The College Hill Independent — Vol. 47 Issue 7

the

November

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2023

Volume 47 Issue 07

05 I’M TRYING TO BREAK UP WITH MY BOYFRIEND BUT...

07 “BUILD THE WORLD FROM LOVE” 09 PLANT AFTERLIVES

THE ECHO ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

47 07 11.17

This Issue 00 “UNTITLED” Mingjia Li

02 WEEK IN BOOKS AND BLUES Tiffany Kuo & Olivia He

03 THE FEMME FATALE AND HER ITERATIONS Jenny Hu

05 I’M TRYING TO BREAK UP WITH MY BOYFRIEND BUT SOMEBODY HAD TO GO AND FLY TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN Annie Stein

07 “BUILD THE WORLD FROM LOVE” Sofia Barnett, Kian Braulik, Cameron Leo & Lily Seltz

09 PLANT AFTERLIVES

Ella Spungen, Quinn Cowing, Mariana Fajnzylber, & Will Malloy

12 AN OPEN LETTER TO BROWN UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT CHRISTINA PAXSON Twelve students

13 IS DINING AT BROWN STILL BROKEN? Naomi Nesmith

15 HOW COME NO ONE MOSHES IN SOUTHERN NEW ZEALAND?

Masthead* MANAGING EDITORS Angela Qian Lily Seltz WEEK IN REVIEW Christina Peng Jean Wanlass ARTS Cecilia Barron Nora Mathews Kolya Shields EPHEMERA Quinn Erickson Lucas Galarza FEATURES Madeline Canfield Lola Simon Ella Spungen LITERARY Evan Donnachie Tierra Sherlock Everest Maya Tudor METRO Kian Braulik Cameron Leo Nicholas Miller SCIENCE + TECH Mariana Fajnzylber Lucia Kan-Sperling Caleb Stutman-Shaw WORLD Tanvi Anand Arman Deendar Angela Lian X Claire Chasse Joshua Koolik DEAR INDY Solveig Asplund LIST Chachi Banks Saraphina Forman

STAFF WRITERS Aboud Ashhab Maya Avelino Benjamin Balint-Kurti Beto Beveridge Dri de Faria Keelin Gaughan Jonathan Green Emilie Guan Yunan/Olivia He Dana Herrnstadt Jenny Hu Anushka Kataruka Corinne Leong Priyanka Mahat Sarah McGrath Kayla Morrison Abani Neferkara Luca Suarez Julia Vaz Siqi/Kathy Wang Zihan Zhang Daniel Zheng COPY CHIEF Lucia Kan-Sperling COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS Rafael Ash Elaina Bayard Maria Diniz Benjamin Flaumenhaft Anji Friedbaur Dylan Griffiths Sam Ho Becca Martin-Welp Nadia Mazonson Adelaide Ng DEVELOPMENT COORDINATORS Corinne Leong Angela Lian Ella Spungen SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM Jolie Barnard Kian Braulik Angela Lian Kolya Shields Yuna Shprecter

BULLETIN BOARD Qiaoying Chen Angelina Rios-Galindo

George Nickoll

17 CASTRATION ANXIETY Kolya Shields

18 RAPID FIRE Solveig Asplund

COVER COORDINATOR Mina Troise DESIGN EDITORS Gina Kang Ash Ma Sam Stewart DESIGNERS Jolin Chen Riley Cruzcosa Sejal Gupta Kira Held Xinyu/Sara Hu Avery Li Anahis Luna Tanya Qu Zoe Rudolph-Larrea Eiffel Sunga Simon Yang ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Julia Cheng Izzy Roth-Dishy Livia Weiner ILLUSTRATORS Sylvie Bartusek Aidan Xin-he Choi Avanee Dalmia Michelle Ding Anna Fischler Lilly Fisher Haimeng Ge Seungwoo Hong Ned Kennedy Avery Li Mingjia Li Ren Long Jessica Ruan Meri Sanders Sofia Schreiber Isa Sharfstein Luca Suarez WEB EDITORS Kian Braulik Hadley Dalton Matisse Doucet Michael Ma MVP Sofia — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, MA

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

19 BULLETIN

Qiaoying Chen & Angelina Rios-Galindo

From the Editors

The Indy, April 23rd, 1992 -LS

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

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

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power.

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

Letters to the editor are welcome; scan the QR code here or email us at theindy@gmail.com!

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WIR

Week in Books and Blues ( TEXT TIFFANY KUO DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA ILLUSTRATION LUCA SUAREZ )

→ In a world where almost anything you want is only a double-click

and same-day delivery away on Amazon, it’s easy to forget how pleasant it feels to go to a real store. There’s nothing quite like spending time at a bookstore, dallying between the shelves, and deliberating on which special volumes to take home with you.

I’ve had many memorable conversations at bookstores—once, at Strand Bookstore in New York, a stranger came up to me and asked: “How do you pick what to read?” I was holding Roxane Gay’s Hunger and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

Edge. What an English major would give to be asked this question. We spent a good twenty minutes discussing our favorite genres, BookTube, and Goodreads. If he had been ten years younger and had shaved that morning, I would probably have fallen in love.

This wasn’t really on my mind when I asked my friend Marcus to go on a walk to Fox Point in late October. I simply wanted to enjoy the last bit of fall weather. We grabbed some overpriced Japanese food at Sakura and went on Google Maps to find local stores we could walk to. Looking through the app, I saw an independent bookstore called Twenty Stories. “Marcus, should we go?” I asked. We pulled up our bank apps to see how much was left in our checking accounts. “Maybe not today,” he said. We shook our heads and sighed.

I went the very next day. Two big tables piled with books—all featuring that recognizable pink-and-green modern cover art every contemporary novel today shares—occupied the center of the room.

But the real delight was the display of books on the wall—twenty titles, hand-picked by the two owners each month, to be highlighted and recommended to all visitors. The owner explained to me that the books on the table were all picks from past months. She had read almost every title sold in the shop, which was quite unfortunate for me because she confidently recommended every book I asked her about—“This was translated from Dutch and just won a literature prize” (We (We Are Light by Gerda Blees). “This one is a little scary because it makes you reconsider how you spend your time” (How (How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell). I told her that I was studying creative nonfiction, and she recommended another book, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado: “This book is gaining so much popularity in the literary space for defying the traditional structures of memoir.” It was only with great reluctance that I reduced my personal pile of to-buy books from six to three.

As I left the store, I calculated in my head: $58 spent. That’s almost 5 hours of work I have to log into Workday. I prohibited myself from stepping foot in this store until Thanksgiving.

→ As the daylight no longer needs saving, I

guess, the sun will set at 4:23 p.m. today. It all began on an evening when I walked down the street, and realized that the sun was down before Ceremony had even closed. Holding a cup of matcha in the darkness, I had no choice but to admit: the dusk will only get more sudden. Soon enough, trees will be bald again, the wind indestructible. The cute topless guys who used to run around campus will dissolve into distant memories—Oh, the things I would give just to be walking down Benevolent in August again! The floral dress, the

+++ A week later, Marcus asked me to go on another walk downtown. We wandered through Westminster Street to look at the fun posters in Craftland and try out the delicious lox bagel from Small Point Cafe. And of course, we found our way to another bookstore: Symposium Books.

Symposium has all the elements of your classic locally-owned bookstore: bright windows, comfy chairs, beautiful art books on high shelves, and a great selection of literary fiction as well as BookTok novels (for the cash grab!). A book on Edvard Munch rested on the tallest shelf. I giggled to myself at the all-capped “MUNCH” (I wonder how the Norwegian painter would feel if he knew that people now associate his name with Ice Spice).

And as with many local bookstores, there was a discount table waiting for me to scavenge through. I’m not one for the big thrift shops—I lack the persistence and creativity necessary to find thrifted gems under big piles of clothing. But cheap books? I rolled up the sleeves of my puffer jacket and set out to find something interesting. Some comics and motivational books sat on the table. A Murakami novel… oh, and Fresh Complaint,, a book of short stories by Jeffrey Eugenides B’83. I picked Complaint it up: $12.99 for a book that was originally $28—what a steal! A short story collection I didn’t need and likely won’t read—this was the perfect purchase to begin my No Spend November with.

I checked later on Amazon and they were selling the same hardcover for $12. But an extra 99 cents (5 minutes and 5 seconds logged on Workday) is a small price to pay to bring down the beast.

TIFFANY KUO B’26 has two jobs yet no money left in her savings account.

sun splashing through the canopy, the scented breeze—all these won’t come back until maybe April next year. You tell me, my caught-up-inNovember friend, if that isn’t a teeny-tiny bit depressing.

The thing about seasonal depression is that it doesn’t happen suddenly or dramatically. By the time I realized it, I’d been unhappy for two weeks, and had considered dumping my boyfriend about ten times just because the gray sky doesn’t really bring out the color in his brown eyes (my boyfriend said I need to clarify this was *last winter.*) But seriously, I just want to run off to a sunny beach and lie there and never talk to anyone I know the whole time, i.e. until we decide to save the daylight again.

It is simply a curious period when you know something is definitely going wrong, but can never quite tell exactly what it is. So you become prone to adopt any solution just not to be so damn depressed all the time. If you are one of the unattached, it might seem tempting to find a situationship just so someone can warm your bed before you tuck yourself in. Or if you have to go to the library on a cold and rainy night, it might seem like a good idea to wrap yourself in one winter jacket that feels safe, and wear it to school every single day, and never take it off again your whole life.

But really, a much better strategy would be to buy a guitar and actually do the dorm room makeover that you promised yourself at the start of the year. Why? Because soon enough, every hour you invested in that 100 square feet

( TEXT OLIVIA HE DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA ILLUSTRATION ANNA FISCHLER ) will pay off on a late weekday night: holding a cup of hot chocolate (DIY-ed by microwaving hot water), hopefully with a friend or two, watching Notting Hill for the 17th time in the cozy room while coldness melts onto the sealed window in soft droplets of dew.

In a sense, seasonal depression reminds you of the important things in life. As you enter a freeze-induced low-power mode, it might be worth it to ask yourself: when puffer jackets replace tank tops, do you still find your crush hot?

When it’s icy outside, are you still motivated to go out with friends who forgot your birthday two years in a row? When your body (naturally) gains a little bit of weight, can you still love yourself amidst the -20-degree gloominess?

If you think about it, while the winter blues can be chalked up to lack of sunlight, they also reveal those deeper problems for you to take a clearer look. As your bare survival seems to be challenged by the climate, take a deep breath.

See the people that truly matter, the things that actually please you, the heart-warming little details we still have in life, and the eternal summer inside of you that the winter wind can’t dim a bit.

OLIVIA HE B’26 misses the sun.

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02

FEATS

Femme Fatales ( TEXT JENNY HU DESIGN SEJAL GUPTA ILLUSTRATION LILLYANNE FISHER )

→ When I was sixteen, one of my then-best friends—K.—decided she

was going to be a witch. Not of the Medieval variety—no, she placed bulk orders of crystals on Amazon, painted her lips and nails dark red, and wrote her boyfriend’s name on a sheet of blank paper a hundred times so he would never be able to leave her. We had a dramatic falling out after I found out she’d placed a curse on the silver ring she gave me for my birthday because she was worried her boyfriend liked me, and we never spoke again after that.

I remember being offended by the malicious intent, but more so by the ludicrousness of it all. Did she seriously think she could ruin my life with spells? What kind of a stupid game was this supposed to be? And yet, for the years that followed, I noticed the internet and the popular consciousness becoming increasingly taken with this aesthetic she’d claimed: enchantments on Tumblr, love spells on Tiktok, Instagram witches who promised they could make a man fall for you in ten days, flat.

The occasional visit to K.’s Instagram profile reveals a wardrobe full of black satin, hair done up big, eyes framed in sultry extensions. In her bio, she proclaims herself a ‘love witch.’ At this point she had been dumped by her long-term boyfriend and had replaced him with a guy we all secretly laughed about. Those of us who knew them both joked about how even her spells and potions hadn’t been enough to keep her ex around. So why keep up the ruse? Or was it more than that—truly a lifestyle she believed in?

The term ‘love witch’ is a reference to Anna Biller’s 2016 horror-comedy of the same name, in which the beautiful witch Elaine is desperate to find love, but her seductiveness and magic overwhelm the men she leaves addled in her wake. Like K., her manipulations revolve almost exclusively around men. After all, at some point in the American social consciousness—we can approximately pinpoint it to the pulp movement of the 1960s, an artistic era dominated by men—the witch changed from a hideous, old creature to a sensual, seductive woman, an object of male desire.

But the casting of feminine beauty and charisma as fear-inspiring dates back thousands of years. The modern witch is the latest in a series of femme fatale variations: yet another woman who, according to the men who wrote her, sources her power through manipulation, deception, and charm.

Portraying a woman in the modern, artificial society, the term femme fatale was first coined in the mid-1800s in response to the fall of the ‘natural woman.’ Rejecting the Romantic ideal of a sweet, sensitive woman immersed in the natural world, the French decadent writers—again, predominantly men—constructed this trope in a time of rapid commercialization and globalization. Gone is the pure, virginal woman of the countryside; instead, the femme fatale trades creativity for destruction and passivity for violence. In their eyes, she walks through the world of film noir in slinky black dresses with a cigarette between crimson lips, captivating the male characters around her with her sex appeal and insatiable sado-masochism.

At first glance, she looks like an empowered woman: she claims her sexuality, chooses action over inaction, and exerts control over men through manipulation and beauty. For example, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1891 novel Là-Bas centers the femme fatale Hyacinthe Chantelouve, who seduces the decadent writer Durtal and destroys him through a trail of witchcraft, black masses, and orgies. A far cry from the romantic heroines of the previous century, Chantelouve appears capable, independent, and strong. However, she later reveals herself to be a succubus, a female demon who seduces men in their dreams, compromising our assessment of her agency. Huysmans paints Chantelouve as a vessel for Satan, a woman acting on behalf of demonic forces instead of any choice of her own. In this text and others, the judgment cast upon the femme fatale makes her a mere container for immorality and falsehood, stripping her of her agency and personhood.

To be feared isn’t necessarily to be empowered. Certainly, if agency just required conquest, the femme fatale would be empowered to the fullest. However, any female character conceived through the male gaze and operating solely in relation to men cannot be empowered as an individual.

The Decadent femme fatale is not passive, but she is still nothing without her male counterpart, the man she destroys.

It’s for this reason that the modern ‘love witch’ still troubles me—

03

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

her spells, her potions, and her embellishments are still in service to the men she so desires. Strip away her pursuit of fulfillment through a male partner, and what remains? A notebook full of names? Empty tubes of lipstick? This is the inherent problem with the word ‘seduce’: the Latin, se ducere, means literally “to lead astray.” For an identity to revolve around seduction, there must be an active leader (the femme fatale) but there must also be a victim (the inextricable man) to be deceived and destroyed in her wake.

Roots in Antiquity We find one of the earliest instances of the femme fatale in the character Medea, the infa- mous witch from Greek mythology who murdered her children and her husband’s lover. Her story has been taken on by numerous playwrights and authors, from the ancient Greek version by Euripides in 431 BCE to modern feminist adaptations such as Christa Wolf ’s 1998 retelling. In each adaptation, the key pieces of the story remain largely the same. Medea, the princess of Colchis, aids Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece, murdering her brother and his uncle to help him ascend to the throne of Iolcus. Driven into exile for their brutality, the two flee to Corinth, the setting of the play. In a last-ditch effort to assert agency, Medea slaughters her children in revenge after Jason betrays her by leaving her for Glauce (also called Creusa), the princess of Corinth.

Euripides’ version of the story is considered the earliest, drawing from folktales and regional mythology. It responds to an uptick in Athenian men having children with foreign concubines and bringing them back as wives, a social phenomenon we can examine through a series of laws revolving around ethnic purity. Although the Greeks did not conceive of race in any modern sense, the urgency of preserving the Athenian bloodline manifested in a distaste for producing mixobarbaroi: descendants with mixed Greek and non-Greek blood.

Thus, Medea’s foreignness makes her seen as immediately dangerous to the Greeks, leading to her exile at the end of the play. She is characterized by the Roman writer Ennius as Medea Exul, Medea the Exile, but this identity is oxymoronic. After all, exile involved the confiscation of property and termination of voting privileges, neither of which would have belonged to a woman in the first place. Instead, in an Athenian household, a woman’s role was liminal, in flux between father and husband, untethered legally to property and material wealth. For Medea to be able to be exiled, she would already have to have entered Greece with exceptional characteristics, ones that disrupted and challenged existing social norms.

Medea’s wealth and political power come from her royal upbringing in Colchis. Geographically, the city was located to the east of Greece in the western part of modern Georgia; the people there are described as darker and culturally distinct from the Greeks. To the ancient Greeks— and the Romans who followed—the East was a region of blanket luxury, excess, and grandeur. The Persian Wars helped establish a distinct Greek ethnocentrism: a civilization that prided itself on law, order, and structure, the ancient Greeks perceived the nations around them as inferior, disorderly, and savage.

In this context, Medea, with her Colchian treasure and regal background, has transgressively masculine traits atop the feminine, and therefore, she poses a clear threat. Further complicating the matter is the fact of Medea’s divinity: she is the granddaughter of the sun, Helios, giving her powers of sorcery that Corinthian mortals could not attain.

FEATS In contrast with the masculine characteristics she carries, her powers and abilities are inaccessible, shrouded in mystery, and already distinctly feminine. Homer’s Odyssey, which dates several hundred years before the first performance of Euripides’ Medea, reveals an existing tradition of sorcery as a female art through the manipulations of Circe. In comparison to the masculine art of hand-to-hand combat, the Greeks considered witchcraft to be deceptive, dishonorable, and tainted—thus relegated to the woman’s unseen sphere. Medea’s cocktail of material, political, and divine power turns her into the ideal scapegoat for the existing problems with Greek society.

At the same time, her foreignness is fetishized by Greek society—interestingly, especially by the women. In the French tragedian Pierre Corneille’s version of the play, the Greek princess Creusa covets the gem-studded dress Medea brought with her from Colchis, noting that nothing similar can be found in Greece. Despite reviling Medea and the so-called barbarism of her homeland, Creusa is desperate to have the dress for herself. Edward Said’s Orientalism presents a similar framework between the modern East and West, which parallels the ancient dichotomy between Greece and the East of antiquity; he notes that Europe perceives the East as exotic, mysterious, and profound— when appropriated for their own use. Likewise, Medea’s foreignness is alluring, but only when claimed by Creusa for herself.

This fetishization is even more significant in the context of Jason’s theft of the Golden Fleece, which today could be considered an act of colonial plunder. Medea herself calls Jason a “brigand,” noting the violation of her homeland and cultural heritage. Even she herself is robbed from her people, displaced, forced into exile

by Jason’s actions. The colonial significance of the femme fatale is not her foreignness itself, but ways in which it has been exploited by mainstream Greek society for their own benefit.

The theft of Medea’s cultural identity and her social status leave her alienated; she lacks a place in society and therefore must rely on the dangerous stereotypes cast upon her to respond to her unstable circumstances. In her rituals, she begins to associate herself with Chimeras and other mythological monsters, embracing the outward perception of her foreignness, which is simultaneously masculinizing and exoticizing. Though she expresses deep, intense regret about her impending filicide, she is compelled to act because she is certain she does have any other choice. The fear and fetishization of foreign women, therefore, is a self-fulfilling cycle.

Medea is not empowered because she murders her children—taking on the role of the barbaric witch is inherently a reaction, not an instinct borne from Medea herself.

As a femme fatale, Medea ends her own titular play as a villain. Her vengeance against Jason is not righteous, nor is her conquest of Glauce triumphant. The true victor is the Greek chorus, whose mores remain imposed on Medea even in the face of her actions. Medea’s story is filtered through the lens of Greek social values, as it is narrated by the women around her, not by her own voice. Said writes that the East must always be told through the lens of the European imagination, and thus must always be a hostile world far away, perpetually lacking in morals or ability or triumph; similarly, Medea’s homeland and experience are subjugated to the Greek eye, filtered through Greek mores and beliefs.

What makes Medea disempowered is not collective judgment, but the fact that she betrayed her own desires in an attempt to strike out against society. Just as the Decadent femme fatale is reactionary to the desires of the man she chases, Medea is inseparable from her quest to strike back against Jason. Her assertion of selfhood is, in reality, succumbing to external perceptions and lashing out in the only way presented to her: her manipulations, deceptions, and ultimate crimes remain confined within the social assumptions imposed upon her.

Eastern Interpretations Viewing the femme fatale through Said’s theory

of Orientalism relies on a relative East-West framework; however, how does exoticism explain the similar trope manifested in the mythology and lore of East Asian cultures? The story of the fox as a seductress dates as far back as the eighth century CE, during the Tang Dynasty: According to Chinese legend, the beautiful concubine Daji was possessed by a wicked fox spirit and convinced the emperor to commit cruel and tyrannical deeds that destroyed the land. Known as kitsune in Japan and huli jing in China, further iterations of vixen spirits are consistently beautiful women, often with extreme sexual desire. It is this desire that is most harmful to men—the erotic touch of vixen stories leads to the downfall of the women’s male partners.

The mythology of these seductive creatures came, interestingly, at a time of relative female liberation. The Tang Dynasty is generally considered a golden era for women’s rights; women were no longer required to cover themselves with long dresses, divorced women were blessed instead of stigmatized, and the Empress Wu Zetian presented a model of female authority in court. The lore of monstrous, sexually voracious female spirits can be interpreted as male authors’ reaction to these new freedoms, as a mechanism of maintaining phallocratic power structures in the face of sexual openness and increased equality.

Furthermore, the infamous fox spirit Daji is credited as the originator of the practice of foot binding, a traditional symbol for female subjugation in China. By accusing a feminine creature of creating a practice that restricted women’s freedoms and movement, male authors and thinkers were able to justify the necessity of it as something originating from women themselves, not a male imposition. The dynasty that followed, the Ming, was an era of almost nonexistent legal rights for women, during which women were not even allowed to hold public conversations with men. The pendulum reaction from liberation to suppression is evident in the mythology of fox spirits, whose demonic abilities revealed a fear and frustration toward women’s freedoms in the Tang, eventually leading to the movement toward the repressive Ming cultural practices toward women.

The crucial difference between East Asian fox spirits and the Western classical witch is that huli jing assume femininity and weaponize it as a route to power, while the Greek femme fatale is made wicked by the forced assumption of masculine traits on a female body. Chinese and Japanese folktales recognize the capacity of a beautiful female form to manipulate men and rob them of agency; the malevolent fox spirit relies on deception, beauty, and sex to attain social power. On the other hand, the Orientalist Greek version of the trope draws on exoticism rather than feminine sexuality to captivate and cultivate desire.

However, both versions of femme fatale hinge upon an inner capacity for violence. Cross-culturally, femininity and violence are seen as conflicting; what is so appalling about both huli jing and Medea is the destruction they wreak, which surpasses that of which a woman should be capable. Both versions also source power from what makes them other: whether misplaced masculinity or foreignness. Fox spirits are made foreign not by ethnic or cultural heritage but by their animal nature itself; they are subhuman, possessed by evil just as Huysmans’ Chantelouve is, and unable to act as individuals. At the root, neither the huli jing nor Medea is considered to truly be human. Said claims that the “Oriental” is viewed first as other, then as human, then as other again; the danger and allure of the femme fatale both originate in what makes her exotic. She is condemned to exist as a monster no matter how pursued or desired she is, for ultimately the role she must fill is only to destroy.

nations, while the legends of huli jing were recorded during a dynasty of immense social reform and technological development. Similarly, today’s globalization has caused cultures to brush together and overlap; at the tap of a finger, we have access to media, stories, and news from all around the world. Just as during the Decadent movement, today’s art and aesthetics respond to a world growing increasingly artificial, plagued by extreme commercialization.

In particular, the rise of Asian cinema and music has promoted a sudden interest in the culture and media of the East, as well as a fetishization of Asian bodies. K-pop and K-dramas have taken over streaming platforms, and a quick search on Tiktok yields countless videos of East Asian-inspired makeup looks on white women. In a time when appreciation and appropriation can be difficult to distinguish, the femme fatale’s ‘Oriental’ characteristics are often easily brushed aside and dismissed.

The white ‘love witch’s’ adoption of dark hair, dark slanted eyes, and dark full lips is reminiscent of Creusa desiring Medea’s gown—exotic traits are empowering when superimposed onto a white body, though they are unnatural or undesirable on a woman of color. The fox-eye trend—taping one’s eyelids or applying makeup to create the appearance of upward-slanted eyes—is called ‘sultry’ and ‘seductive,’ but in reality represents the white woman’s effort to take on distinctly Eastern features in order to enhance sex appeal. Many immigrant daughters can recall bleaching their hair or wishing for rounder eyes as children, though blond hair and Bambi eyes are now considered incompatible with the femme fatale—the sexy, dangerous woman—due to their association with traditional, passive femininity.

In contrast, Eastern features and their connotation of exoticism allow white women to inspire both fear and desire concurrently.

After all, like the Decadent writers’ reaction against the ‘natural woman,’ the modern femme fatale pushes back against the image of the ‘girlboss’ from the Hillary Clinton era: the white woman in a hot pink suit and heels who emblazons girl power slogans on her laptop but is willing to stomp on other women on her way up to the top. At the same time, the femme fatale rejects the rise of ‘bimboism’ heralded by the pandemic, during which silliness, frivolity, and girlish fun were celebrated. While supposedly the ‘girlboss’ is antagonistic to other women and the ‘bimbo’ is too shallow to have agency, the femme fatale claims to source power from claiming authority over men. Is this not ultimately the most feminist way to be of all?

The initial image of the femme fatale is dangerous because of the destructiveness inherent to her persona. The facade of authority makes her empowered at first glance, immediately posing a threat to the men around her. Worse yet, this seductive power stems from the appropriation of features and aesthetics associated with the East in order to create sensuality and induce fear. Though disempowering at its core to the white woman, the trope is doubly unkind to women of color, who—even through the lens of exoticism—are unable to escape the narrative of barbarism and savagery in the end.

Just as my friend K.’s love spells were ultimately ineffectual, the femme fatale as an archetype fails to reclaim the power stripped away from female characters by a male author’s pen, retreating to oppressive colonial tactics as a means of edging closer to the white man’s power.

JENNY HU B’26 is rereading Christa Wolf ’s Medea.

Today The femme fatale’s resurgences come at times of rapid economic and social changes. Medea was first written in the wake of Greek city-states’ first interactions with each other and foreign

VOLUME 47 ISSUE 07

04

I’M TRYING TO BREAK UP WITH MY BOYFRIEND BUT SOMEBODY HAD TO GO AND FLY TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN LIT

( TEXT ANNIE STEIN DESIGN SARA HU ILLUSTRATION MINGJIA LI )

SETTING The setting is Crete, on a cliff by the sea by the olive tree grove.

The other setting is that weird, murky nonplace you go when your boyfriend keeps not listening to you, indicated by the presence of one nice, godly beam of light.

CHARACTERS The GIRL is a girl. She has always tried to be patient and hospitable, like a good Greek mythological girl.

The BOYFRIEND is her boyfriend.

A nice, godly beam of golden light upon the face of the kneeling GIRL. GIRL Muse… tell me why.

BOYFRIEND Oh. GIRL You understand?

BOYFRIEND Oh, yes.

She looks at him carefully.

GIRL You… do?

BOYFRIEND That woman. I knew who she was. That woman on the street.

The beam of light reappears and the girl looks up and—

The beam vanishes— Now it is midday, sunny, on the cliff by the sea by the olive tree grove.

The girl is sitting next to her BOYFRIEND. He’s throwing pebbles off the cliff. Like a child.

BOYFRIEND You’re saying it’s not about the sheep, but I keep feeling like it is about the sheep.

GIRL It’s not about the sheep. I told you, you own a perfectly adequate number of sheep.

GIRL PLEASE MUSE DON’T LET HIM TALK ABOUT THE CURSE— The beam vanishes and— BOYFRIEND I’m CURSED. GIRL I don’t think that woman was— BOYFRIEND I told you from the start. I’m cursed. I should have watched where I was going that day… but I’m careless. I’m reckless.

BOYFRIEND I know they’re no oxen of the sun, but—

He looks her deep in the eyes.

GIRL Will you listen to me?

GIRL I think you’re great. I just—

BOYFRIEND I always have been.

And that’s why Aphrodite cursed—

BOYFRIEND Yes.

BOYFRIEND It’s my clothes, then. You always make that face when I wear the Phoenician purple tunic.

GIRL Aphrodite did not curse you. You didn’t bump into Aphrodite in the street. That was a normal, mortal, human woman. It was five years ago.

BOYFRIEND I’m destructive. And I’m cursed. Something is cracked inside of me. Broken. And no woman will ever be able to repair it… or even want to.

GIRL No, I don’t.

BOYFRIEND Yes, you do.

GIRL Okay, I don’t love the Phoenician purple for you. But— BOYFRIEND See!

He buries his face in his hands.

The golden beam of light.

The girl throws her hands up like, “Help me out here?”

The golden beam of light vanishes.

The girl puts her hand on his shoulder.

She sighs.

GIRL Hey, nooo… that isn’t true.

GIRL That’s not what this is about. It’s not even about… Look, I think you’re great, but there’s just something that isn’t…

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He looks up.

BOYFRIEND How would I know? You don’t want to.

Repair me.

GIRL You’re not “broken,” that’s not why I—hey.

She stops. Both the girl and her boyfriend look up.

There are two enormous birds— are they birds?—in the sky.

GIRL Those are huge, um… are those birds?

She keeps staring.

He looks for a second.

Then returns to throwing pebbles.

BOYFRIEND I’m cursed, and it’s an unbreakable curse…

I consulted three oracles, you know. Three. And they each said things that strongly implied that I was likely unbreakably cursed.

She is still looking at the birds.

One is slowly climbing higher. She looks back at him.

GIRL No, listen, this isn’t about your… curse. It’s just… well, whenever I’ve imagined love, you hear about people like Orpheus and Eurydice…

BOYFRIEND Oh, should I go get my lyre?

GIRL (immediately) No. BOYFRIEND But I’m getting really good at— GIRL I always imagined what love would feel like, you know, and it was like a huge wave, like down there (she points down to the sea), and it would just, I guess, wash over me and it would be powerful and gentle and it would smell like…

BOYFRIEND (with an aggressive pebble toss) Salt?

GIRL (smiling at him, for a moment) Well, yes. But also… nectar.

BOYFRIEND A wave of salt and nectar… and no one will ever feel like that with me. Because of my curse.

GIRL No, it isn’t…

The beam of light, the muse.

The girl looks up.

GIRL Muse, help me with the words.

You always help the big guys.

Virgil, Homer…

Homer definitely didn’t come up with all that

LIT

stuff by himself. You helped!

But what about me?

Nothing for a girl in need?

The muse, naturally, does not respond.

But the beam of light stays.

GIRL Don’t look at me like that.

The beam stays.

GIRL No, you’re right.

You’re right.

I have the words.

But… you can’t say those things to a man.

The beam stays.

GIRL Why? You know why.

He’s so fragile he’ll— The beam disappears— The girl is speaking to her boyfriend— GIRL —you’re not broken, you’re not cursed.

It’s me. It must be me. I just don’t feel…

She is distracted by something happening in the sky.

He looks up as well.

They watch the birds.

One flies higher.

Then it plummets to the sea.

Their faces and eyes follow its trajectory.

Maybe we hear the splash of it being swallowed by the water.

She looks confused.

He looks how he looked before.

GIRL Did that bird just…?

BOYFRIEND This is an omen. This is what I am destined for.

This is the fate that repeats itself to me.

GIRL I don’t think it’s about you.

They stare into the waves.

GIRL I think it’s just something that happened.

GIRL Muse, we both know those weren’t birds.

Of course we know what they were— Of course when the whispers spread around the village— When the messengers told us the news—the myth— They were men— We looked at each other— The patient, hospitable girls of Crete— and we were sad— But not surprised.

She stands.

GIRL I’ll go home with my boyfriend.

And I won’t say a word.

Muse, you know why.

Blackout.

ANNIE STEIN B’24 always flies a perfectly appropriate distance from the sun because she isn’t stupid.

The beam of light, one final time—

VOLUME 47 ISSUE 07

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“Build This World from METRO

→ On the afternoon of November 8, the

Brown University administration facilitated the arrestof 20 Jewish students engaging in a peaceful sit-in at University Hall. The students, part of a newly established student organization called Brown University Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN), announced that they would not leave the campus’ central administrative building until Brown president Christina H. Paxson committed to supporting the University divestment from “companies that enable war crimes in Gaza.” Starting at 5:44 p.m., the Providence Police Department, with the assistance of Brown’s Department of Public Safety, arrested all 20 students. While tensions between the University and students reached a boiling point on November 8, student organizing has defined the campus landscape over the past five weeks. +++

On Thursday, October 12, Brown Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a vigil on the Main Green. Following a surprise attack

by Hamas on October 7 that killed close to 1,200 Israelis, the Israeli government launched an intensive military campaign in the Gaza Strip. By the day of the vigil, Israel had killed at least 1,300 Palestinians, and their bombs kept falling as students gathered, spoke, and prayed.

In the days thereafter, Israel has continued to use the atrocities of October 7 to justify an unprecedented assault on Gaza—which has included cutting off access to fuel, electricity, and water in the strip. Multiple historians of modern genocide have characterized the ongoing incursion as a clear case of genocide.

By October 21, the Israeli offensive had intensified and the death toll in Gaza had reached nearly 5,000. Close to a thousand community members gathered on the steps of the Rhode Island State House to rally for “an end to occupation, genocide, and U.S. aid to Israel.”

The event was collectively organized by Brown SJP, Jewish Voice for Peace Rhode Island (JVPRI), and Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), among other local organizations.

As Israel continued to prepare for a grond invasion into Gaza, on Wednesday, October 25, Brown SJP and the Brown University Palestine Solidarity Caucus (PSC) hosted a walkout “in solidarity with Palestine” alongside student groups at over 100 universities. Their joint statement reads, “We demand that Brown University use its power to pressure Rhode Island senators to call for a ceasefire, protect its Palestinian community members and co-strugglers from harassment and divest its endowment from companies that enable the Israeli occupation.” In the days following, the Palestinian death toll approached 8,000 and the Israeli military continued to target hospitals, now at a dire shortage of life-saving resources. +++ On Tuesday, November 7, the Brown Daily Herald (BDH) published two op-eds: a letter signed by over 160 Brown University faculty members calling for “a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine and the protection of academic freedom and student activism,” and “An open letter from Jewish students” by “a collective of anti-occupation Jews.” The signatories of the student letter emphasized the consonance (rather than the conflict) between their Jewish identities and their opposition to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and expressed their solidarity with SJP. “It’s not despite but because of my Jewish identity that I call for justice,” said Rafi Ash B’26, one of the signatories of the open letter, in an interview with the College Hill Independent.

These two letters came as the IDF closed in on Gaza City, with Israel’s defense minister threatening to “[tighten] the noose” in occupied Palestine.

The next day, November 8, more than 400 people gathered on the Main Green in another walkout organized by SJP. “No rest until we divest,” the organization promised. The walkout

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Five weeks & four decades of anti-apartheid student organizing

began with speeches, poems, and chants delivered by organizers, but it soon transitioned to a march circling University Hall. Protestors recited chants ranging from “What do we want? (Divestment!) When do we want it? (Now!)” to “Christina Paxson, you can’t hide, Brown’s supporting genocide.”

Shortly before 1:00 p.m., Brown SJP and PSC introduced a third student group organizing for Palestinian liberation—Brown University Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN). The group, which was also listed as a contact on the BDH student op-ed, announced that 20 Jewish students would not leave University Hall “until President Christina Paxson publicly [committed] to include and support a divestment resolution in the next meeting of the Brown Corporation.” As their peers applauded, the 20 students entered the building.

According to interviews with the Indy, the 20 members of JFCN sitting in spoke with multiple administrators about their demands while inside, including Vice President of Campus Life Eric Estes and several deans. President Paxson was not present in the building that day. Shortly before 5:00 p.m. the administration had not agreed to the students’ demands, and the building was about to close.

The group then posted on Instagram calling for students to gather outside University Hall “in support of students sitting in.” Soon, roughly 500 people had gathered on the Quiet and Main Greens in the cold, long after sunset. Organizers passed around song sheets with various Hebrew prayers calling for peace. But for two hours straight, one hymn echoed in unison through the crowd: “Olam chesed yibaneh, yai dai dai (‫דֶס ֶח ם ָלֹוע‬ ‫ )ה ֶנ ּ ָבִי‬/ I will build this world from love… yai dai dai / And you must build this world from love… yai dai dai.”

The crowd continued singing even when, just before 5:45 p.m., Brown Department of Public Safety and Providence police arrived on the green, called in by the University to arrest its own students. In a statement sent to the Indy, the administration said that they issued “multiple trespass warnings” before moving forward with arrests.

DPS officers restrained the students with handcuffs and zip ties and escorted them one by one from University Hall. The protesters emerged from the doors of the building as their peers sang louder, lining the path from the building to the gates. They joined in the crowd’s hymn as they were marched across the Quiet Green.

“Hug a stranger,” one of the organizers shouted through a megaphone. “There is no shortage of love here.”

Ash told the Indy about his experience of the arrests from inside University Hall: “There was a song that we sang that goes, ‘Where you go, I will go, my friend.’ But, you can replace the ‘my friend’ in that line with anyone’s name.

When each person was carried out, we changed the name in that verse and to their name. And it was very powerful to then walk out and see the crowd on the outside providing the same kind of support.”

It took two hours for all 20 students to be arrested. Between verses, organizers on the ground shouted through the megaphone: “the Jewish name is not a war cry” and “Not in our names, not ever.” After the final student was taken into police custody, organizers urged attendees to sustain their support for the 20 students by attending their arraignment, which is currently set for November 28. The protestors have been charged with willful trespass, a misdemeanor under Rhode Island law. +++ JFCN explicitly aims to amplify SJP’s demands for ceasefire, student protection, and divestment.

Both groups oblige the University to reject its

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

longstanding complicity in Israeli apartheid.

Brown SJP noted before the statehouse rally that “Israel is committing a U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and Brown University is profiting from it.” To JFCN, divestment would be the most consequential action that the University could take to condemn the violence in Palestine and express support for a ceasefire.

Brown’s $6.5 billion endowment is invested in weapons manufacturers that profit from Israel’s apartheid regime, including the mega-corporations Textron, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, among others. “Until Brown heeds the demands of its community and divests from all companies that enable Israeli apartheid, the University remains complicit in profiteering from the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza,” writes SJP. “As Brown students, we have a responsibility to the people of Gaza.”

Calls for Brown to divest are not new. In a 2019 referendum conducted by the Undergraduate Council of Students, 69% of voters supported

Love” ( TEXT SOFIA BARNETT, KIAN BRAULIK, CAMERON LEO, & LILY SELTZ DESIGN ASH MA ILLUSTRATION MINGJIA LI )

METRO

in Gaza. In the wake of this letter, a computer science professor urged Harvard to blacklist the co-signatory organizations. The conservative group Accuracy in Media paid for a truck to encircle Harvard Square, plastered with affiliated students’ names and faces. Corporate CEOs have created “no-hire” lists including the involved students. Columbia University and Brandeis University have recently suspended their SJP chapters (Columbia suspended its chapter of JVP, too). Just last weekend, Waltham police at Brandeis violently restrained students peacefully protesting in front of the Shapiro Campus Center.

The suppression of free speech has often been defended, implicitly or otherwise, as protecting students from antisemitism. Brandeis, for example, cited “hate speech” as a reason for de-recognizing its SJP chapter, while Columbia pointed to “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” Harvard’s doxxing truck called signatories of the University’s PSC letter “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” And for years, Canary Mission has facilitated the harassment and silencing of pro-Palestinian student activists, especially Muslims and students of color, under the guise of identifying and combating antisemitism.

The U.S. has undeniably witnessed a rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents over the past five weeks. During the last week of October, for example, a Cornell student threatened to kill his Jewish peers on an online messaging board.

Antisemitism was widespread in the United States long before the October 7 attacks, too, including at Brown: just last year, a note containing violent threats against Jewish people was left at the Brown/RISD Hillel. But members of Brown’s JFCN, and other anti-occupation Jewish students across institutions, “do not accept a Jewish ethnostate as the solution to [their] struggle.” They resist being used as “rhetorical shields,” their “safety” invoked to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people.

They push back against the frequent conflation of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian advocacy with antisemitism. Refusing to distinguish between the two, they argue, bolsters actors that seek to shut down pro-Palestinian activism, and cheapens the accusation of antisemitism along the way. “Antisemitism is very real,” one of the students sitting in, Rita Feder B’24, told the Indy.

“Calling for a ceasefire is not antisemitism.” +++

divestment. A second referendum among graduate students in 2021 showed 87% approval. Ash, who was also one of the 20 students arrested, pointed to this widespread support as part of the reasoning behind staging the sit-in. “With civil disobedience, you do it when you have exhausted every granted path,” he said. “We wanted to call them to a place where they have to make their political non-neutrality, which has been true for decades, explicit… When you’re putting your money there, you cannot be neutral.” +++ Across the country university students face disciplinary action, doxxing, and police violence for their participation in movements for justice in Palestine. On October 8, 33 student groups at Harvard signed on to a letter written by the University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), condemning Israel for the “unfolding violence”

This isn’t the first time university administrators have confronted students peacefully occupying university property in an effort to prompt Brown to divest from an apartheid regime. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Brown students protested the University’s investment in companies operating in South Africa through sit-ins, shantytowns, and hunger strikes. In March 1986, a group of student organizers under the banner of the Brown Free Southern Africa Coalition (BFSAC) sat-in at the IBM office in Providence. They were arrested by the Providence Police Department, and the incident was reported in the New York Times.

When the Brown Corporation voted to incrementally divest over a period of two years and “review” its finances in 1988, the BFSAC also began a hunger strike, to which the University responded by suspending the students. The movement at Brown University wasn’t entirely successful on its own—it didn’t win immediate or complete divestment. But in coalition with other university anti-apartheid organizations, particularly at Harvard and UC Berkeley, Brown students’ advocacy prefigured a significant legislative impact when Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. About his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, alumnus and Professor of Law James Forman Jr. told the Indy that “the University will always resist at first.” Another anti-apartheid group at Brown republished a statement in the 1980s from then-president Howard Swearer, who said, “I think South Africa is a flagrant violation of human rights. But where do you draw the line?

You have to take the morality of investments on a case-by-case basis.” Yet two decades later, the University had changed its tack: In 2013, President Paxson released a statement lauding former

president Nelson Mandela—who had urged U.S. students to do all they could to win divestment from South Africa. Ash told us: “As soon as it’s out of the immediate, all of a sudden, the moral imperative has become clear.”

The University’s response to South African divestment demonstrations mirrors President Paxson’s response to the 2019 referendum. At the time, she wrote in a letter addressed to the Brown community, “[the] endowment is not a political instrument to be used to express views on complex social and political issues, especially those over which thoughtful and intelligent people vehemently disagree.”

But members of JFCN look to the 1987 Divest Brown case as evidence that the University’s stance is more amenable to change than it claims to be. “In the middle of our broadcast, [Vice President Estes] came in and talked to our administrative liaison, one of the other students, and was like, ‘No matter how long you stay, [President Paxson] has said she will not change her mind,’” said Ash. “And that’s not true. We’ve seen years and years of ‘the administration won’t change their mind’—until they do.”

Graduate students and faculty have joined undergraduates in their push for justice in Palestine.

On November 13, the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO) published a letter of solidarity with JFCN, echoing their call for “ceasefire and divestment” and also urging the University to “drop all legal charges” against arrested students. Already, 194 faculty have publicly signed a letter to President Paxson asking that charges be dropped and that the students’ demands be taken seriously. Andrea Flores, Assistant Professor of Education and one of the signatories, told the Indy: “It is incumbent on us as faculty to support our students. If we are serious about cultivating Brown students as active and engaged citizens of the world, then the students who were arrested should not face any disciplinary action or legal charges.”

Undergraduates are not alone in their calls for divestment and ceasefire. +++ The United Nations has warned of a starvation crisis in the Gaza Strip. Since Israel cut off the fuel supply to Gaza, waste can no longer be properly transferred to landfills, leading to a high risk of airborne disease. Amidst these health crises, Israel has deprived Gazan hospitals of electricity. Over 11,000 are dead, and Israel continues to encroach on refugee camps and push south. Noura Erakat recently termed Israeli incursion an “ongoing Nakba,” a reference to the 1948 displacement of 700,000 Palestinians.

“We don’t plan on going away,” Feder says, of JFCN’s ongoing efforts. “We plan on getting louder.” +++ Over the coming weeks and months, the College Hill Independent is committed to regularly updating a blogpost with news about campus organizing and information about how to get involved in action.

SOFIA BARNETT B’25, KIAN BRAULIK B’24.5, CAMERON LEO B’25, and LILY SELTZ B’25 for divestment and a ceasefire now.

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Plant Afterlives Four reflections on the Brown University Herbarium

( TEXT ELLA SPUNGEN, QUINN COWING, MARIANA FAJNZYLBER, WILL MALLOY DESIGN TANYA QU ILLUSTRATION REN LONG )

→ Stepping In I’ve gotten good at reading the scrawl of dead language. Before biography, I know these men: Charles Bailey, with his ornately printed, meticulous labels; Hans von Türckheim’s tight script; the haste of Karl Richter’s scribble. Mary Ann Armstrong’s handwriting is nowhere to be found, but her hands are in the delicacy with which her ferns curl. I trace the turns of a letter, the curve of a stem on the herbarium sheet, and I can almost touch the collector who laid out the plant and wrote its label hundreds of years before I pulled it out of a folder in a file cabinet in the Brown University Herbarium (BRU).

An herbarium is a kind of library for plants: a physical collection of preserved specimens collected from the field, pressed and dried, and mounted, often with great artistry, onto a standardized sheet of paper which is labeled with information about the plant and its collector. Herbaria emerged in the 16th century as botanists amassed collections of plants. They began as bound volumes but soon became what we have today— cabinets filled with horizontally stacked, flattened specimens. The BRU was founded in 1879, after Brown acquired the collection of Stephen Thayer Olney, and now houses over 100,000 specimens. The appearance of the space belies its intrigue: rows of gray file cabinets give way to thousands of plants, each holding a story of its collector, the place it came from, time and climate and lost ecosystems.

There is an intimacy to the Herbarium, to botany itself. There it is: the exact artifact picked, arranged, pressed by a stranger in the 19th century laid out before me. It is a record of the very human urge to preserve—maybe that’s why I feel I can see through to some kind of humanity behind each botanist’s collection. I read delight into these botanists’ work, as when I pluck especially good leaves off trees and fold them between the pages of my books. Or maybe it’s just that the Herbarium delights me: it is a joy to spy a hint of purple on a flower that lived 200 years ago, to stumble upon a notecard of four-leaf clovers from an afternoon in June 1892 (“Miss Oliver’s clover freaks”), to thumb through pages of plants from across space and time.

But botany is a science of presumed, false knowing. I don’t know these botanists any better than botany, with its Latin nomenclature and flattening logic, allows them to know the plants they collected, or the people from whose lands the plants were often taken. Botany established a hegemonic mode of seeing wherein to see is to know and to know is to extract. It is a science of colonialism, wherein botanists

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on colonial expeditions transformed plants from living organisms into “green gold,” exchanged, cultivated, and commodified to build empire.

Indeed, flattening made plants easily transportable and interchangeable, transforming them into botanical currency that could circulate through global colonial circuits.

I know this too well when I sit in the Herbarium at Brown University, itself a colonial institution, examining plants collected on expeditions to the American West operating on the logic of Manifest Destiny, or spices from Caribbean islands whose discovery by British explorers would lead to genocide and enslavement. These histories sit heavily in the space and yet are nowhere to be found if I don’t go looking.

The herbarium sheet is quiet by design.

We gather around a pressed specimen of goldenrod and marvel at its delicate yellow flowers, marveling that for centuries the same love—of learning, of beauty, for the plants themselves—has driven humans to so carefully preserve the plants surrounding them. And yet I also know that so many of these plants are here out of a love of power above all. Or maybe both loves at once, somehow. I can’t, shouldn’t, shake the horrors of the histories that are inextricable from the existence of this institution.

What kind of delight is that?

Here, perhaps, we try to grapple with it all: joy and horror, beauty and extraction. We dive headfirst into the Herbarium through the plants (turned artifacts) that make it, the joy that traces at their edges and the oppressive stories under their flatness. Try, in these encounters, to understand how a discipline, an institution, can be both dedicated to love of the world and memorialize its destruction.

-ES

Puzzle of the Potentilla When I tell someone I work in the Brown University Herbarium, they are rarely surprised, given the fact that I dress in earth tones, have a botanical tattoo, and concentrate in Geology-Biology. But, contrary to popular belief, I’m not a BRU databaser just to hang out with plants. Instead, in the late night hours and early morning, I slip away into the Herbarium for the stories.

I let my day wash off me as I walk into the climate-controlled back room, hauling folders upon folders of pressed specimens. I open the first file to find a page with six different pressings of a small, yellow-flowered mountain plant. At the bottom left, there are four separate labels stacked upon each

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other. My task: to transcribe the old cursive labels into a database; to catalog the names of the pressed plants, the names of their collectors, and anything else I can decrypt from the specimen sheet.

At first glance, the label looks like nothing more than an elaborate scrawl. However, I know it could hold knowledge about antiquated municipalities, surnames, biomes… I quickly call up, again, my minimal first grade cursive education and the holiday cards I used to receive from

my great-grandmother. Searching for letters in the linework, I grasp for a clue, a word, a brief phrase. I first note the date of collection: July 15, 1869. The next thing I can make out is the plant name, Potentilla grandiflora, a small cinquefoil found in the Alps. As I’ve narrowed down the plant to a possible region, I move to determine the collector. After much contemplation, I decide the signature at the bottom reads “v. Türckheim”—a German collector known among my fellow digitizers for his illegible script.

As I research this collector online, I find that Hans von Türckheim became a coffee farmer in Guatemala later in life, and continued to collect specimens and embark on botanical expeditions there. Searching for information on his whereabouts circa summer of 1869, I run down a rabbit hole and end up on the page of a Swedish botanist esteemed for “discovering” the mountains of Haiti.

In the midst of this haze of history, my eyes wander back to Türckheim’s handwriting, where there are two lines left to interpret. I open Google Translate to try and make sense of the tangle of German letters.

Before I know it, 30 minutes have passed, and I’ve learned the name of a small mountain pass in Northern Italy where these flowers once grew, 154 years ago.

But I must move on to the next piece before fully translating this specimen, as my deductive strategies can only take me so far. Just as there are parts of the label that we never quite decipher, I’ll never know how v. Türckheim may have found himself on that road—if he had permission to collect—why he collected in the first place—or how the consequences of his later expeditions manifest today.

I move on to the next story…

geon Charles Christopher Parry (California flora heads might know him as the first to describe the torrey pine). This valley sedge was one of many plants that Parry collected and pressed on the 1873 Jones Expedition, a survey of Northwestern Wyoming led by Captain William Jones with Parry as his head ecologist. The expedition had the explicit goal of tracing a new trade artery of the West: a wagon route to connect the Union Pacific Railroad with the newly-founded Yellowstone National Park. Headed by the Army Corps of Engineers, this economic mission was also a military one, like many expeditions of the West during this time that both surveyed a region’s geography and calculated the expulsion of its communities. Nature reported in 1873 that Department of the Interior geologists rejected the Army Corps’ invitation to join them on the Jones Expedition, not wanting to risk their existing relationships with local Indigenous peoples by returning to their land with soldiers.

The Interior geologists’ disinclination to a militarized reconnaissance proved wise.

Captain Jones’ descriptive journals of the expedition feature a variety of encounters with the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, and Shoshone peoples, most of them violent. Two entire chapters of these journals, one titled “Hostile Indians” and another “Trouble with Indian scouts,” are dedicated to these contacts. Jones’ writing details the offensive strategies he would use before even catching sight of Indigenous dwellers and describes these peoples’ acts of defense and retaliation as his crew descended upon their land. On an expedition with the express purpose of gathering geographical, geological, and ecological knowledge, much of Captain Jones’ reflections on the troops’ time in Northwestern Wyoming seems to be dedicated to militarized strategy of movement. What these journals lack, meanwhile, is the Carex vallicola specimen in Brown’s collection, which goes unmentioned in Jones’s catalog of botanical acquisitions from their journey.

And yet it is this valley sedge, stalks centered on the page, that survives. The other subjects gone unnamed in Jones’s journals—the Indigenous guides that led Jones to the summit of the Absaroka Range, for instance (“After the Indian guides, I was the first to reach the summit of the pass, and, before I knew it, had given vent to a screeching yell”)—are disappeared from recorded memory.

This particular Carex vallicola plant is far from the only specimen in Brown’s collection that preserves the historical practice of colonial botany. The oldest specimen in the Brown Herbarium—according to its director Rebecca Kartzinel, as the specimen has not yet been data-

-QC

Ecological Witness Carex vallicola is a sedge species commonly known as the valley sedge.

Its leaves are tight, green sheaths, growing upwards to reach somewhere between four inches and a towering two feet. At its tip, the valley sedge culminates in small, spiky inflorescences. If you’ve ever cut through a field somewhere west of South Dakota, chances are that you’ve brushed paths with Carex vallicola.

Of the four valley sedge specimens in the Brown Herbarium’s collection, only one was collected by the infamous botanist and sur-

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based—is a sesame species collected in the late 18th century from St. Lucia. Sesame species are native to the ecologies of West Africa, not the Caribbean. The specimen sheet for that particular sesame plant preserves 200-year-old vestiges of roots and stems, very clear British scientific notation, and an ecological witness to the triangle of Transatlantic enslavement.

Teddy Roosevelt utilized the presidential power vested in him by the 1906 Antiquities Act to establish the nation’s first national park in Yellowstone country.

This decree was only made possible by the research expeditions that preceded it, primarily a survey in 1871 led by Ferdinand Hayden, from which there are several specimens in the Brown collection. Yet in exercising this executive authority, it was not just Yellowstone country that was stolen from the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, and Shoshone peoples and opened up to colonial consumption: the founding of Yellowstone Park made way for expeditions like Captain Jones’, during which Charles Christopher Parry plucked this valley sedge.

This sedge, a Carex vallicola specimen that Parry identifies tentatively (under the species name, he writes “prob. but too young” on its label), lies flat on the page. It spreads at roughly five or six inches on the larger sheet, its sheath-like structures braided in worn tangles at the base of the bracts. Those once-spiky inflorescences lay smushed, their half-dozen discreet flowers pressed into one inconspicuous clump. And yet with each yellowed piece of tape adhering the weed to itself and to the paper, with each long stroke of Parry’s ink below its body, something greater than this organic mass is preserved within the filing cabinets of Brown’s Herbarium.

If it were just about the plant itself, I’d send you to a field in Montana, where Carex vallicola grows unfettered. But these aren’t some 800 words about a valley sedge, are they?

Rather than Montana, I invite you to sit here, with me, in this climate-controlled, supersized botanical closet, founded five years before Parry and Jones made their way to Northwestern Wyoming. With 150-year-old paper in hand, we’re left to consider how to conjugate this nation’s colonial preterite into our archival, material present.

-MF Hidden Hands The label of an herbarium specimen says a lot: the identity of the plant, where it was collected, when it was collected, what else grew nearby, who collected it, and who owns it.

Many specimen sheets in the Brown Herbarium bear stamps with curling script, announcing their lineage: Herbarium of J.F. Collins, Providence, R. I.; Herbarium Olneyanum; Herb. A. Gray. They tell the story of who collected each specimen, who subsequently owned it, and how it came to be in Brown’s possession. Today, each new sheet is embossed with the seal of Brown University. The scientific record here is concerned with ownership; documenting the passage of materials from one individual or institution to the next.

At Brown, thousands of new specimens lie in fragile newspaper sheaths, stacked in boxes as they wait to be mounted. Before they can formally enter the collections, they must be carefully glued, taped, or strapped onto archival paper, accompanied by a detailed label.

Old specimens, too, need attention. Storage in the same room as a coal furnace, for example, or the failure of decades-old drops of glue,

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demands the continual repair and management of the collections. The job of artistically arranging, gluing, preparing, and repairing the objects at the heart of the herbarium—preserving and making visible the leaves and stems that give each specimen value and meaning—is performed

by Curatorial Assistant Martha Cooper and Herbarium Assistant Mary Dennis. Their names appear nowhere on these labels.

Cooper and Dennis have a wide range of responsibilities and skills, with Cooper specializing in mounting and accessioning new specimens and Dennis specializing in repairing damaged specimens. The ability to render a pressed plant a legible record of a once-three-dimensional subject is both highly artistic and highly scientific.

This labor requires a keen aesthetic eye to ensure the presentation of the plant and its parts supports its function as an object of scientific study. The final mounting of the plant must display the arrangement of leaves, the root system, the fruits and seeds, and the backsides of leaves and stems such that a future observer could see the specimen and recognize its identity. Dennis articulates that this process requires deep botanical knowledge as well as an artistic eye. For example, she says, “An oak tree has a specific bud structure, so [I] can highlight some of the things that are key to identification, not just that [a specimen] includes a fruit or a flower.”

Their work requires painstaking consideration of each species and its unique characteristics. And they must do this over and over again within the confines of a standardized sheet of paper, no matter the size or original growth form of the plant, so the plant can be stored alongside the rest of the specimens in archival cabinets.

So why do the people who do this—who create the objects atop which the value of the entire institution rests—appear nowhere on the sheet at all? When asked about this, both Cooper and Dennis defer, situating their work as a piece of a much larger scientific and cultural project. They insist that it doesn’t bother them, that they are part of a collective effort, not one that demands individual recognition.

Cooper notes that it has never been the historical convention to credit the mounter formally. Dennis understands her work by implicitly comparing it to the work of historical female collectors who were often credited with only a first initial or who mounted their husbands’ specimens entirely unacknowledged. She refers specifically to one woman’s work that she admires: “This one woman who collects in Europe… her handwriting is meticulous and the plant is just, like, beautifully pressed and presented.” Their attention to the aesthetic becomes a part of this history of people, mostly women, whose contributions can be seen and admired, if not known by name. Overall, Cooper and Dennis profess to be unbothered by the lack of formal recognition of their work, foregrounding their passion for being a part of a great, collective scientific effort. Their craftsmanship and handiwork record for future observers what they have done, nameless but for the seal of Brown.

-WM

ELLA SPUNGEN B’23.5, QUINN COWING B’25, MARIANA FAJNZYLBER B’23.5, AND WILL MALLOY B’25 want to be pressed, dried, mounted, and stacked in a cabinet for the next hundred years.

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An Open Letter to Brown University President Christina Paxson From the twelve students who met with President Paxson on October 19, 2023

Dear President Christina Paxson, In this open letter, we are writing to follow up with you on our meeting held on Thursday, October 19, 2023. As Palestinian, Black, Muslim, and anti-Zionist Jewish undergraduate and graduate students, we collectively cited numerous incidents of Islamophobic, anti-Arab, antisemitic, and anti-Palestinian attacks on campus and nationwide. We attested to the existing and looming threats to the safety, well-being, and academic futures of Palestinian students and their co-strugglers. We demonstrated the immediate threats that members of our communities, friends, and family are currently facing, especially those who are at imminent risk of injury and death in Gaza, but also those at risk of violence, imprisonment, and political persecution in the West Bank, Israel, and the United States. We shared deeply personal stories of Palestinian students expected to carry on ordinary academic lives amidst the growing uncertainty of whether they will ever see their families or homes again.

We have endured harassment, intimidation, and censorship, compromising our safety and freedom of expression, both academically and personally. Since our meeting, 20 brave students with BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now were arrested and loaded into prisoner vans during a peaceful sit-in at University Hall on November 8.

Hundreds of students stood outside in Jewish prayer and song as we witnessed their act of civil disobedience. These students joined the Palestine Solidarity Caucus (PSC) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in demanding that the institution divest its endowment, support a ceasefire, and protect its community members.

What began as Brown’s inadequate stand against the harassment and defamation of Palestinian students and co-strugglers has left students vulnerable to brazen acts of suppression and intimidation.

This is a failure that cannot go unacknowledged.

We reiterate the demands shared with you on October 19. We are proud to share that, since we met, we have garnered over 1750 signatures in support of these demands calling for an end to Brown’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Our demands remain: CEASEFIRE NOW! Brown University must use its power and privilege to publicly condemn the genocide and demand that Senators Reed and Whitehouse support legislation calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.

PROTECT STUDENTS! Palestinian students, faculty, workers, and their co-strugglers face urgent threats to their safety, academic freedom, and futures. President Paxson must immediately and unequivocally condemn the doxxing, Islamophobia, and racist harassment, censorship, and political persecution of the Brown University community.

DIVEST! Until Brown heeds the multiple democratic demands to divest the endowment from Israel and the military-industrial complex, the university remains complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Maria Zuber—a board director at Textron, a weapons manufacturer—must also resign from her position as a Brown University board member.

In our meeting, Dr. Eric Estes expressed repeated apologies in his capacity as Vice President for Campus Life, and took careful notes as we spoke of our experiences and shared our demands. We left believing that, at the very least, Brown would attend to our call for the protection of students, staff, and faculty. Instead, this administration has called for the arrest of its own students. All of this follows your decision, during the week following the October 7 attacks, to attend a vigil hosted by the Brown/RISD Hillel and the Rohr Chabad Student Center (two spaces that many students have identified as exclusionary of both Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish community members) while remaining conspicuously absent from the October 12 vigil organized by Palestinian students and their co-strugglers to mourn all lives lost.

Several students testified during the meeting with you on October 19 that they have been harassed by other Brown students in private communications on social media, while others have been verbally attacked and defamed while collecting funds for the Palestine Children Relief Fund on campus. Members of a program house asked a student to resign from her position after liking a social media post. Many others have reported being photographed and recorded on video while leafleting, picketing, or participating in activities on campus, which puts them at immediate risk of being doxxed and harassed. A Black Muslim undergraduate student from Brown, who wears a hijab, was verbally and physically assaulted by a group of seven adults in Boston. Multiple students have attested to experiencing first-hand violence and threats to their lives by the Israeli military industry Brown invests in. One current student from Palestine shared that, while enrolled at Brown, they were shot with a rubber Send questions/responses to theindy@gmail.com.

bullet by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank. Another Palestinian student shared that they had the guns of Israeli settlers and soldiers trained upon them point-blank while doing Brown-funded dissertation research there. The heavy presence of campus police, in general, and at every one of our vigils and walkouts, has only exacerbated our fears of being surveilled or arrested.

These incidents at Brown and against Brown students cannot be viewed in isolation from the hateful attacks on Palestinian students and their co-strugglers at other U.S. academic institutions. A conservative organization has been sending what are known as “doxxing trucks” to Brown’s Ivy League peer institutions, including Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania, which displayed the names and faces of students who participated in pro-Palestine speech and action and maligned them as antisemites.

The trucks also showed the face of at least one well-known student who has no affiliation with Palestine solidarity organizing but simply exists as an easy target. These organized attacks are connected to nationwide attempts to suppress Palestinian voices that have escalated to include: the banning of pro-Palestine student organizations and the shutdown of two SJP chapters in Florida, the suspension of SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) student groups at Columbia University, the banning of an SJP chapter at Brandeis University where student protestors were brutalized by the police, the Senate’s condemnation of student groups including SJP and JVP, and the ADL’s attempt to frame student activists in solidarity with Palestine as supporters of terrorism. These events have precipitated and accompanied the escalation of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, and Islamophobic racist violence throughout the United States, including the murder of six-year-old Palestinian-American child Wadea al-Fayoume in Illinois.

No claims to institutional neutrality can stand when Brown has allowed an Israeli soldier to speak on campus in an event organized by Brown Students for Israel on November 7. As the signs of peaceful and silent student protesters read: “If Brown’s Palestinian students were to be in Gaza, this guest speaker could kill them with impunity.” We condemn the hosting of foreign military personnel to speak on our campus, and it is unconscionable to do so while that military is actively carrying out a planned genocide on an occupied civilian population.

Since we met, the fatality toll reported by the Ministry of Health in Gaza (on November 10) has reached 11,078+ Palestinians, of whom 68% are children and women, while 27,490+ Palestinians have been injured, and over 1.6 million (70% of Gaza’s population) have been internally displaced. The number of reported deaths has more than doubled since October 19. The number of Palestinians killed by the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza now exceeds the number of students enrolled at Brown. This violence is not only limited to Gaza: since October 7, in the West Bank, over 169 Palestinians have been killed, and over 2,560 have been injured, while Palestinian citizens of Israel face escalating threats and arrests. As expressed in our meeting, knowing that our university is invested in corporations profiteering from this genocidal violence, occupation, and apartheid is a burden none of us deserve to carry.

We will continue to organize around our demands, until Brown heeds our democratic calls, and ends its complicity in this genocide.

In the meantime, we invite you, in your capacity as President and with regard to your responsibilities to the impacted communities at Brown, to meet the bare minimum of our demands and immediately commit to the following: 1. Acknowledge that the over 11,078 Palestinians killed in the past few weeks and the political and historical context of Israel’s Zionist settler colonial project cannot be divorced.

2. Acknowledge Brown’s failures to address Palestinian, Arab, Black, Muslim, and anti-Zionist Jewish students and community members in official statements and communications, especially with regard to offering them academic and support services and committing to providing them such services in an adequate manner.

3. Ensure the defense of free speech of students and community members. This must include the freedom to debate and criticize Zionist ideologies and policies.

4. Reject the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Brandeis Center’s call to investigate chapters of SJP and the ADL’s attempt to defame and punish students in solidarity with Palestine.

5. Recognize that anti-Zionist speech and action are not antisemitic and acknowledge that antisemitism—not equated with Zionism and critiques of the Israeli state—is a real threat to Jewish community members.

6. Protect academic freedom and the right to organize by establishing an accountability mechanism on behalf of the Palestinian students and their co-strugglers who have been harassed by students and officials at Brown and by reducing—not increasing—policing on campus.

VOLUME 47 ISSUE 07

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IS DINING AT BROWN STILL BROKEN? Workplace difficulties continue for Brown’s dining staff.

→ This piece features pseudonymized interviews

with dining workers at Brown University, a measure taken to protect their identities.

Workers using equipment that is “older than them.” Employees waking up at dawn to find parking. Management “only coming down when they need a soup or coffee.”

Despite years of complaints from employees and ongoing pressure from the student body, working conditions for Brown University’s dining staff have shown few signs of improvement. And with contract negotiations between the dining workers’ union, United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island (UAW-RI), and the university a year away, workers continue to demand changes for a better working environment.

In interviews with the College Hill Independent, 15 Brown Dining Services employees described continued issues of understaffing and overused, broken equipment within university dining halls— problems originally reported on by the Brown Daily Herald two years ago—as well as a parking system that forces employees to pay significant sums and walk long distances to get to work. The workers who collectively spoke with the Indy, some of whom are union leaders, have been stationed at every dining hall on campus and have between four years to three decades of experience at Brown as dining employees. They have been given pseudonyms to protect their identities.

Workers attest that they have brought these concerns to Brown multiple times to no avail. While the University has met some requests, such as the installation of air conditioning units in dining hall kitchens in 2018, they did so only after conditions became unbearable and students began to petition. Other problems have not been fixed.

“How much can you take? People are tired. Very, very tired,” Joanna, a Dining Services worker, said.

staff,” a figure he claimed is low for the college dining hall industry.

Workers cast doubt on Barboza’s net new position total, however, saying key positions have been eliminated. Aaron referenced several positions that no longer exist at the Sharpe Refectory, such as a second staff member for the “dish and supply” positions in charge of wiping counters and bringing out plates for service; a second trucking person, who deals with the garbage and scraped plates; and a “lead food service worker” position. Barboza declined to comment on these statements.

This has caused major dining hall workers to have to perform overtime, according to Joanna. Although workers are not obligated to work overtime, due to current staffing, major dining halls cannot function without it, several workers said. Understaffing forces some to work over 60 hours a week, Allison said.“If we want to have dinner run smoothly, I work until dinner is done,” she said. “It’s just kind of assumed that I will do that…it’s not on paper but it’s assumed.”

“If you don’t do overtime they don’t have staffing,” said Marissa, a Dining Services employee. “[Management] needs the help.”

Some workers are compelled to work overtime by economic necessity. “The cost of living is crazy right now,” said Shane, another worker.

“People need the money.”

Workers also face pressure from management to work overtime. If they call out of work due to exhaustion from working too much overtime, management is free to punish them, which can range from a verbal warning to a write-up, Joanna said. “All employees are willing to help out, but at what cost? People’s health?”

It is for these reasons that dining staff speculate that Barboza’s statistics are false and that Brown is violating its contract with the UAW-RI. Aaron told the Indy that every unionized dining worker’s contract requires Brown to fill empty full-time positions with a full-time unionized hire, but workers say Brown has skirted this stipulation by relying on temp workers, many of whom work far below 40 hours a week, and overtime to meet production goals. Aaron and other dining workers said that Brown prefers hiring temp workers to avoid paying for the salaries and benefits of new unionized workers. “They’re trying to run on a shoestring budget,” he lamented. +++

“They’re trying to run on a shoestring budget” According to Aaron, a dining employee, Dining Services were “tremendously understaffed” throughout the pandemic, and the problem continues today. The union says that the University has frequently rejected its requests for more full-time hires, claiming it is unnecessary.

In an email to the Indy, Vice President of Dining Services George Barboza said that since 2022, Brown has added “32 net new bargaining unit positions and currently [has] a 4.8 percent vacancy rate among all union

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This year’s addition of the Meat and Dairy Kosher kitchens and the Allergen-Awareness kitchen to the Sharpe Refectory has also put a strain on workers.

These new kitchens have pulled workers away from their designated stations, though some workers appreciate working with the new machinery. Management “did not open positions for culinary in the Kosher kitchens because they were just assuming that they were going to pull from the rest of the staff,” Allison said. “That was just nuts to us all.

Apparently they just didn’t have [money for new hires] in the budget. They planned these kitchens for three years and they didn’t have the budget for it.”

Aaron echoed this point, saying that management added only two cooking positions

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( TEXT NAOMI NESMITH DESIGN SAM STEWART ILLUSTRATION JACK DICKERSO DICKERSON ) and zero food service positions across the three new kitchens. “Cooks and food service workers have been taken from the other stations in the dining hall and from the main kitchen and dish room,” he said. “The staff is spread [thinner] throughout.”

This understaffing impacts the cleanliness of the original dining hall kitchens. Workers described an extreme pile-up of dishes, especially in dining halls such as the Ivy Room.

Workers also find that the overuse of temp workers and overworking of full-time staff is dangerous. “We have tons of temps in the kitchen, and it’s the most I’ve seen,” Allison said. She said temp workers shouldn’t have to work food production positions, which can be hazardous, since they don’t have the injury benefits afforded by union membership.

Brown’s reliance on temp workers therefore leaves them vulnerable. A temp worker recently was burned while cooking and another slipped in the Kosher kitchen, hurting her hip. Last week, she added, a chef also slipped in the Kosher kitchen and fell underneath the kettle, burning himself with the water that was running under it.

“Smoking, sparking, and short circuiting” Workers also described the equipment in dining halls as poor-quality and inadequate. Shane said that workers often prepare food with equipment that is “older than them” and that frequently breaks down. Aaron agreed, stating that he was “surprised at the amount of broken equipment within the kitchens” for a school as wealthy as Brown. “Sometimes you deal with broken equipment at a Mom and Pop restaurant. Here, it’s possibly worse,” he said.

Broken equipment is nothing new for Brown. Workers have been complaining about worn down machinery since 2021.

“Management is constantly patching up issues,” Allison said. “Every other week we’d have the mechanical guy come in to service the steamers and the kettles. Two weeks later, something else was broken.”

The issue persists today. Within all dining halls, there are soda machines that are “not designed to handle the amount of students Brown serves,”Aaron said. “The people from Coca-Cola said that the soda machines that are put in dining halls are really intended for a Burger King, not a dining hall for thousands of students.” Ice cream machines are also overused within Verney-Woolley and the Sharpe Refectory, resulting in “the machines breaking down routinely,” he added.

Aaron described several other items in dining halls that are constantly in disrepair. He said, “We use a lot of different kinds of coolers, reach-ins, display units, as well as warmers that food can go into while it waits to be served after cooking. We also use trucks and carts to move food throughout the building. Most food is transported from the kitchen in the basement by elevator up to the dining hall. Many of these things are commonly in disrepair or completely broken.” Workers also described dishwashers that do not effectively clean dishes, forcing workers to soak dishes in soapy water to ensure their cleanliness. “Some things need to be replaced, especially if [they are] 50 years old,” Shane concluded.

According to Barboza, Brown has spent

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over $250,000 annually on new equipment for dining halls and much more on capital projects, which create a return on investment, such as the completed renovation of Josiah’s and the addition of the three new kitchens within the Sharpe Refectory. However, workers say it is not enough. “Behind the scenes it’s not that pretty,” Joanna said.

The poor equipment has resulted in more stressful work shifts for workers and longer lines at popular dining locations for students.

Food stations such as the smoothie station within the Ivy Room, for instance, have had an increase in wait time because blenders have been “smoking, sparking, and short circuiting,” according to Evelyn, a Dining Services worker.

“The circuit for the blenders routinely goes out, and it’s very not safe,” she said. “I heard the food service workers cursing while using the equipment. They’re fed up.”

Management is aware of these issues, according to Evelyn. “Just the other day, the manager had to turn on the circuit breaker because the fuse went out because of the blenders. They’re very aware of this safety issue,” Evelyn said. Barboza declined to comment on his knowledge of broken machinery within the Ivy Room, or any dining hall on campus.

Brown has made some efforts to fix damaged equipment. It bought two new coolers for the Sharpe Refectory after months of dining workers using a run-down cooler that constantly broke, according to Aaron. Still, the aging equipment that remains has caused workers to lament what they view as Brown’s perpetual focus on budget rather than working conditions.

“Extreme competition” for parking But dining workers’ problems are not limited to the walls of Brown’s dining halls. Every day, Evelyn leaves her home in East Providence 40 minutes before she is due for work even though she only lives seven minutes away by car. She spends the remaining time finding parking on campus.

Most of the parking east of North Main Street is free in Providence, but parking on Brown-owned properties is not. Employees can purchase parking passes for designated areas on Brown’s campus for a range of $9.45 to $14.93 a week, depending on salary. Or, they can pay $1.25 an hour to park on campus, which is the

hourly rate for parking in Providence.

Although Brown charges all people— professors, workers, and students—to park on campus, this system disproportionately affects dining staff workers, who need to arrive on time in the morning to start food preparations for students, lest they face disciplinary action.

Workers find parking to be an issue for several reasons. Firstly, workers are not guaranteed a parking spot, even if they purchase a pass. “It’s whoever gets here first,” Shane said. “[There is] extreme competition for parking.” This is especially true for people who clock in during the afternoon, as the public parking around campus is typically taken by then.

Second, if a dining worker is scheduled to come into work before 8 a.m., Brown parking lots are the only place they are able to park— thus pushing them to pay the $40 monthly fee.

This is because open parking around Brown is only allowed at three-hour intervals on most streets in the early morning. The only other option is parking several blocks away from their work assignment, which is cumbersome in the cold and dangerous for older workers walking on crooked sidewalks. Gina, a dining worker, parks as far away as Hope High School and walks to her job position, which she said “irritates her asthma in the cold.”

Lastly, during the summer, parking becomes even more difficult. Shane received a ticket last summer for parking near the only dining hall open that day, Verney-Woolley, when her parking assignment was near the Sharpe Refectory, where she is typically stationed.

“When I went to go fight the ticket, I was told that the parking pass only covers a four-block radius [from my parking lot assignment]— something that wasn’t advertised when getting the parking pass,” Shane said. Shane was able to get the ticket waived, but the parking system still “doesn’t make sense,” Aaron said.

Aaron doesn’t pay for a parking pass. He found the waitlist that workers have to get on to be approved for parking cumbersome and confusing. Instead, he parks several blocks away from campus every day, which takes a toll on him, he says, especially in the winter.

Workers say they instead want free designated parking spots for dining staff.

Barboza declined to comment on whether that was being considered.

“We’re just plain peons” Workers like Aaron feel that Barboza “values budget over workers’ concerns,” casting a veneer of progress over an incredibly difficult working environment for staff. “There are a few new people that have been added to management [recently] that take worker concerns seriously. Barboza is not one of them,” Shane said.

“How do you not have the budget? How do you think that your staff is going to be okay?

How are you going to open new kitchens and not have the staff for it?” Allison said.

Evelyn finds management’s treatment of workers offensive. “We’re the ones working the job. We know what works and what doesn’t down here,” she said. “And yet, management doesn’t consult us when they make [new] decisions. To them, we’re just plain peons.”

Marissa agreed. “Some supervisors have no idea what I even do,” she said.

“We’re on the floor actually working, but they don’t ask for our opinion,” Shane echoed.

“And my job isn’t simple.”

Still, Aaron blames more than just management within Dining Services—he blames the university at large. “Brown University as a whole is responsible,” he said.

“This is their property. Dining Services abide by what Brown University is telling them.”

“Dining Services are the heart of Brown” Thus, in remedying the issues facing dining workers today, the answer for dining staff is simple: hire better management that actually takes the concerns of its employees seriously—one that addresses understaffing, that fixes old appliances, and that provides free parking to its workers. A management that checks in on conditions often, not “only coming down when they need a soup or coffee,” said Gina.

“There could be a better, more positive environment if management listened to us more,” Shane concluded.

Workers also asked for management that values them more. Dining staff workers today do not have employees of the month or events outside of work orchestrated by management for community building. They don’t even get a shout-out from management when it’s their birthday. “It doesn’t help staff when we feel unappreciated,” Shane said. “Which is wrong, I mean, Dining Services are the heart of Brown.”

Many workers echoed their desire for a changed work experience because they love Brown and wish to see it succeed. For that reason, workers want students to know that they are on their side, fighting to provide a dining hall experience that one can be proud of. “I know [students’] reactions to what is happening, and we recognize the issues,” Allison said.

“It’s your dining hall too,” Evelyn noted.

“We’re here for [students], working for them, trying to make the place better,” Marissa said. “Even a smile [from students] puts a smile on your face knowing you’re doing the right thing for them.”

From students, workers request one thing: that they speak out against working conditions within dining halls. “Students’ voices at Brown matter. Nothing is done until the students speak,” Evelyn said.

Allison echoed this point, stating, “Students at school make a change. They rally around us.”

And Emily, another Dining Services worker, agreed. “All it takes is one student to start speaking up and things change.”

Hence, as workers begin to prepare for contract negotiations with Brown to be held next November, the Indy asks that you follow the Student Labor Alliance and join as they support the demands of dining staff.

NAOMI NESMITH B’27 is probably about to get a strawberry sundae from the Ratty if you’d like to come along.

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How Come No One Moshes in Southern New Zealand? ( TEXT GEORGE NICKOLL DESIGN ZOE RUDOLPH-LARREA ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG )

Gig dynamics and genre-defiance in modern Dunedin sound

ARTS

→ On my first day in Dunedin, New Zealand,

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I went for a walk. The coffee was dark and the weather grim. I nearly got run over by honking cars twice or maybe three times, meandering through the city in a delirium only possible after 18 hours of cabin pressure and a curiously delicious pie with meat inside. Spires of Victorian Gothic Revival cathedrals faded in and out of view in fast-moving fog. My socks grew soggy.

On my way back I noticed a black and white poster in a fiendish font that read: “They’re Live!

Silly Drunken Bastards, Fota, and Filth Wizard. $10 July 8 @ The Crown.” July 8, I thought. July 8! That’s tonight! I was drawn to Dunedin for a number of reasons—beyond active surfing and skateboarding scenes and the ongoing, reparative discourses between Indigenous Māori and European Pākeha peoples, I was enticed by the city’s place in music history. “Dunedin sound” is an enigmatic musical genre that emerged in the early 1980s with bands like The Clean, The Verlaines, and The Enemy, whose lo-fi, heavily reverberated, and alternatingly aggressive and poignant recordings have influenced long-lasting trends in alternative music the world over. But what was the state of modern Dunedin sound? I was about to get my first glimpse.

A few hours later I made my way to The Crown, a venue on the first floor of a Victorian building standing between two vacant lots several blocks from the main city center. Amongst the dwindling presence of local venues, The Crown has taken responsibility for preserving the legacy and continued evolution of Dunedin sound. Above the entrance is a hand-painted sign that reads “proprietors Sam and Jones Chin,” who have owned and operated the pub since 1989 (Jonsey’s Facebook profile picture is an image that reads “punk is not dead”). Inside, the faint scent of fig emanates from any number of hurriedly active fingers in tobacco pouches.

The walls are decorated on all sides with framed old flyers and photographs of Dunedin performances, some in black and white film, others more recent. The stage, not more than 18 inches tall, boasts behind it a huge banner that reads: “Protect Live Music… Protect Our Venues.” At the first mumble of guitar feedback, the crowd, as if sleeper agents triggered by their calling code, abandons the present happenings and diligently gathers at centerstage.

First up is Silly Drunken Bastards, a fourpiece act whose lead vocalist wears a top hat supporting two pairs of glasses and a trench coat with a communist patch halfway concealed by a several foot-long beard. On assessing the multitude of black leather and boots in the whistling crowd, I approached the front and prepared my body for a bash. As predicted, the band broke into angry song, pelting snare at some 200 bpm with doomed-out riffs over growling vocals. But as I tensed my shoulders and held my breath, I absorbed no jarring blow or sticky splash, no foreign hair brushed up against mine, no pinched toe, no knocked cheek, no sweaty “sorry,” no emphatic hand waving in the air with a “whose shoe is this?!”

Maybe it’s only the first track, I guessed—surely one or two more and it’ll really kick off. But when Silly Drunken Bastards’ six-song set ended, my skin was still dry and unbruised. Maybe the closing acts, you know, a few more rounds for the lot and things oughta get rowdy here, surely. But on came Fota, and later Filth Wizard, and by midnight, there on the curb, everyone put out their butts and said goodnight. All music, no mosh! I couldn’t figure it out. At any given venue in Providence, the same raucous set would certainly incite some morphing exchange of flesh amongst the crowd, but there everyone was,

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ever so carefully trying not to brush arms.

Maybe my first exposure was only an anomaly. The audience was a mixed bunch: before the amps roared, my pool partner was a Kiwi-born historian with a degree in law from Columbia, I shared a classic southern Speight’s with a retired railroad tradesman, and lent my lighter to a wool-processing grandmother. The acts, with several decades of local performing experience between them, drew an older crowd—maybe that was it. But after six months of weekends and several dozen gigs of high-paced performance, not once have I seen those invigoratingly obstreperous pits of bodily bounce and clang that I’ve grown so familiar with on the East Coast of the United States. What could be the cause for such a stark cultural difference? What are the conditions specific to Dunedin that create such juxtaposition between expressions on stage and those in the audience? Why does no one mosh?! +++ Dunedin is the southernmost metropolitan area in New Zealand, with a total population fluxing around 130,000. The terrain of the city’s immediate perimeter is rugged, its weather is regularly harsh, and its single-terminal airport is surrounded entirely by grazing cows. A typical description of Dunedin inevitably alludes to its tremendous sense of isolation. Chris Knox, music critic and leader of the foundational Dunedin sound band The Enemy (later Toy Love), explained in the 1986 documentary Funky Dunedin that “the isolation… means that you do evolve, pretty naturally, a very idiosyncratic approach to the music that you’re playing.” The social geography of Dunedin lends itself to the production of non-commodified and self-referential music.

Contemporary global influence certainly leeches into the morphing essence of Dunedin sound, but by the time it’s been chewed and swallowed by the local palate, its contorted structure is spat out as something new entirely. It begins to appear logical that members of the audience would defy the external standard.

Over the past few weeks I’ve sat down with a number of local musicians, showgoers, and venue owners to get a better sense of Dunedin style, the history of local performance, and the undulating presence of “the pit.” Liam Hoffman operates the composting program for the Otago Polytechnic and plays drums in the well-recognized “doom slop” band Night Lunch. The act is unlike any I’ve heard. Liam plays extremely fast and involved drums (coincidentally inspired by the early 2000s Providence noise rock band Lightning Bolt). His singular bandmate (also named Liam) plays a homemade diddley bow—a single-stringed instrument that traces back to early 20th-century musicians of African descent in the rural American South, where commercially produced string instruments were largely inaccessible. Liam (Hoffman), perhaps underselling the act’s ingenuity and technical skill, classifies their style as fitting some “joke genre.”

He giggled at my interrogative attempts to categorize the band. “Doom slop,” he provided, “or maybe crust pop.” He shrugged and laughed again. Their 2021 EP release Table for Two holds six tracks of heavily distorted, fast, and monotone riffs atop coarse lyrics that illuminate ironies of the industrial capitalist experience.

Their most popular song, “House Full of Shit,” asks the listener, “what are we going to do with all this shit?” Listening without Liam’s provided context, it is impossible to discern the precise origins of the Night Lunch sound. Sure, each individual performer may credit specific and

traceable influences that affect their style, but together the duo produces something unfit for categorization. Genres turn singular musical production into easily packaged and marketable commodities, ultimately divorcing a band from its hyper-local, eccentric genetics. Notably, every musician I spoke with in Dunedin was hesitant to identify with any one genre.

As a function of isolation, and perhaps active resistance, the commercial music industry has yet to pry its talons into the southern New Zealand skin. Musical expressions are not adulterated by the hovering promise of backstage passes and designer drugs à la mode. Through experience, I came to find out that idiosyncratic projects are by no means anomalous in Dunedin. Jesse Semple, local baker, big-wave bodyboarder, and active member in several local folk and post-punk bands, for example, is conceptualizing a Bob Dylan parody performance in which the members of his band are covered head-to-toe in an armor of tambourines. As an outsider, it would be hard to insist that no one in Dunedin is playing the guitar out of some shirtless fantasy of international stardom, but from my exposure, it is evident that most people are concerned namely with the music. It’s beginning to make sense that the gig is uninterested with the status quo, moshing included.

Simon owns and operates the meticulously well-curated vintage clothing store Static Age and is the lead singer of popular New Zealand skramz band Mandate (a genre I identified based on Simon’s descriptions of a loud, aggressive, angry, and gyrating style). He explained that the honesty, ingenuity, and incestuous blending within the Dunedin scene have to do with its scope. Considering total population, the fluctuating number of bands in Dunedin is remarkably high, but ultimately, the size of the city renders the emergence of specific crowds and partitioned sub-scenes unsustainable. There simply isn’t enough space—nor are there enough people—to support a grindcore night on Friday, screamo Saturday, and art rock Sunday. Jim Taylor, guitarist for the formative 1980s Dunedin sound band The Idles, says that “musicians all get together whether out of frustration—because it is a small city—or fun, and bang away in their garages and off they go.

There’s a unique blend of players and music probably because of that.” All of these musicians are in the same room on any given night, listening to each other. The crowd is often swept over by an intense sense of focus. Liam jokingly analogized the phenomenon to fine dining: instead of hurriedly shoveling the experience down some aural gullet by way of bodily bash, the audience members at local shows are studiously engaged with the music of their peers, attentively chewing the often complicated time signatures and unique chords so as to carefully digest and later re-incorporate the sound into the next non-categorized project.

The genre-defiance responsible for unorthodox styles and crowds is mirrored and amplified by a greater anti-category ethic in Dunedin.

The American punk and hardcore genres have canonically been described as anti-establishment or counter-cultural—their attitudes understood (and commercialized) as rebellion against a chameleon opposition, and their meaning prescribed only through a distinction from what they stand against. Gigs, therefore, act as the physical manifestations of dissent, anti-environments or counter-situations that ridicule the pervasive structures and behavioral expectations of the exterior by way of contrast. This contradistinction is achieved most efficiently through the mosh—a dangerous, ungoverned, and internally

ARTS celebrated performance that, beyond the venue’s doors, would be swiftly classified as riotous, inappropriate, and offensible behavior—thereby accentuating division between the gig and other variations of standardized space.

The longer I stayed in Dunedin, the more it became clear that this tendency to define through opposition does not apply as directly to the experience of local alternative music. Liam explained that, for many, the gig is folded into daily Dunedin life with a reasonable degree of continuity. Because the price of living in Dunedin is relatively cheap, he continued, the majority of musicians and showgoers are not suffocated by excessively demanding working hours—free time is not a scarcity. The gig, then, is not situated in direct contrast to an otherwise brutally confined, rigid, or homogenous experience throughout the week, but incorporated into a more temperate lifestyle. Instead of the Jekyll and Hyde persona that may be associated with the prototypical working professional and nightlife enthusiast elsewhere, members of Dunedin audiences can rest somewhere steadily in between the two extremes, their experience at shows more seamlessly integrated into life at large. Dunedin gigs aren’t inherently classified as anti-environments predicated on contrast and, therefore, don’t necessarily rely on the mosh as a mechanism of distinction against the imposing world out there.

Considering punk and hardcore are typically defined as revolts against authoritarianism, it follows that New Zealand does not have a revolutionary history against its colonial mother. James, a local artist and baker with over 20 years of exposure to Dunedin gigs, assured me that in New Zealand there endures a popular fascination with the British Crown that might seep its way into local alternative music. The legacy of Dunedin sound, for example, is preserved namely through The Crown. The second most prominent venue, Dive, was called Captain Cook Hotel up until two years ago (although the sign remains plastered on the building’s exterior). I visited a gallery space and venue an hour to the north where, directly behind the stage, a giant papier-mâché sculpture of the Queen stood with what I assumed to be a non-ironic caption reading “Happy Birthday Queenie.”

While punk and punk-adjacent genres exist in opposition to convention and control, rebellious music in Dunedin is (however incidentally) presented on a platform that makes celebratory reference to the very structures the music’s attitude resists.

The term “mosh” originally stems from a phonetic misinterpretation. According to untraceable legend, H.R. of the hugely influential classic hardcore punk band Bad Brains was introducing the track “Mash Down Babylon” to a 1983 Washington D.C. crowd largely unfamiliar with the band’s roots in reggae. In the Rastafarian discourse, “Babylon” doesn’t refer to a specific place but more broadly the systematic source of oppression, in many cases referencing the colonial occupation of Jamaica. Before transcending into a calamitous riot of two-stepping and shoulder-bashing, the audience had incorrectly heard “mosh down Babylon,” and the name has since stuck. From its linguistic conception, moshing has been elementally rooted in rebellion against control, and more explicitly, colonial oppression. Therefore, perhaps it shouldn’t come as much surprise that moshing is not common practice at The Crown.

However, this sense of collectivism and continuity is complicated by the history of individualism in southern New Zealand. Liam (drummer) argued that Dunedin, historically comprised of seafaring merchants and university students, is an inherently mobile place. He argued that those who end up permanently settling are often attracted to the quietness and anonymity of isolation and transience. Having grown up in Invercargill, the only significantly populated town south of Dunedin, Liam classifies southern New Zealanders as generally reclusive: “shy, stoic, and stony” with a tendency to engage in a “socially hygienic way.” In 1989, New Zealand historian Miles Fairburn published An Ideal Society and its Enemies, an examination of 19th century New Zealand sociality.

The book contains his “atomization thesis,” which argues that, because the original European settlers immigrated from England, Scotland, and Ireland in chase of endless “milk and honey” and without kinship ties, single males adopted lifestyles of extreme, hyper-mobile volatility. This characteristic of 19th-century New Zealand was epitomized further south as infrastructure grew less reliable and terrain more rugged. As a result of its foundational transience, Fairburn concludes that New Zealanders have historically expressed identity on individual terms, more so in relation to land than social community. Jesse conferred that his grandfather aligns with Liam’s and Miles Fairburn’s descriptions of New Zealand individualism: intensely stoic, hardworking, and reclusive. The model of atomization is perfectly analogous to the spatiality at local gigs. While elsewhere, the crowd may take the form of one singular and morphing organism, audience members at Dunedin shows are careful to maintain their individual units as members of the whole. +++ Just as I was starting to grasp some semblance of understanding, my thoughts were challenged

by James’ stories from the early 2000s. He used Obi-Wan Kenobi’s words to describe the turn-of-the-century scene as a “hive of scum and villainy”—a raucous, intensely rebellious, and occasionally confrontational environment of which moshing was an intrinsic element.

Drugs and alcohol were a more central element to the experience of going to a show, and James guessed that maybe uncontained intoxication was the reason for a more rowdy and aggressive atmosphere. But ultimately, at some inscrutable moment in the early 2010s, moshing just disappeared. “It just kind of snuck up on us,” James said, “And I actually didn’t even realize it had vanished until you asked me.” It wasn’t the product of active effort or meditated reform, but as if the energy had all but expended and dispersed as untraceably as it arrived. Jesse has spent time living and performing amongst the more physically engaged crowds of Western Australia and has heard stories of the Dunedin music scene while working alongside James in the bakery. Hoping to recapture a lost and liberating sense of collective rambunctiousness, Jesse and his bandmates diligently tried to revitalize Dunedin moshing over several months last year through tactical and considerate methods of instigation—namely, recruiting a gender-inclusive group of eager fans to centerstage with friendly yet spirited bumps and nods. Their attempts, he admitted, fell flat.

Perhaps this dramatic shift can be attributed to the steady decline in local venues. Two years ago, developers bought up the vacant lots adjacent to The Crown and released plans for an apartment complex that would likely end all live performances on account of noise complaints. A

motion to “Save the Crown” garnered tremendous local support and has instigated disputes between the scene and the City Council over noise stipulations. The future of The Crown is uncertain. Contention between local musicians and the council is ongoing and has caused the closure of several prominent spaces over the past decades. Despite the overwhelming interest in music, venues are dangerously scarce. Coincidentally, my interview with Liam was interrupted by a phone call from (other) Liam, bearing the news that their upcoming show had been canceled, as Dive, one of only three remaining Dunedin venues, had shut down. As a result, there is a general sense of anxiety about preserving endangered space.

On one evening, I noticed the early rumblings of a pit begin to spark between two or three younger kids in the crowd. Jones Chin, unanimously touted as the chief steward of Dunedin’s rebellious and alternative live music, immediately came from behind the bar and told them to settle down. I went in for a pint one afternoon and asked Jonsey about why he seems to so ardently prevent moshing.

He said that it creates liability. “I don’t want someone getting hurt and the police getting called,” he said, “I don’t need that happening.” Simon explained that Jonsey has a “sixth sense” when it comes to assessing and managing the dynamics at gigs, which has become increasingly heightened in the face of citywide venue closure.

Moshing presents an unpredictable variable to an already uncertain future for Dunedin venues. Liam and James both agreed that a true mosh materializes only at the most packed gigs, due to the collective anonymity and the added safety of extra bodies protecting hurlingheads from glass pints and table corners. Simon revealed his tactic for instigating a pit, when the night is right. He picks up a smaller showgoer and hoists them over his shoulders, playfully bouncing into the mass.

“It’s a fun way to get people involved,” he added, “everyone starts laughing and no one feels threatened.”

I am still convinced that the lack of moshing is in some ways related to a more essential Dunedin-ness. The juxtaposition between punk attitudes on stage and shockingly tame audiences reveals the city as an extremely unique place for music. Interestingly, James admitted that he didn’t even notice moshing had disappeared until I asked him why no one does it. The music surges from garages and lofts without consideration for categories or definition. Moshing has become decided as an inextricable element of fast-paced shows internationally, and the fact that no one does it in Dunedin is pretty punk rock.

GEORGE NICKOLL B’24 might permanently relocate.

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EPHEMERA

Kolya Shields B’24 Castration Anxiety screenprinted textile

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY

Rapid Fire: Hand Crumbs, UTIs, and Indie’s Got No Clue Dear reader, I’m sorry. Whether it’s the lingering afterlives of Halloweekend, escalating and procrastinated thesis deadlines, or simply the fact that the sun has begun to set at a godforsaken hour, I’m finding myself quite tired. Tonight I’m making myself a soup which I predict will consist mainly of celery (indeed, I have little else), and I think that that picture might be worth a thousand words.

As I’m sitting in the basement of the Rock reflecting on my tenure as Indie, I’ve noticed that at the same time that I receive a lot of truly insightful questions (thanks, guys!), I also receive some that are, well… not that insightful. And let me let you in on another trade secret: sometimes I also receive questions that are sort of just… too hard. Questions that make me feel like I just opened a blue book and realized that I crammed for the wrong subject completely (not (not speaking from experience). experience). As I’m veiled behind the masthead of the Indy Indy,, I wonder if people forget that I, too, am just a student—and one who doesn’t do well with testing, at that.

But for this week, I’ve decided to tackle both my aversion towards asininity and my test anxiety and answer the questions I’ve been putting off. Because while I disagree with the notion that “there’s no such thing as stupid questions,” I do think that even stupid questions deserve answers (sometimes it seems like people just need to hear it from someone else). And my therapist also said I should challenge myself more.

So expect some that are too easy, some that I’m unqualified for, some that draw a strange connection between toilet usage and “culture,” and some that I just don’t have the answers to, which might be the hardest question to grapple with of all. But nevertheless, fueled by celery soup, I’ll try to persist.

What should I have for lunch?

Sandwich.

My roommates joke about being in a polycule but I want it to be a reality…

Somewhat funny joke, terrible reality.

Who should pay on a date?

Whoever asked.

Who is the best Dear Indy writer, historically?

Hm… Probably Indie.

Sometimes my girlfriend doesn’t clean the shit stain in the bathroom after she uses it, but I think it might be a familial thing (i.e. her family doesn’t have that culture)?

Your parenthetical did nothing to clarify the question, because I honestly have no clue what you mean.

Am I inherently unlovable?

Probably not. You might just be unlovable in a noninherent way.

How do I get an A-list rapper to notice me?

If I knew the answer to this I’d be reclining on a yacht in the Caribbean, piña colada in hand, as Drake serenades me (acapella) with his top hits from “So Far Gone.” Yes, I think to myself as a warm breeze gently caresses my cheek, I am the best he’s ever had.

People from NYC won’t stop talking about being from NYC with other NYC kids.

How can I fit in?

Don’t try to fit in—run.

How can I bridge the ever-widening gap between me and my mother?

Forward her an inflammatory, unverified post about a celebrity you both take interest in, and say “Can you believe this?!?” Alternatively, send her a video of Bruno Mars dancing.

Where do I go when my roommate sexiles me?

Do unto others as others unto you, and seek refuge in the bed of another. The sexile cycle must repeat; this is the law of the jungle.

I started taking ADHD meds last week and I’ve started to actually feel emotions now… convince me that bad emotions are worth having too?

Please talk to your doctor about this instead of me.

I hooked up with someone and didn’t really feel that connected to them. But now they’re ghosting me—should I just move on, or try to figure out why?

Move on. Not your business.

I’d like to request a guide to having more sex on campus.

I’m not qualified to answer this.

Told my professor I have an intellectual crush on him and now it’s awkward.

As someone with far more than an intellectual crush on some of my professors (Comp Lit department, this one goes out to you), props to you for saying it out loud. And let’s be honest, they’re probably flattered.

I think that the girl who writes Dear Indy is super cool and sexy, how can I let her know?

Find me in the Underground… and bring a Twix ;)

What should I do with the time that I have?

Pass.

How can I balance my friend group gender-wise?

This was also an extremely pressing question for me in freshman year! Of high school. Grow up.

Recipes for a love potion?

One left Twix; a clump of your roommate’s shower hair; a half-smoked cigarette; Indie’s nail clippings; and those chip remnants that get stuck on your palm and you sort of have to lick them off?

Are my actions (or inaction) making the world uninhabitable for my children, and my children’s children?

Yes. Do something about it.

I think I have a UTI? Again, doctor. I’m sorry, because I do feel for you.

How can I find a guy exactly like my dad?

The butcher’s section at Whole Foods, Bob Dylan’s North American tour, the street by your house that “really needs to be cleaned up.”

I keep submitting to Dear Indy but my questions are never featured. How can I fix this?

Submit something that makes me think it’s your way of asking me out. The answer is yes!

( TEXT SOLVEIG ASPLUND DESIGN SAM STEWART ILLUSTRATION SAM STEWART ) Questions edited for clarity.

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BULLETIN

BULLETIN

Upcoming Actions & Community Events Friday 11/17 @6PM-8PM: Showing Up for Palestine: Intercommunal Solidarity for Students of Color Calling all Brown students of color! This Friday, join your peers in an event hosted by the BCSC Heritage Series to participate in conversations, educational workshops, and healing spaces focused on the Palestinian struggle. Facilitated by Brown Students for Justice in Palestine and Brown Arab Society.

Location: BCSC Formal Lounge Saturday 11/18 @9AM-11:30AM: Cranksgiving Cranksgiving, hosted by Providence Bike Jam, is an annual part bike ride, part food drive, part scavenger hunt event open to the local community. Remember to tune your bikes and conduct a bike safety check with the Providence Bike Collective in the morning before participating! Register through Instagram @pvdbikejam.

Location: 50 Sims Ave, Providence, RI 02909 Saturday 11/18 @11:30AM-3PM: Celebrating Trans History Makers Pop-Up and Screening This Saturday, celebrate trans lives and history at an event hosted by Haus of Codec, Thundermist Health Center, and Providence Public Library. Browse a resource fair and a pop-up marketplace featuring local artists, followed by a screening of Framing Agnes and a panel with historian Jules Gill-Peterson, local trans scholar Elijah Edelman, and trans activist and community leader Jesinya Sousa.

Location: Providence Public Library, 150 Empire Street, Providence, RI 02903 Saturday 11/18 @6PM-9PM: Trans Day of Remembrance Celebration Commemorate the trans lives lost and celebrate the life, resiliency, and beauty of the trans community at the Trans Day of Remembrance Celebration. The event will spotlight the achievements of several trans women of color who have made significant change within the trans community and share their stories in order to enshrine their legacies in RI’s history.

Location: Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad St, Providence, RI 02907 Sunday 11/19 @2PM: Providence TGNB Community Meeting This month’s meetup is here! Come meet and socialize with other trans and gender nonconforming folks in the Providence area. Attendees are welcome to bring snacks, drinks, blankets, and chairs to make the space comfortable.

Location: Dexter Training Ground, 73 Dexter St, Providence, RI 02909

Arts Saturday 11/18 @11:30AM-1PM: Storytelling & Craft with the Tomaquag Museum Join Silvermoon Mars LaRose, Assistant Director of the Tomaquag Museum, for an afternoon of cultural education through a program of storytelling and craft-making. Attendees will first listen to a story, followed by the creation of a game called a Hubbub bowl. Open to all ages. Register at rocadults@clpvd.org.

Location: Rochambeau Library – Community Room Sunday 11/19 @10AM: Self-Care Day for Teaching Artists This gathering is dedicated and open to teaching artists working in community education and health settings. Come rest in this space, where three artist-facilitated sessions will be available to help decompress, along with unstructured time to be alone or to connect with other community members. Lunch is provided. Event is free with pre-registration on Eventbrite.

Location: Shri Studio – 390 Pine St, Pawtucket, RI 02860

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

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

( TEXT QIAOYING CHEN, ANGELINA RIOS-GALINDO DESIGN GINA KANG )

+ JBL Mutual Aid Wishlist Instagram: @jblmutualaid | Venmo: @rijbgc | CashApp: $rijbgc With colder weather closing in, the need for gloves, hats, and blankets has increased. Help purchase items on JBL Mutual Aid’s wishlist to keep the community warm and fed all through winter. Check out the link @ jblmutualaid’s Instagram bio to see how you can help! + Weber Renew Holiday Gift Drive Sponsor a gift this holiday season for a Weber Renew client and provide your community with a cozy, warm present this season. Most gifts are under $40; email holiday@weberrenew.org to find out how to contribute! + Al Dios Fundraiser Help raise funds for evicted punk Providence community members by purchasing a print. Choose from four different styles of prints for $15.

DM @littleguyatthegig for more details and to see more information on how to support. All funds raised goes directly to evicted community members.

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!

FEATURE: Al Dios Wake x Benefit Show for Palestine Red Crescent Society Amidst the ongoing genocide in Palestine at the hands of the Israeli regime, artists and organizers in the Providence community are coming together to raise funds for Palestine Red Cresent Society (PCRS).

PRCS, since its inception in 1910 and recognition as a National Society in 1969, has served as a significant humanitarian relief resource across Palestinian territories. Now, PCRS operates as the primary provider of ambulances and other emergency medical services in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

Al Dios No Conocido, translating to “To the Unknown God,” is a DIY music space in the heart of Olneyville that’s hosted bands like GEL, Catalyst…, Your Arms Are My Cocoon, Vs Self, and more over the past XXXX years. On the heels of an eviction, next Saturday’s benefit will be the venue’s penultimate show—a “wake” followed by a proper funeral the next day.