presents the story of Juanita, a fictional Fox Point resident who produces advertisements for Texaco gas pump video screens. One day, when Juanita goes to fill her tank at a nearby Texaco she discovers that the screen has been overtaken by a Rhode Island red rooster who haunts her with Bible quotes, “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). During such moments, TV220 commands us to write a dissertation. In this essay I will (not) argue that the representation of Juanita’s alienated labor begs an attitude of guilt that finds its object in the lack of a grand narrative inherent to how Frederic Jameson conceives the postmodern condition. I’ll hold my tongue, but this thematic and openly antag onistic attitude seems only possible vis-à-vis TV220’s commitment to mixed media and indi vidual production.

With these theses in mind, I expected to sit down to interview Goulis and Z and discover philosophical treatises on the generative nature of accessible, community-oriented media. To my dismay, Goulis, then-gallery director, main tained that the primary purpose of TV220 was to promote visits to the studio. From Amy Z on the other hand, there was that previously quoted comment about the virtue of unjuried curation as a means of diluting pure accessibility. Despite these comments, TV220’s content leaves room only for authenticity, blandness, or inefficacy. It appears like the last of its time, a source for video production before the internet. More than a television program though, TV220 begs us to consider how potentialities for community-cen tered art remains subject to medium, platform,

and economy. +++

Allow me to argue from a TV220 story, one from “Andre the Giant has a Posse.” “Andre the Giant has a Posse” documents the proliferation of Andre the Giant imagery through stickers and T-shirts by then-RISD student Shepard Fairey. The Andre campaign began in 1989 with Shepard distributing stickers around the Providence skater community. Those stickers would soon spread across the United States and eventually become the impetus for the OBEY logo. “I just think he looks really funny,” mumbles the ’90s skater boy, now OBEY founder and Obama ’08 campaign graphic designer. Throughout Shepard’s lackadaisical diatribe, one moment about his politics sticks out. For context, Fairey stuck an Andre sticker over the head of a poster of Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, to which onlookers assigned a degrading motive. In the TV220 documentary, Fairey denies denies denies.

“Everybody was reading all this stuff into it… ’cause Cianci had beaten up his ex-wife’s lover, and they thought because Andre’s a brute and Cianci was a brute I was making this parallel, but I was really just trying to make the small stickers seem more meaningful.”

Fairey’s aversion to ‘politics’ reflects the purportedly apolitical intentions of TV220’s producers. However, as Fairey notes not ten minutes later, “since the sticker doesn’t have any meaning, everyone was making up their own meaning for it.” Contrary to “apolitical inten tions,” in a manifesto he wrote in 1990–1991, and has since posted on his website, he links his graphic design work with phenomenology. The ambiguity of the Andre sticker elicited a series of varied but intense political reactions in the early 1990s. Both the claim that the Cianci vandalism constituted a cheeky accusation of domestic violence and the claim that Andre signals the birth of a new cult (a right-wing conspiracy theory that Fairey references in his manifesto) point to liberal-multicultural and conversative reactions to an intentionally meaningless sign. Even in his purportedly “meaningless” attempt to prank the mayor, Fairey, and TV220 by exten sion, clarify higher truths about ’90s American politics.

The production process behind TV220 resem bles what media scholar Henry Jenkins terms a “participatory culture.” Participatory culture necessitates three conditions for Jenkins: (1) technologies that facilitate remix, retelling, or reappropriation; (2) a subculture that engages in “DIY” media production; and (3) horizontal narrative and visual flows between media “channels.” He claims that participatory culture promotes “community building, intellectual exchange, cultural distribution, and media activism.” TV220 seems to satisfy these criteria to a tee.

TV220 took a practical approach to commu nity-centered video production. In my interview

with Z, she described how, perhaps for acces sibility’s sake, TV220 combined a veritable mixture of production technology that ran counter to the hasty movement to the digital in the late ’90s. Additionally, the curation of TV220 from the Providence community suggests a leveling of what constitutes the role of ‘artist’ itself. It is also through its television slot that TV220 occupies a place usually reserved for a gaze at ‘mass culture.’ Uniquely voluntary and participatory, TV220’s structure made a submissions-based regime compulsory for the program to sustain itself. A circular relationship developed in which community participation kept TV220 alive, and, as such, TV220 became more and more open to new possibilities for participation.

Rather than edit on the computer, to this day, Amy Z’s video practice centers on tangible and handheld machines.

“When editing … I’ve always preferred to use things that I can touch, things that I can hold, knobs that I can turn, and buttons that I can press instead of clicking on a mouse.”

As Z details, the production of TV220 combined various standard and emergent tech nologies: the Amiga Video Toaster for editing, the MiniDisc for storage, cassette tapes, and Sony video cameras. TV220 employed produc tion conditions resistant to hyperspeed, against trends, and certainly apart from expectations of technical prowess. Z thinks differently about editing with mouse and keyboard, that editing with novel software suggests precision, cleanli ness, and distance, while a hands-on approach feels tangible and satisfying. Scrappiness was built not only into the philosophy behind TV220 but also into the production technology itself. +++

TV220 itself speaks to anxieties inherent to the democratization of artistic production. In a segment called “Genius Artist at Large,” the mayor seeks an artist whose work will then attract people in large numbers to move to his ‘Renaissance city,’ Providence, Rhode Island. After soliciting submissions, the city supposedly finds a ‘worldwide-known’ artist to showcase. During the unveiling of that artist’s painting, it’s revealed as just a blank face, made with three brushstrokes (like ‘:|’). At once, the skit describes how the ravenous pursuit of artistic status comically forebodes low quality.

Like Providence’s fictional platform in “Genius Artist at Large,” early internet video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo offered a pseudo-democratic space for the proliferation of memetic images, ironically jokey clips, :|s. In her second book The Virtual Republic, critical theorist McKenzie Wark describes “tele-” technologies (telegraph, telephone, television) as heralds for the development of a “third nature.” Adaptation to new objects is second nature—as in, “riding a bike became second nature”—getting used to the big informatic noise, a “third.”

She thinks that the ubiquitination of online platforms necessitates not just adaptation to new technologies but subjection to constant streams of information, at once knowledge-producing and sensorially overwhelming. In my interview with Richard, I asked him what he thinks about the internet as a site for video production.

“Sometimes it seems like the greatest resource in the world, but then sometimes it seems like a landfill.”

It’s impossible to discuss ‘art and partic ipation’ as if one specific model satisfies an ambiguously defined ‘community need.’ Rather, the capacity for participatory creation remains subject to medium, capital, and gaze. In his book Pure War, Paul Virilio makes the claim that the internet accelerates speed, and speed remains inseparable from violence. He explains it along class lines as such: “People say, ‘you are too rich,’ but no one ever says: ‘You are too fast.’ But they’re related.”

Taking Wark’s and Virilio’s focuses in mind, we arrive at a consideration of contemporary video production that foregrounds sheer density: speed plus volume. With regard to participa tion, it’s difficult to envision the internet and its corporate platforms as a facilitating force. Rather than that aforementioned circular model

between community participation and episode production, the mere capacity to opt in to a monetized structure leaves voice always at the behest of advertisement, clicks per minute, the platform’s bottom line. YouTube harnesses speed and volume and has grown into a dominant format from constant and omnipresent, large and small production lines and creators. Is it possible to pull back from acceleration in the current day? With the move toward streaming platforms and away from cable, I think not. TV220’s lack of profit motive, as a cable-access show, left it available week-by-week for open submission, a format lost by the current media landscape. +++

When I asked Goulis about why TV220 ended in 2004, he hypothesized two possible reasons. (1) Personal. Amy Z and Heather Sylvester probably got bored after all those years of producing. (2) Structural. The rise of available video content and production opportunities online through YouTube and Vimeo left public television in the dust. As sources for entertainment get more and more diffuse and streaming gains popularity, cable seems less on the way out the door than in the driveway.

Early YouTube and Vimeo provided not only an easy-access means by which to locate content but also the opportunity to engage in a community with the aesthetics of democracy: a star-rating system and comment section. Video streaming sites meet that first condition for “participatory culture” but certainly don’t facil itate flows between media channels. In addition to the ability of fans to “opt in,” they’ve quickly developed tendencies for the promotion of virality and reciprocal production that remixes, each more divorced from the primary source.

During our interview, Goulis expressed a fantastical, apocalyptic outlook in reaction to a tangent about internet addiction.

“Someone talks about this apocalyptic event, ‘there’s no electricity, people are living inside of burned-out tanker trucks, and, you know, catching radioactive fish in ponds to survive on.’ I find solace in that. I find relief in the apocalypse … Like people are sort of getting back to natural things.”

As with most invocations of the nature/ culture divide, a desire to return to the former elides a more vulnerable expression of anxiety about how to fit into the latter. I take Goulis’ expression in stride, and I think it’s comparable to a metaphor that Wark uses in “Mapping the Antipodes” for how both of them envision the internet as a harsh edge upon which we’re teetering. In that chapter, Wark describes the balance between material and digital spheres as like “living too close to the freeway.” It’s a noisy road where drivers constantly rocket somewhere else, a humming liminal space where touch feels

unreachable. As opposed to the kinds of imper sonal and parasocial audience-producer inter actions that internet production foregrounds, TV220 promises a step back from the crushing noise for a focus on its local community.

Potentialities for such participatory televi sion production appear wholly unviable today, and the screen certainly facilitates the grating individualization of artistic production. There’s a story from TV220 called “Dirty” about a man in a suit who wants to erase every trace of himself from the world. “I’m not antisocial, just nonex istent.” Expressions like these make me think of the Freudian death instinct, the desire to return to a mythical place “pre-birth,” to self-efface, to seek the human in the infantile. It’s difficult to resist the fetishization of the pre-digital past as somehow “more human.” That impulse becomes all the more magnetic as visions for even the short future become more and more opaque. Rather than either impulse, maybe we bear in mind models for the present. From TV220, these might include community integration, working with “small means,” admitting the avant-garde, squishing your way into spaces where no one wants you. The man in the suit, later revealed as “Andrew,” gets a call in his motel hidey-hole one day. Someone’s just had his child, and she pleads with him to return her call. Cut to him as he dives into the motel pool and resurfaces.

For all the TV220 stories I haven’t told, here’s a brief highlight reel.

(a) “Artists in Recovery.” A sequence of addicts discuss painting, philosophy, religion, aesthetics. “[My] decision to be a junkie was a decision based on the information I had about being an artist.”

(b) “Bingo #1.” Content warning reads “homophobia.” Monologue about the differences between straight and gay porn stars. “Why are the men in straight pornographic films ugly as hell, and the gay ones, they’re beautiful and they’re pretty?”

(c) “John’s Deli.” Ends with a leather jacket-clad beautiful biker kissing a girl who works at the deli, wears a baseball cap. “Take it easy kid.”

I’d like to thank Providence Public Library Curators Kate Wells and Jordan Goffin for their help with this project.

KIAN BRAULIK B’24 now seeking genius artist in a Renaissance city.

FEATS

SLIP SLIDIN’ AWAY

Losing and finding home in

Paul Simon and the kosher deli

I. Setting Out

Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping / I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why

The record sleeve of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends is emblazoned with a huge black-andbeige spiral. At least mine is. I suppose it may have once been white, now faded with age and fingertips, or maybe it was designed like that, preemptively yellowed.

When the pandemic hit, I propped the Bookends record sleeve on a chair opposite my bed at home and stared at that endless spiral as the album looped over and over on my tinny record player. I got out of bed only to flip it over and over and over. I became familiar with the jarring transition between “Bookends Theme,” and “Save the Life of my Child,” learning to brace for the latter’s crashing synth after the quiet meandering guitar of the former. Fragments of “Sounds of Silence” echoed eerily out of the cacophonic depths of “Save the Life of my Child,” (Hello darkness my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again). I sank into the imposter syndrome that so mirrored mine in “Fakin’ It,” the bittersweet melancholy of “Old Friends.” In the open, empty space at the start of “Overs”— the flaring of a match, two half-breaths, almost gulps—I would always take a deep breath of my own and listen to the record spin.

I couldn’t stop listening to the album. The first three quarters of my freshman year of college had rent me apart and then unceremoniously spat me back home, a home turned upside down and utterly unfamiliar, a self I could no longer recognize. In that fracturing, I relished just how much Bookends works as a coherent whole: the way the “Save the Life” synth buzzes at the start of “America,” oh my Grace / I got no hiding place melting into humming about, perhaps, hiding every where. The generosity of “Voices of Old People,” a recording that teeters on the line between infinite wisdom and complete nonsense, suturing the album together.

It was certainly not the first time I had turned to Simon & Garfunkel that year; in my first months of college, I listened to the boys from Queens whenever I needed comfort. “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” a song about the exhaustion of performing whose upbeat rhythm, enthusiastic vocals, and full brass section sound like a forced grin, took on new meaning as I tried to play myself for a new audience. “Homeward Bound,” the former’s melancholy partner, played when I real ized I missed my parents. And, when I came home in March, empty and aching and not knowing why, I turned to Bookends. +++

At the same moment, the pandemic was working to hasten the decline of an already-threatened cultural institution: kosher delis. These delis once numbered in the thousands on the streets of

New York City, prevalent most of all in the Jewish enclave of the Lower East Side. But they have been in decline since the ’50s, due to the concurrent rise of Jewish suburbanization (part of a wave of white flight from New York), a collective turn toward healthier food, and the increasing assimi lation of Ashkenazi Jewish Americans. Thousands of delis have disappeared in the past half-century, and the pandemic sent a few more to their graves; only a handful remain. As I grappled with personal instability, New York’s kosher delis fought off an destabilizing tide of their own. One that, I fear, might hint toward the loss of something much larger than the institutions themselves: the loss of cultural Jewish memory.

I have again and again turned to Simon & Garfunkel in the face of the unknown; I turn again. In their twisting lyrics and fluid harmonies, and particularly in Paul Simon, the man behind the music, I search for an answer to this existential instability.

II. Slipping Away

half of the time we’re gone / but we don’t know where / and we don’t know where

Kosher delis in New York didn’t feed Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants exactly what they would’ve eaten in the old country. Emerging out of the tradition of German delicatessens (a word that means something like a place to find delicious things to eat) and influenced by an influx of Jewish immi grants from eastern Europe and Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they served luxuries that tasted something of the past: most emblem atically, rye piled high with hot pastrami, maybe with some sauerkraut and deli mustard. Pastrami, indeed, was invented by Jewish American immi grants, who applied imported Romanian curing techniques to cheap American beef. At these initially Yiddish-speaking institutions, flavors drawn from various countries of immigrant origin met for the first time and were filtered through their new home.

In those years when Kosher delis proliferated in New York, they served as joyful hubs of cultural Judaism—perhaps the most visible Jewish third space, if you will—playing no small part in the consolidation of a secular Jewish American iden tity. As Ted Merwin writes in Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli, “the cramped,

bustling delicatessen became a focal point of Jewish identity and remembrance—a capacious, well-trodden, metaphorical homeland for the Jewish soul.” They became both what French historian Pierre Nora would call lieux de mémoire (memory spaces), sites of collective—sometimes invented—remembrance, and the site of assim ilation, folding the tradition of the past into the context of the present.

For me, and surely for other entirely assimi lated Ashkenazi Jewish Americans, the “kosherstyle” (but often no longer kosher) deli today performs a doubled nostalgia: for the place where these flavors came from, and for the time when the deli fostered a vibrant cultural Judaism. Stepping into Katz’s these days feels like stepping onto the set of an ’80s rom-com: The decor seems not to have changed meaningfully in decades; banners hanging from the ceiling still implore you to “send a salami to your boy in the army,” a relic of World War II patriotism. At 2nd Ave Deli (now with locations only on 1st and 3rd Avenues, notably), the nostalgia is less obvious but no less present. They set the table with pickles (both sour and half-sour) and sauerkraut, offer jellied calves’ feet and lots of tongues alongside matzo ball soup and sandwiches. The menu is frozen in time, perhaps as a result of dwindling immigration, and the pictures decorating the walls honor the deli’s heyday. I can’t help but feel that the decline of this memory space and dispersal of community has transformed the remaining delis into living arti facts, commemorating a past Jewish experience and city rather than ushering in a contemporary one.

For the deli is for me also a site of anxiety and vague, unplaceable mourning. A reminder of so much tradition left behind, the shreds of which we cling onto in the deli. I search here for myself, for my ancestors, hoping the flavor of things pickled and cured will connect me to a past I lack other evidence for. Just like the delis, I sit in the space between presence and absence. My maternal great-grandparents only spoke Yiddish; my mom knows a litany of phrases; I say shtick and schlep a lot. I joke that this is the generation in which Yiddish will die and yet do nothing about it. I know little but the names of my great-grand mothers—Essie and Pearl and Jenny and Ella— who fled their homes in Ukraine and Belarus, traveled across great oceans to reach Philadelphia and New Jersey. I can do little but trace around the

edges of what used to be, grasping memory only secondhand through the scrapped-together stories of family, the taste of pastrami. There was memory here, but I struggle to hold it. +++

I don’t know if my parents were always playing Simon & Garfunkel when I was growing up, or if it just feels that way. Sometimes I can remember the first time I heard one of their songs. My brother and dad and I, seven-years-old, waiting in the car on 3rd and 70th for my mom to return from an errand. The sunroof is open, and Joey and I jostle for a spot on the center console to poke our heads out, reveling in illicitness. “America” comes on the radio; my dad tells us that this is our mom’s favorite song. I suddenly scan the street, anxious for my mom’s return, eager for her reaction. But when she comes back to the car, she barely notices, and my heart sinks. It’s only now that I know that my mom has many favorite songs, that this would not have been notable, though at the time my kid brain told me favorites must be singular.

I don’t know if this actually happened. I wonder, in the act of remembering and re-remem bering this moment each time I hear “America,” whether the memory gets hardened in truth or reinscribed in degrees of falsehood. My associ ations with every word in that song are layered down to that first listen—childhood visions of an invented New Jersey Turnpike sit beneath a more mature, complicated grasp of Simon’s malaise— and yet I suspect those first impressions to them selves be false.

They might as well be; I realize that the project of parsing degrees of accuracy in memory is futile. Because of the mind’s elasticity, memory is always a reconstruction of the past, never an exact replica but rather the past seen through the prism of the present. The importance of these memories derive far less from their total accu racy than from the resonance with which they imbue the music. There need not be anxiety in the slipperiness of memory: it is in fact the process of reconstituting that childhood experience through all I have lived since that allows the memory to take on greater meaning. Through the weight of this reconstructed memory, Simon & Garfunkel become a link to my childhood, a way of under standing myself today, and a connection to my parents that cuts across decades. I learn “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on piano; years later my dad tells me he had to sing it in middle school chorus—the high notes so high they hurt his head. I soak up my parents’ reminiscences of the time when Simon & Garfunkel were “of the moment,” my dad’s stories of playing his own father’s record of Bridge Over Troubled Water over and over and over. I return constantly to Bookends because of all the memory it carries, find myself in it at 20 in ways I never could have at age seven. +++

There is real mourning in the loss of familial memory, in assimilation long past. I will always wonder how my ancestors practiced Shabbat, if my great-great-great grandmother wrapped her hair, what they ate, how they made a living and where. The decline of kosher delis is still a loss. But the elasticity of my childhood memories of “America” offer a way to come to terms with my anxiety about the preservation of a stable Jewish past. If we can understand cultural memory to be, as Nora says, “by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual,” then the memory of a collective past can, too, be understood as always imperfectly reconstructed. To preserve one Jewish past in amber—honing in on, say, 1940s New York or 1870s Ukraine— would be to deny that “Jewish culture” has forever been fluid. To be Jewish, to me, has always meant to redefine what it means to be Jewish. I mourn those centers of community lost, but cultural preservation has never meant freezing relics of community past. There is resilience and beauty in what comes of moving forward, in doing what deli owners in their prime did: reimagining elements of the past in the context of the present, inventing pastrami.

Besides, despite no longer being the cultural hubs they used to be, the kosher delis of my home still kindle memory. Last weekend, my family made a pilgrimage to 2nd Ave Deli, lacking a good deli in our own neighborhood; my parents and I shared potato knishes and piles of smoked meat on rye. In the space made by the deli, the call to memory of the space, we speak for the first time of their immigrant grandparents’ culinary traditions: brisket, so much brisket, and stuffed cabbage, gefilte fish, kasha varnishkes, sour cherry vareniki. We call my grandma and my dad’s cousin and learn that great-grandma Pearl was born in Zhmerynka, Ukraine.

Interviewed for “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli,” an exhibit that opened this month at the New York Historical Society, the owner of 2nd Ave Deli proudly quoted his customers: “I’m so glad you’re here. They’re talking about the deli. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad I have a connection to the past.”

III. (Re)building

I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending / or maybe there’s no obligations now

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel both grew up in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, a neighborhood with a long Jewish history that is today an enclave of Orthodox Judaism. Garfunkel learned to sing growing up as a cantor at his local synagogue. Simon’s connection to music is far less explicitly grounded in his Jewish upbringing. When asked by Malcolm Gladwell where he sees his Judaism in his music, he responded: “In my songwriting? Hard to say. Because it’s a cultural sensibility that you grow up with, and how exactly you define that, I don’t know. It’s there, but it’s only there because that’s the world I grew up in.”

I can’t help but search between the notes for that elusive sensibility, attempting to locate myself in his music. I hear it in “Voices of Old People,” recorded in a Jewish retirement home, in Simon’s imagination of his life in the old country in “Fakin’ It” (“Prior to this lifetime / I surely was a tailor”) and identification with his grandfather, indeed a tailor in Vienna. And I find it walking arm in arm with two friends on a dark city street, belting “The Boxer” and realizing how much the wordless hook—lie la lie—mimicks a nigun, a wordless, repetitive melody chanted collectively in Jewish prayer and song. Simon claims the sounds were originally meant as a placeholder, but that “we love to sing nonsensical sounds, that’s a deep human pleasure. There’s a communal atmosphere that it evokes.” Indeed, I have found this pleasure most of all in Jewish song: sitting shoulder-toshoulder on a living room floor, eating challah and drinking wine and singing in the round, nonsense sounds and words I can’t understand but can feel ringing in my chest. Song is what brought me back, after years of my rejection of regular prac tice, to a version of Judaism I could begin to find myself in.

But Simon’s Jewish sensibility is just that: a sensibility. He is notably less reticent about his other influences, able and eager to identify the diverse traditions folded—sometimes all at once— into his work, down to the style of guitar-plucking or the origins of a single lyric. His embrace of influence is evident in his sound: in the drum ming of Rhythm of the Saints, the slapback guitar in Graceland, the gospel influences in Bridge Over Troubled Water. Growing up in Queens at the time that he did, Gladwell claims, both exposed him to a swath of musical traditions and allowed his own identity to melt into the background: “To be a New Yorker of that era was to sit in a wonder fully ambiguous place, where all those different

traditions … literally intersected.” Simon’s genius lives in his ability to collect bits of histories and sounds and influences—especially through collab orations with artists from around the world—and transform that patchwork into something cohe sive and completely new. It is his instability of identity, not his grounding in a particular place or culture, that renders Simon’s music singular.

This freedom to explore instability is in no small part made possible by the shifting of what it has meant to be Jewish American in the past century. His music is emblematic of the space between Jewish past and future, an example of what may be created through the reconstruction of past tradition into something new altogether.

This process—made personal—creates, indeed, new tradition. As I’ve tried to find and create my own spiritual spaces these past few years, how I learned to be Jewish growing up has become just one piece of a patchwork of influence informing my practice. Like Simon, with distance from ancestral tradition comes the flexibility to create something new, something fully my own.

In slipperiness, I find myself at home.

IIII. Bookending

then I’m laying out my winter clothes / and wishing I was gone, going home

There is something universal, anthemic, even genius in Paul Simon’s 60-something-yearlong career. But it is not grandeur that keeps him playing in my kitchen. It’s his deep, ordinary joy and sadness, the way he sits quietly in the regular delights and disappointments of a life lived. He loves deeply and is honest about how very tired he is.

So much of his music is steeped in that which is just about to end—the space between having and having had. In “Overs,” a married couple lives as a pair of ghosts, no longer meaningfully sharing space or love but unwilling (or unable) to stop haunting each other. His lovers are always just behind him or on the doorstep. He is the secret king of the road song—in the most expan sive sense of the word—of leaving and traveling away as he looks back, but never quite reaching anywhere else. Where are they going in “America,” in “Graceland”? Away from here, to look for some thing that is everywhere and thus elusive. Those pilgrimages are about the search far more than the arrival.

Every time in the past few years that I’ve ached for home, I’ve listened to “Homeward Bound.” When I hear Paul Simon long for comfort on a train platform, I feel his words echoing in my throat and stomach and chest. I too want, so badly, to be homeward bound. But home is too often a shifting target, fragmented across space and time by many moves, by switching schools, by college, by the pandemic, by disorientation in myself. When I wish for home, I do not think of a particular place, but rather long to be held by that in which I know I belong.

In “Homeward Bound,” Paul never reaches home. It is a song perpetually in transit, living forever on the road, in the missing and the yearning. Perhaps that’s what speaks to me so strongly—the act of missing home without having to have a grounded place to locate the want. He also doesn’t describe his home. He doesn’t need to: An image emerges in the negative space of his longing. Home is anywhere where not everyone is a stranger, where you don’t have to perform, where your love lies, where music plays just for you.

Maybe this is the music that is playing wher ever home is for me.

ELLA SPUNGEN B’23.5 can be your long lost pal.

It struck me then, for the first time, that I had idealized her—that knees-flush-to-the-altar whisper of worship, dressing the pedestal as comfortably as possible, imagined eulogy for the charitable, the giving, and good. But there was nothing left to do: Outside it was begin ning to freeze, and Esme had ended our rela tionship in its third year. I was to be a loveless, jobless graduate. I had become kind of selfish, she claimed.

One by one, responses to my last-resort fellowship applications to places like Banja Luka, Croatia or the suburbs of Guangzhou— where I would answer my parents’ twice-weekly calls with fabricated stories about all of the massive, infrastructurally indispensable suspen sion bridges and underground railways I was building—reached me as rejections. Before the onslaught of mailbox clutter, I often fantasized about bringing her with me across either ocean, sitting together at the dining room table as she spooned West Lake beef soup into two fist-sized bowls. There I would tell her the truth, about the kids I had no right to be teaching English to, or the shallow archival research I’d begun on local 18th-century fashions.

That fantasy had dissolved. My sister persisted, and perfectly. +++

Winnie told me she was pregnant on a Friday in April, more so in apology than announcement. We curled into ourselves in her living room, half an hour from campus, where that morning I caught Esme looking at me with honest disgust for the first time. I had worn her pants out the night before, peeling them off in her kitchen as the sun came up and abandoning them on the tile. It was roughly well-intentioned—to soak up the pool of tap water that had escaped my goblet of interlocked fingers.

“I’ve really been wanting to tell you,” Winnie said. She folded her hands under what was still an imaginary belly, prodding the cotton petals of her blouse down as if to sculpt a baby-sized globe. She was due the first week of August. “I swear.” And because I could see no part of her brushing up against malice, because I had recently learned what it was like to tearfully beg someone, please, to understand—tucking Esme’s trousers into the washing machine with utmost care as she watched with her arms crossed—no part of me was angry.

I screeched her name, first and last.

April (the month Winnie disclosed her changed existence) or Charlotte (easily abbrevi ated to Charlie) or Saoirse (like Ronan). She was especially distressed by Saoirse. The life of an Asian kid with a Gaelic name would be difficult. She hadn’t told me it was a girl until she stepped out to make dinner, after I stopped bouncing and cooing and squeezing her but not too tight, because now there was something to crush.

I thought my giddiness might expand until it distorted me. I could only imagine her daughter in demigod proportions. Big dark eyes with eyelash wings, impossibly round fingers that dripped from her hands like berries.

object lesson

Our parents had always told me Winnie was a child genius, so the baby spoke her first word at six days old and commanded three languages in a month. When she cried it was adorable and only during the day.

Since starting school, Winnie’s letters had arrived in my campus mailbox in unpredictable intervals, flecked with holographic stickers and swirly script—the baby, too, had a sense of whimsy, she brought me pebbles and flowers and mud as gifts. I called Winnie to thank her for the letters and each time she feigned ignorance, words twinkling under static, see you this weekend

If the baby blundered it was out of good ness. A pair of eggs she left behind the couch to rot because they were in love, because their discovery would delight us, because eventually it would make for a great story about parenting.

To Carter’s for one-piece pajamas. To Best Buy for a baby monitor. On Monday I’d skip class and cite in my apologetic email a niece of two months, but by Tuesday she’d be twelve years old. When a shop clerk asked about my little angel, I’d gaze fondly at my midriff and tell them the name of a creature that might never exist.

She would be golden. She would trick Winnie into having and adoring so many cruel, uncooperative children. +++

I didn’t consider myself a bad cook. The first time Winnie watched me pour oil into a pan, she sucked her teeth in dismay. When I asked her if it was too much, her laugh sounded like slivers of

glass scattering. “Not even close to enough,” she said.

I would have drained the rest of the bottle into the pan if she asked me to. Gently she took it from me. She was particular about food and never, to my contentment, let me chop vegetables or boil stocks or sear filets.

The night she told me she was pregnant, I was happy, as always, to enjoy her cooking without laboring over it beside her. Instead I lay on the sofa and raced through baby name websites, sorting by meaning rather than phonetics.

When her voice rang out to say the food was ready, I rose to gather utensils—glasses, wide plates, serving spoons, two pairs of forks and knives. Frances or Jo or Carolyn, maybe. She cast me a smile. I couldn’t tell her I was growing too nauseous to eat. How to carry everything? I braided the forks and knives around my fingers, recoiled from a series of painful pressures, embossed handles.

The glasses teetered in the bowls on top of the plates in the crook of my elbow. When I made it to the table, it had already been set. +++

Time worked differently when I was seven or eight. For weeks that mutated into months, I scrambled straight to my room after school to practice my belting. A barrage of high notes that commanded a voice into unnatural shapes. A dance-pop power ballad wielding tinkly synth hooks, lyrics of the class that commanded you

to love yourself, find power in who you are. Seek truth! the singer in the music video howled beautifully. Then a cannon of firecrackers burst behind her. That was the song that brought Winnie and her friends to tears.

But I loved the act—nursing the fractures in my timid voice, smoothing its edges the same way Winnie reunited two ends of a pencil she’d snapped in a show of adolescent strength, splintered halves sharing a kiss. Toward the end of my obsession, there were still places where my voice plummeted into flatness. But no one would notice, I reasoned, and my lack of volume was the more urgent issue. The woman with the pyrotechnics could easily fill an auditorium with sound. My voice petered feebly through my bedroom.

My final day of practice started out well enough. Six hours in a second-grade class room left me with plenty of energy to drill the chorus—the most demanding part of the song— all afternoon. Winnie had brought her friends over, and whenever a note left my lips I imagined it sounded like a crystal, shimmering.

Alone in my bedroom, I flung my voice further and further away from me. Something clawed at my door as I approached the chorus, like an animal desperate for escape, but I trekked on. Jaw wrenched, fists trembling, my body nearly sacrificed to a crest of sound.

A muffled snicker interrupted the climactic note. At its highest point my voice trembled in the air and hurtled to the ground, pitchy and repulsive. A flurry of girlish noises ambushed my bedroom door.

They were laughing. Laughing indistinguish able from crying. I stood frozen near the window as their cackles drifted down the hallway. In rushed air I refused to breathe. Of the preteenage pack behind the door, Winnie’s voice pierced through me most clearly, I could imagine her doubling over, gasping for breath. Clutching at her stomach, like there was something she strug gled to contain. +++

Now on the drives back through the creeks and trees each weekend, I searched for some kind of thought to overwhelm the sound of my breathing, everything of substance already spent up in conversation with Winnie—pensive, soothing audience. I thought about the contents of her fridge, each item sorted into beautiful lines, objects and their shoulders brushing. She sent me home with leftovers I would not have time to eat. That was the sister who made up the lovely noise of my life, and if there were no cars around, I dug my palm into the horn and left it there.

We sat for dinner with our parents one night during my junior year of high school, weeks after they had gotten into a screaming fight with her over her desire to drop out of college, days after she had moved back in with us and enrolled at the local university. It had been a few years since I’d looked at her face long enough to remember what went where. I cleared my plate quickly and mentioned going to visit my then-boyfriend, whom I did not name. Disbelief surfaced in her expression then, something that exposed, if only briefly, her unquestioned assumption: that I occupied not only no space in her life, but no space in any life at all. +++

We had a lot of good days, even after I used her pants as a mophead. Each time Esme looked at me my skin felt raw, like the aftermath of a burn, but she still cracked jokes, made the sculptures her studio class assigned, and I continued to find my room dusted with the things she used to make them—warped mesh, plaster, jewel-toned scraps of fabric. The spirelike shapes she favored still surfaced in everything. But what she created had taken on a strangeness that I was distraught I understood. Something indestructible caged in something delicate, or painful materials made to look soft.

If she stayed the night, she left what she was constructing on my desk. Through the hours I snuck glances over her shoulder at whichever project punched up into the air. Everything she touched teetered on the edge of something, I thought. Sometimes I struggled to breathe. It was as if Esme had thrown herself across my chest and just laid there. Studying the dark figures on my desk, I could not tell if this was a symptom or a desire. Her body was warm and still beside me.

Esme always woke early, a breakfast-eater. She carried her half-finished sculptures to my doorstep, where the same sliver of light illumi nated her face each morning. I didn’t ask her what the sculptures meant, or what she wanted them to be. I was desperate for her to know that I was more proud of her than I’d ever been of another person. And that would be it. I’d have said everything I would ever need to say, and so I would go, go forever, looking for a place I knew didn’t exist, a room that wouldn’t take us hostage. +++

beside me, irritated. “If you insist,” I said, and began my attempt. It offered nothing—I spoke aloud but circuitously, slipping on each term and whatever connected them, my mouth and mind both slick with oil. Esme did not laugh.

She simply listened. I kept talking and turned to look at her, met her eyes, intent to stare. Her unwillingness to leave. And as my words began to give out I understood. Sometimes I just wanted to hear her talk.

When I turned to pick up a pencil Esme snatched it from me. I took it back and began scratching out heat conduction derivatives on a spare notepad, an ache running from my arms into my fingertips. For an hour or two she crouched beside me on the desk chair, hovering in the darkness my ear cast upon my neck, but I could see her smile despite—bright pearl in my throat, slipping—and I pressed her head to mine—in that unbearable place beyond devotion where it landed—and she began to whisper: do you get it, the glint in her teeth, do you get it, the arc of her mouth, do you get it now? +++

I drove into the city to see her old apartment only once. Wooden rooms with cold, thin air. Thin air with no scent. My hope was to catch a glimpse of Winnie or her mustachioed husband moving their things into a U-Haul, a new sign wailing NOW LEASING. Instead I saw straight into the apartment window. Nothing behind it moved, but the lights were on.

Telling the story to Esme, I’d have asked her to participate. She’d be eager to. Guess, I would say, when I finally started to cry this time?

And Esme would say, I need you to narrow it down for me. What are my options? +++

This was not the first time I’d considered breaking up with Esme. After a year together, the thought arose more than once—because she had a habit of interrupting me in conversation with no point in mind; because she was the first person I’d ever deeply loved, I knew nothing when I met her and knew very little now; because in some mental kernel primed to pop, I was sure she could no longer find it in herself to want me. But of course I would never do it, I loved her, I wanted us to be our boat out of here.

I wanted to know why I would never.

In the spring of our sophomore year, Esme stayed the night and apprehended me with a question as I sat at my desk. “Do you think you’re your parents’ favorite? Between you and Winnie.”

It wasn’t like her. She preferred to talk and talk around things, skirt the edge of an idea and watch a shape arise, but today she looked tired and pink in unusual places, so I didn’t press. I paused. “They’re proud of me,” I said slowly. “I think they’re proud.”

A thing can be honest and false, simulta neously. My parents were happier with me than they’d ever been with Winnie. Not because there was anything wrong with her. Everything I told them was a lie. But I didn’t want to burden Esme with this explanation, it seemed like she had a lot going on.

She nodded, looking satisfied, and rubbed her eyes. The final projects for all her classes had come and gone early, so she was left watching me drill problem sets for my engineering classes. Leaning over my shoulder, her profile turned newly attentive. I reached up to touch her hair. A printout from Thermodynamics claimed the center of my desk, and her finger suddenly shot out from behind me, lodging in the center of the page. “Explain this,” she said.

“I honestly don’t get it yet.” I dropped my hand from her hair. “Sorry to disappoint.”

She pressed into the back of my seat. “Okay? Try it anyways.”

My exam was the day after next. I gave an eyeroll she wouldn’t have been able to see from

At first I assumed it was to save me gas money. A week before my final commute, Winnie asked to meet in a café a few blocks from campus, the only coffee-serving establishment open past 4 p.m. I sat at the booth furthest from the doors, which fluttered open and closed in the cold. She arrived in a tank top unsuitable for the dark drizzle of November. In her right hand she cradled baby Gemma in a car seat-turned-carrier. When I stood to hug her she was damp with rain.

The café was not the best place for a meeting. Endless kitsch prints and Tiffany blue. We only ever saw each other under her hospitality, in her eggshell room with the pear-shaped saltshakers. Here our difference in years materialized: in the decor, across the width of the table. Her baby’s presence. I still lived in a bedroom a few blocks away, with walls I wasn’t allowed to drive nails into.

“Thanks for coming all the way out,” I said as we sat down.

“Aw, come on.” She paused. “I’m more than happy to.”

I slid her a menu across the laminate and wiggled a finger in her direction. “How’s baby Gemma?”

“Tired. She’s…tired.”

Winnie swiped the glossy edge of the menu across the space under her nails, like she was trying to separate them from her fingertips. It looked like she was shivering. This was okay, I reasoned, because she had just walked barearmed through the rain.

“Did you forget a sweater or something—?”

“How’s school?” she interrupted. I pouted. I spent Friday nights babysitting her daughter. Winnie had to have known exactly how.

She opened her mouth to speak once, twice. There was something heavy about her, some thing slack in the face. An itch spread across my neck and into my mouth. Her uncertainty drew my eyes to the doors.

She watched the same exit, the way it blinked. “You know,” Winnie began.

“What?”

“You know,” she said again, with a sudden force, as if thrusting the body of her voice from a great height, “Danny and Gemma and I are

moving.”

“Moving? Did you guys find a house?”

“To Northern California.”

It was near freezing outside, but our seat by the kitchen made it hot. I’d come here for lunch once with Esme, and in the bathroom the tap changed temperature before I could finish turning the knob, replacing warmth with a flood of freezing water. The ice-cold arrived before I could process it, disguised briefly as a raging heat—sleight of hand. I ripped away from the stream. I scalded myself; I was unharmed.

A thing can be honest and false, simultane ously. I could confuse cool water for a wound. The same nerve fibers that carry temperature carry pain, Esme told me as she buttered her rye, and I wanted to know how she’d come to this conclusion. I felt the same way now.

“When—when are you leaving?”

Winnie leaned forward to answer, like she was sharing a secret. Like she was scared someone would hear. I was scared to be someone.

We sat there for a while. My mouth flut tered open and closed in the cold. Eventually she stood and brushed nothing from her pants. This was her way of waving. Then she laid her hand on mine across the table, where our pinkies touched. The only part of her eyes I could see was their sad slope.

In my imagined game with Esme, I repeat a pair of truths to guide her: Winnie wasn’t looking at me then. Winnie lives elsewhere now.

When she turned, the bony backs of her shoulders were peppered with goosebumps, straining like bare machinery from the weight of the baby carrier in her right hand. I saw, finally, where her layers had gone. She had taken off her sweatshirt to veil her baby’s eyes. To shield her small head from the soft patter of rain. +++

An electric moan had replaced the chatter of passing students on my walk the following week. The air smelled sweet above the sidewalk and its oily shades of gold and tangerine, fallen leaves. Throughout the week, the trees had jettisoned everything that was theirs. Three men in a strained triangle used leaf blowers to feed dead leaves into a woodchipper that devoured and furiously spat what remained of them into the air. It hung from a truck dwarfing half the street.

Confetti didn’t erupt in fiery colors. Instead dusty fragments lodged in my mouth, my nostrils, the whites of my eyes. I cupped my nose and squeezed myself completely shut. In the dark my body disappeared, as if the air holding me in place had slackened its grip. I tried to see how far I could walk without stumbling.

When the growl of the leaf blowers dropped out, I took it to mean I was safe. The first blink after opening my eyes burned, placing me in front of an intersection that looked exactly like the block where the truck sat, sans truck. Sans sweet air. Water pooled in the street’s leafy crust and wrung from it the scent of decay, sharp and inescapable, like the stench of warm fruit. If Esme were to guess that it started here, that it all became too much, the leaving and the cold

and the disgusting smell, I would have told her, no, but good guess, this was the second, and quieter, time.

+++

It took me a while to place it, where in the past I had caught that morning’s smell. On the first of every elemen tary school month they laid mulch in all of the planters, filling the day with rotten wood. I spent recesses pinching my nose shut and squatting at the apex of the playground tower in an effort to distance myself from the wood chips, which were pungent but not quite repulsive, like grocery store cake with chemical flavors. This was long before Winnie begrudgingly drove me to the middle school each morning, back when we always arrived together in mom’s RAV4, and Winnie burst onto the blacktop the instant the door opened.

Sour mulch was a routine encounter, and an incident we never acknowledged took place. She was nine then, so I must have been four. I don’t remember what day it was, just that what happened was the only significant thing about it, the air at school lacked strength and splinters didn’t cling to my shoes, it was a time defined by its absences. Winnie sat on our home’s entryway floor beside a plank whose dimples held colorful quartets of stone. She did not touch them. Instead she cut pieces of tape using miniature scissors, pasting them smugly between the board’s clefts and edges.

Seeing the full set of mancala beads was my first, and most transcendent, encounter with beauty. I told Esme this on our fourth or fifth date, when she asked me what is the most stunning thing you’ve ever seen—and I could have said you, except I didn’t know her that well, even as a joke it felt gauche and kind of creepy. She laughed in response, described a sunstruck mountain in her mother’s home country. The mancala board, I explained, gripped me so forcefully because I hadn’t yet known what I was meant to do when faced with beauty, take a picture or perceive my smallness or mourn that nothing wide-eyed was staring back at me. Its sheer magnetism might also have resulted from its contrast with the ugly thing that happened afterward; this I had never been able to tell Esme, not even in imagined conversation. It was a story I wanted to spare her.

My favorite mancala pieces were tinged with pale marine green, a color I had never seen before. It didn’t occur to me at four years old that they were things without value, I only saw little opals, sapphires, hard lumps of brown sugar polished into something worthy of being pinched between my fingers. A platter of high-budget hard candies. I wanted to hold them, eat them, hide them away.

The scene was not beautiful to Winnie, who was fervently bedazzling the board. Every time I reached for a bead she smacked my hand away. “ she spat, and transferred another sticker from a glittery sheet onto the wood.

I could not. My hands were siphoning all energy reserved for the rest of my body, and they took every opportunity to poke at the board, primal snout snuffling uselessly in the dirt. A sense of unease grew in me with each failed capture. Something parallel was rising in Winnie, who had stopped applying rhinestones and stickers and abandoned the roll of Scotch tape she’d been kiddie scis sor-splicing into one-of-a-kind shapes. She stared at me blankly, her body so tense it shook, seemed to curdle. With her gaze boring into

my eyes, I saw my chance, I shot forward with inhuman—meaning childlike—speed.

The sound is so distinct to me now, a sweet chirp of metal. In a rapid movement Winnie pried her small scissors open, and just as quickly snapped them shut around my thumb. It must have hurt, but I was so busy tracking her reaction that the feeling is nothing to me. How her eyes saucered open. The way she clapped her hand to her mouth and let the blades fall. Blood puddled on the floor, first on the cream tiles, then in the cracks between them, a little network of red. She started crying before I did, the panic flooding out of her in piercing wails, and I took this to mean that I should cry too, and louder.

“You can have them!” Her chest heaved. She shoved one of the mancala pieces into my fingers. Through tears I mimicked her refusal of the scissors and let the small stone fall to the floor. “Please. Please take them,” she sobbed, the swell of her throat stretching her words into oblong shapes. She handed me another. Then another. I was bawling with such force now that it morphed into a gargle, but I finally cupped both hands together to accommodate her offerings.

My name rang from a faraway place. Winnie gave me a clear stone, then dark blue, then a green one. Our parents thundered down the stairs, began to howl after us, her pace quick ened, she blubbered and emptied the board with impossible ferocity. “I’m—I’m—I’m soooorry,” she screamed. I screamed too, but inside some thing whole had burst open, I was not angry. My hands hung in the air, damp and dark.

Winnie piled the pieces into my palms until I could hold them no longer, until they spilled onto the ground in sheets. Little beads snapping on the stone like sparks: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

When I looped back onto the street where my walk had started, the truck and the wood chipper were gone. Any trace of what had fallen from the trees, too, had disappeared, the season escaping on wheels. I thought with a pang of the night before Esme ended things, how we were sitting on her couch when Winnie called me like always, and I snuffed out the phone’s light and sound by pressing power down. A helpless look eclipsed Esme’s face. “You should take it,” and I shook my head, but she insisted, and there was a quickness with which I relented, pressed my lips to the peak of her shoulder and retreated to call my sister back. On Esme’s bedroom floor Winnie imparted only questions—what did you do today or if you could change one thing—and for hours I let the cell phone static guide my voice into the receiver without a second thought. Drifting along the leafless sidewalk, I considered what would have become of us had any part of the scene not occurred. If the blades of the scissor hadn’t snapped shut around my finger, if I hadn’t screamed like a comet had struck. If I had located it then and not as two sleeves swayed before her baby’s eyes, the least excruciating road to good

The City is an Image Among Images

Two summers ago, I visited the Whitney Museum in New York City. I decided to start at the top and work my way down. But upon reaching the eighth floor, I entered an exhibit beyond traditional spatial coordinates. The canvases swallowed the room, fusing the Whitney’s pale floors and white walls into their facades. I found myself pacing through the exhibit like a rat in a maze: right, left, closer, further back, to the right again, and to the left once more.

Julie Mehretu’s mid-career survey, on view from March through August of 2020, encompassed more than two decades and 30 paintings. Mehretu, known for her dynamic use of space, architecture, and abstraction, was born in Addis Ababa but fled to the U.S. in 1977 after the Ethiopian Revolution. Political violence and migration all figure heavily in her work, but it is the city that grounds her pieces. Take Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts). Seen from far away, the paintings appear as abstract movements, the brushstrokes gestural and blurred, like whispers of birds taking flight. They’re mostly black and white, cut through by colorful geometric shapes that suggest some sort of order to the chaos. But when one gets closer, the dynamic shifts. Behind these smudges and lines, the viewer finds a sketch of buildings fit for an architectural blueprint—a strikingly mathematical basis for a painting so wistful. Drawing closer, the buildings’ designs come into focus: windows with iron balconies, glamorous entryways, and stained glass. These windows, doors, and walls overlap so that just as the viewer locates one spatial plane, they find themselves dissolved into another.

The buildings Mehretu references can be found in Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square, New York’s Zuccotti Park, or Cairo’s Tahrir Square, all sites of political demonstrations. The diagrams of these buildings were composited and then projected by the artist using computer programs. She traced over these projections and then painted strokes, blobs, lines, and shapes— illusions of paths or landmarks—on her map of this fictional megacity. The product manages to reject representation from five feet away but embrace it at a closer range. +++

Mehretu is interested in the image of the city: the city as an aesthetic locale as much as a political one, a compilation of images—abstract and representational—as much as a destination. A decade before Mehretu was born, urban planner Kevin Lynch explored the conceptual basis for this kind of thinking in his hallmark book The Image of the City (1960).

For Lynch, “the urban landscape, among its many roles, is also something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in.” In essence, Lynch is interested in the aesthetic form of the city. By studying Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles through interviews with locals and excursions, he foregrounds “mental mapping” as a crucial aspect of urban conception; that is, people experience their cities based on specific images that orient their thinking of the space. Lynch identifies five features that urbanites recall in their mental maps of each city—paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks—as “building blocks” for city designers. “We have the opportunity of forming our new city world into an imageable landscape,” Lynch writes, “visible, coherent, and clear.”

Lynch championed the city at a time when white people were leaving in droves, and cities were suffering financially as a result. In the minds of mid-century urban planners, a ‘better’ city would bring these white flight-ers back into the fold, with their money, resources, and political power. While he proposed a new framework, that general objective seems to have informed Lynch’s work. Because of this, Lynch’s book does not sit well with the 21st-century reader. The class and race politics of the city are suggested but never stated. Lynch’s biases aren’t excusable, nor would his book’s argument alone provide a truly equitable vision of the urban.

Yet many top-down urban redevelopments have been attempted since Lynch’s time, and many have failed. The mall/massive highway combination has left cities like Providence with deserted downtowns, parking lots, and missed opportunities. Urban renewal has pushed out downtown dwellers to make room for empty offices and expensive high-rises. And the more recent “creative class” model pioneered by urban theorist Richard Florida, which argued for development that catered to “high bohemians”—that is, tech workers, creatives, and “gay men and lesbians”—has left us with gentrification in every mid-size city. Lynch’s idea, for its many faults, offers a new way of conceptualizing space. Might Lynch’s imagefirst model more effectively democratize urban space?

In a rare moment of political awareness, Lynch argues that a city designed with aesthetic intention could make “exploration of new sectors both easier and more inviting.” He then notes that “[i]f strategic links in communication (such as museums or libraries or meeting places) are clearly set forth, then those who might otherwise neglect them may be tempted to enter.” Of course, neglecting to enter public space usually has less to do with apathy and more with exclusivity. But the idea he espouses still holds merit. In Lynch’s time, the ‘nice side’ of Beacon Hill, Boston, was full of distinct nodes and landmarks that allowed the citizen to “inform it with his own meanings and connections.” The other side of Beacon Hill, however, had of this imagistic quality.

Urban renewal— which bulldozes distinct, derelict buildings to make way for indistinct, pristine ones—could be read through Lynch’s terms as a destruction of meaning for the urban subject. A different sort of renewal would instead provide more opportunities for “meanings and connections.” And, in an urban plan more nuanced than Lynch’s proposal, this sort of meaning-making would lead to a more democratic and equitable city through aesthetic means. It would blur the lines between city and art, as Mehretu’s work does. It would acknowledge the urban as what it is: a collage of images.

Henri Bergson, an early 20th-century philosopher, made the brave claim that the brain is only “an image among other images.” “Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word,” he wrote, “images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed.” In his insistence on the image as the basis of experience and perception, Lynch finds an ally in Bergson.

Bergson had faded into philosophical obscurity by the time Lynch came around, but in the latter half of the ’60s Gilles Deleuze returned to the philosopher to continue Bergson’s project of “a metaphysical image of thought corresponding to new lines, openings, traces, leaps, dynamisms, discovered by a molecular biology of the brain: new linkings and rethinkings in thought.”

Openings, traces, leaps, and dynamisms provide the rhythm for Mehretu’s complicated projects too. Just as the viewer links an edge to a window or a door to a facade, a tower interrupts the image constructed, or a red strike leads the eyes elsewhere. The blend of the abstract and representational creates an “intermingling” in Mehretu’s words. To borrow Deleuze’s terms, Mehretu “makes thought think” by severing the viewer from all of their presuppositions.

This severance, however, isn’t enough for some critics. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, Jed Perl took aim at Mehretu as another example of the trend whereby artists alternate between abstract and representational modes with little rhyme or reason. He argues that while the post-postmodern era likes to reject labels, artists could benefit from having to answer the question, “Where do you stand?” He argues Mehretu’s abstract markings clash with the representational blueprints onto which they’re inscribed because “for marks to be meaningful they must be tied to some vision of an alternate reality, a new reality.” Instead, he writes, her paintings take the form of “a visual shouting match.”

Perl, though, critiques from a position of extreme stasis, for the emergent realities within Mehretu’s paintings appear with movement. “You have this multitude of experiences in a short amount of time,” Mehretu says of her pieces. “You have to travel through it, and something in it becomes a memory in your experience.” In the exhibit, I oscillated between viewing positions before the prodigious works. The after-image of a close-up view persisted as I backed away, and when I returned to inspect a detail, the canvas’ totality lingered in my mind. A new image emerged from my memory of images. This kind of viewing is as essential to abstract art, as it is to the city. Mehretu provides an artistic model for zooming out of the city while “atomizing,” in her words, the individual landmarks of memory that form a city’s experienced consciousness. Lynch provides a framework for actually carrying this project out in city planning.

Large-scale conceptualizations have not served urban dwellers in the past. But what Lynch is proposing is not so much a transformation of urban experience but experience transformed into the urban. This would be a process, much like Mehretu’s paintings require a processing from the viewer, like Bergson’s idea of perception requires a processing from the subject, like the urbanite processes the nodes, edges, paths, districts and landmarks that form their mental image of the city. This process itself could be enough to, as Lynch says, “sharpen the [city’s] image,” even if the physical result proves unsatisfactory. The development of the image is the important part, for it is through painting marks onto blankness, as he writes, that “the amateur painter begins to see the world around him.”

CECILIA BARRON B’24 can be found around a node or edge of Providence, depending on the day.

TEXT CECILIA BARRON DESIGN SAM STEWART

Julie Mehretu, Kevin Lynch, and a new urban project

THEY ARE ONE

To understand the Mexican government, one must understand the cartel. To understand the Mexican cartel, one must understand the govern ment. The dynamic between the licit government and the illicit cartel shape the systemic corrup tion on which Mexico is built.

From small-town municipal elections to federal officials, cartel and government entanglement is rife. Even in towns with fewer than 500 citizens, voters approach an election already knowing which candidate is backed by which cartel. At the federal level, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is seen greeting the mother of El Chapo—one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world— then dismisses it as a mere greeting to an older woman.

Too often Mexico is defined by the harmful narrative that its violence stems solely from cartels. Officials blame organized crime for sky-high murder rates and Mexico’s status as the deadliest country in the world for journalists. However, bloodshed in Mexico is much more nuanced. It is prominent and deadly because it is deeply integrated. It comes not only from the cartel, but also from the government.

A recent leak of internal documents from the Mexican Ministry of National Defense confirmed this interconnection. The leak showed direct evidence of military involvement with the cartel—a fact that came to no surprise to the Mexican people. As Guacamaya, the group that leaked the documents, said on Twitter, “They did not need us to hack to know something that is evident, in Mexico the government and the narco are one.”

Even though the leak just confirmed these suspicions, it has still led to investigations of the government, posing a threat to the power nexus between the cartel and the state. In this nexus, journalists’ work becomes as crucial as it is perilous. +++

On Thursday, September 29, approximately four million confidential documents were obtained through an illegal breach of la Secretaría de Defensa Nacional (SEDENA), the Mexican Ministry of National Defense. Guacamaya, a prominent hacktivist group that has been

were even assigned to recruit public officials to expand cartel networks of corruption. The López Obrador administration has redefined the illicit and licit nexus in the Mexican military.

There are even cartels that were created by former military officers. Los Zetas, a criminal syndicate, is a prime example: started by former special forces soldiers who had served as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas has established itself as one of the most dangerous cartels in the country.

Thus, suspicions regarding the military’s covert actions were already well-established in Mexican society. However, the leak provided tangible evidence to initiate formal investigations. Following revelations from the SEDENA leak, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Mexico has begun looking into the infamous culiacanazo, the failed attempt by the Mexican National Guard to capture El Chapo’s son.

The relationship between the licit and illicit in Mexico creates an immensely dangerous environment, particularly for those who would expose the truth. Journalists and activists on the front lines of media outlets are disappearing and being brutally murdered, while the López Obrador administration glosses over them with a dismissive fatalism.

When journalists are critical of his government, President López Obrador has personally exposed their private information, calling the public eye to them and putting their lives and their families’ lives at risk. He attacks journalists to evade questions about important issues, particularly the surge in homicides and violence against journalists throughout his tenure.

In daily press conferences, known as Mañaneras, the escalation of the president’s war on journalists is clear. Journalists have demanded action from the president—at least a condemnation of the violence they are experiencing—and have been met constantly with indifference that ridicules their experiences and villainizes their careers. In 2019, for example, journalist Lourdes Maldonado López attended a daily press conference to ask for support and protection because she feared for her life. Her requests were dismissed. In January

2022, she was killed.

“Journalists who do their job wholly and aggressively are always going to come in conflict with power. It is inevitable. The question is how power is going to respond to that,” Brown University professor and journalist Stephen Kinzer said in an interview with the College Hill Independent. In Mexico, that response is becoming exceedingly clear. The role of the journalist has always been crucial for accountability in Mexican politics, and will only continue to be so in a country that is becoming increasingly militarized. +++

The Guacamaya leak highlights the urgency of scrutinizing Mexico’s deepening militarization. It is no longer a question of what could happen if Obrador decides to militarize Mexico, it is now unquestionably confirmed that it is happening. Militarization is the first step for a leader to gain total control over all armed forces. A government becomes centralized and any separation of government sectors dissolves. There should be deep fear for what lies ahead when the military that was just exposed for being in active negotiations with cartels—serving as their enforcer gang, providing them with weapons and information—is only gaining more and more control in the country.

Additional documents confirmed that, in 2019, the Mexican Army bought software to surveil journalists. The software has given military intelligence access to journalists’ electronic devices to keep tabs on their correspondences. The López Obrador administration has continuously denied allegations regarding any government surveillance of journalists—claiming that this government is different from previous administrations who did engage in this surveillance. The president has refused to provide any explanation following this exposure.

While the relationship between the government and the cartel is known, Mexican citizens are consumed by a culture that is built on keeping quiet. There is a hushed knowledge of the corruption that is woven into the political and social fabric of the country, but the widespread threats facing citizens prevent public recognition of it. Both the government and the cartel are kept safe by this fear of speaking out. It is not a matter of being ignorant to negotiations occurring between the government and the cartel, but a function of a culture nourished by fear that allows these negotiations to be accepted as the norm.

Journalists exist outside this culture—they challenge it the moment they write about an issue that isn’t supposed to be written about, accepting the consequences that are sure to follow. They sign a contract by committing to a career in journalism, even with the provision that an interview, a story, or even a simple question could be what gets them killed. Mexico would not be the most dangerous country in the world for journalists if their role was not so critical.

The possibility of losing absolute control is threatening to the government and for the cartel, as is the publication of the conversations they hold behind closed doors. It is no coincidence that those exposing and challenging the government’s corrupt actions—which greatly benefit the cartel—are the most targeted in the country.

The revelation of documents in the SEDENA leak illustrates the sheer enormity of power the López Obrador administration has handed to the military—a military that has been operating illicitly and upholding the nation’s corrupt roots. The fate of democracy in Mexico now depends on both the government and the cartel: who will assert control over the other and where the Mexican citizen will be left standing.

ARIANA PALOMO B’25 still craves her hometown elote.

A government leak con firms the entanglement of the cartel and the Mexican state

Yufan Hu RISD’23

“Map of Fahua” 10x20x4 centimeters, MDF

and fire

A member of the map series, this work is based on my visit to Fahua, a temple complex in Beijing that was destroyed or burned during WWII. All wooden structures were erased, with only stone and brick left: the foundation delineating the layout and the extruding tomb tower for monks. I was overwhelmed by the strong sense of absence there, which drove me to ‘conjure’ it. Studying in the U.S., I relied on various online resources, i.e., simulations (images/layouts/maps/essays, etc.). I made it into a wood (MDF) jig for metal bending: rods to bend metal against can be inserted into holes in the extruding blocks of wood constituting the temple’s foundation. Metal can also be bent and welded together according to the shape of the negative space in between these blocks. Holes are pillars, routes are negatives; pillars for bending, negatives for welding. MDF, an imitation of wood often used as preparation for and modeling of the real work to come, is unsuitable for welding as it can’t stand fire. It is instead marked permanently with burns delineating the contours of the metal rods when I tried to heat them, mapping the routes inside the temple complex. The map is oriented toward 30 degrees west of north, the direction the complex faces in its original location. A constant process of simulation, pointing to a lack, absence and excess.

Atwood B’22.5 “Elbow Room”

Hidden patterns surface in the space between the familiar and the foreign. Pattern is the index of something essential. What do you find your self noticing again, and again?

Sylvia

Presents:

W W i nt e oes r

Dear Indie, It's that time in the semester. It gets dark at, like, 4 p.m. How am I supposed to find the motivation to keep doing work/making plans with people/functioning?

It's cuffing season, and I am not cuffed. Usually I don't feel pres

sure to be in a romantic relationship, but the holidays always

Dear Indie,

make me wish I had someone to share them with. How can I make

sure my loneliness doesn't interfere with my holiday cheer?

Love, Blue Christmas

Dear Indie, Now that it's winter, how am I supposed to stay warm and look sexy when I go out?

Love, Hot and Cold

Love,Daylight Savings Victim

homeworking. Hey, the earlier it gets dark out,

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Every Wednesday @ 4:30-6:30PM: Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) Organizing Circle Workshops

Are you community rights-minded? Attend Providence Youth Student Movement’s youth leadership program workshops to learn about grass roots organizing, abolition, leadership, and more! Reserve your spot at bit.ly/ocworkshopsform

Location: 807 Broad Street, Room 430, Providence, RI 02907

Saturday 12/3 @ 6-10PM: Christmas Toy Drive

The Milagros Proje ct, a Rhode Island-based organization aimed at food insecurity, is hosting a Christmas Toy Drive. The organization is looking for donations of new (unwrapped) toys that they will give to local chil dren in the community.

Location: Lower Level, 175 Eddie Dowling Hwy, North Smithfield, RI 02896

Tuesday 12/6 and 12/8 @ 11AM-2PM: Period Product Drive

Period Equity @ Brown is hosting multiple dates for their period product drive! The club is collecting individually wrapped pads and tampons (pads preferred) as well as cash donations which will be distributed to the Refugee Dream Center and Providence Rescue Mission. Location: Barus & Holley Café, 184 Hope St, Providence RI 02912

Monday 12/12 @ 6:30PM: Rhode Island Create Homes Act

Reclaim Rhode Island, a progressive advocacy group, will be hosting their second meeting in a series of two Create Homes Act teach-ins. The Create Homes Act, introduced by Senator Meghan Kallman, would make Rhode Island the first state in the nation to have a state-level public housing developer. While the first meeting in this series took place on November 28th, attend this virtual session to learn about the history of public housing and how the act will benefit our community.

Location: Virtual, Zoom link: tinyurl.com/CreateHomesAct -zoomlink

Every Second Tuesday of the Month @ 7:30-9:30PM: UpRiseHer’s Feminist Book Club

Join UpRiseHer, an organization aimed at empowering women, for their Feminist Book Club, which meets every second Tuesday of the month. The club studies female authors and books that explore feminism. Sign up to attend here: tinyurl.com/upriseher-bookclub

Location: UpRiseHer, 335 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906

Every Sunday @ 3-5PM: Queer Knitting Circle

Join Small Format, an organization focused on supporting queer creative culture, any Sunday for a queer knitting circle! As the cold season approaches, come by for free knitting lessons—supplies are provided according to Small Format’s availability, so bring your own needles and thread if possible. Be with queer community!

Location: Small Format, 335 Wickenden Street, Providence, RI 02903

Saturday 12/3 @ 12-4PM: Providence Art Club Holiday Block Party

Free and open to the public, attend the Providence Art Club’s Holiday block party to appreciate art, listen to live music, eat food, and participate in much more fun activities!

Location: 11 Thomas Street, Providence, RI 02903

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

+ Support RI Family Donate at tinyurl.com/help-ri-family Support a family that is part of the Pioneer Tenants Union, a group that stood up to a slumlord’s derelict living spaces. Donate to help this young family pay their legal bills and find a new place to live.

Saturday 12/17 @ 7-10PM:

International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

COYOTE RI (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics Rhode Island), a non-profit organization advocating for policies that promote the health and safety of people involved in the sex industry, is hosting a virtual memorial and awareness event about violence against sex workers.

Location: Virtual, Zoom link: tinyurl.com/COYOTE-zoomlink

Tuesday 1/3: Day One of Advocating for Equality in Abortion Coverage Act’s Passage

The Womxn Project is a statewide organization aimed at embodying the principles of reproductive justice, cultivating innovation, and advancing real and lasting change. Join them in supporting the EACA (Equality in Abortion Coverage Act)’s passage. The EACA will eliminate the policy that withholds health coverage for abortion in the state Medicaid program and associated plans and halt the denial of coverage for abortion in the health plan used by state employees. The Womxn Project is pledging to show up on January 3rd and every session day (Tuesdays/Wednesdays/ Thursdays) in great numbers until the EACA is enacted! The Womxn Project will provide materials and support from their staff and board members. Fill out this form if you are interested and want to receive more information: tinyurl.com/womxnproject-passeaca

Location: Rhode Island State House, 82 Smith St, Providence, RI 02903

Arts

Monday–Friday until December 22 @ 10AM-4PM: Art Exhibition: Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson and Deborah Spears Moorehead, two Rhode Islandbased artists, have created site-specific artworks that respond to the Center for Public Humanities’ historic wallpaper, Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord, which features false depictions of Indigenous people.

Location: Main Hall in the Nightingale-Brown House, 357 Benefit Street, Providence, RI 02903

+ Donations needed for a Housing Activist Donate at tinyurl.com/donate-2-hope Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) at Brown is organizing this GoFundMe for a fellow housing activist. This friend of HOPE’s is facing eviction, recently lost his job, and had to pay for eye surgery. Donate to help him out of this dire situation.

+ Black and Pink Providence’s Fundraiser for Tunji Donate at tinyurl.com/help-tunji Black and Pink Providence, a nonprofit organization working toward prison abolition, is raising money through a GoFundMe for Tunji. Tunji is formerly incarcerated and recently lost his job.

+ Amenity Aid Rhode Island Donate at amenityaid.org/donate-money Amenity Aid works to provide hygiene resources to marginalized communities and low-income people in need. On top of serving individuals, Amenity Aid part ners with local shelters, food pantries, anti-domestic violence organizations, and other community groups that support underserved communities to distribute hygiene resources. .

+ Project LETS Providence COVID-19 Relief Fund Donate at projectlets.org/covid19

Project Let’s Erase The Stigma (LETS) is working in coalition with various grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to support marginalized groups in our community in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. All donations will directly help individuals, children, and families meet their basic needs.

+ Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund

Donate at tinyurl.com/oceanstateass

Support sex workers statewide. Priority is given to BIPOC sex workers, trans sex workers, and sex workers who have been impacted by the pandemic.

+ Queer & Trans Mutual Aid Providence

Venmo: @qtmapvd; Paypal: qtma.pvd@gmail.com / Info: tinyurl. com/qtma-pvd QTMA PVD is a small, volunteer-run mutual aid fund for queer and trans folks in the Providence, RI area. They do payouts once per week and have distributed over $80,000 since their founding in June 2020. They currently have over 30 outstanding requests for aid and would appreciate any donations!