The College Hill Independent Vol. 41 Issue 3

VOLUME 41 ISSUE 03 09 OCTOBE R 2020

WONDROUS OMENS On Collecting and Letting Go

SEARCHING FOR STABILITY Redefining Home in San Francisco

THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM Palestine, Kashmir, and the ideological incongruities of Indian Nationalism

Indy Cover

Untitled Seth Israel

Week in Review 02

The Great Debaters Kaela Hines Bountiful Big-Name Babies and a Baby Birkin Nicholas Michael

Nation + World 03

The Paradox of Freedom Anchita Dasgupta

Metro 17

07

Shaking Up The State House: An Interview with State Senator Candidate Tiara Mack Sara Van Horn Against Austerity: A Justice Budget for Rhode Island Leela Berman

From The Editors Monday, first day at school weeks after first day of. Just before opening the door to outside, backpack swung over shoulder, I turn around to my roommate, to anyone who will listen. “This doesn’t feel right.” An amused, almost defeated, smile in return. “Have a good day at school sweetie.”

Nearing the green, my backpack makes me feel naked and naive. I’ve had this dream recently, walking backpack-clad across campus as my intended destination is slowly broken down into nowhere.

Sitting down on a green check mark surrounded by a sea of red x-es in a classroom with space for ten times our number. Air smells filtered, light glares.

My classmates smile the smile of my roommate, but now I only see it in their eyes. Our check marks are so far apart that lip-reading would’ve been a bonus.

To make up for the words that are lost on us, lost to the sterile room, lost in our masks, we nod fervently, eyes wide.

About an hour into seminar, a small ant walks with determination across the x-marked chair in front of me. After the second hour, I watch it—or is it a new ant?—march back in the direction it first came from.

Monday, only day at school. We probably won’t return to the barren lecture hall; somehow this was more exhausting than Zoom. The ants get to stay, though. I wonder for how long.

Features 09

Searching For Stability Evie Hidysmith

11

The Future Memory of Food Rhythm Rastogi

Arts + Culture 15

Justice As Seen On TV Anonymous

Science + Tech 13

Wondrous Omens Mariel Solomon

Literary 05

The Mayerling Incident Kate Ok

Ephemera 12

6

In The Recurring Dream Claribel Wu

X

Wizards Sarah Goldman

List 19

Tara Sharma, Sara Van Horn, & Mehek Vohra

MISSION STATEMENT The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

STAFF Week in Review Amelia Anthony Nick Roblee-Strauss | Nation + World Emily Rust Leela Berman Giacomo Sartorelli Anchita Dasgupta | Metro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini Peder Schaefer | Arts + Culture Seamus Flynn Alana Baer | Features Alina Kulman Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger | Science & Tech Gemma Sack Anabelle Johnston Thomas Patti | Literary Kate Ok Bowen Chen | Ephemera Sindura Sriram Anna Kerber | X Maia Chiu Ethan Murakami | List Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn | List Designer Mehek Vohra | Staff Writers Uwa Ede-Osifo Mara Cavallaro Muram Ibrahim Justin Han Izzi Olive Bilal Memon Seth Israel Nell Salzman Victoria Caruso Zach Ngin Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Ella Spungen Sarah Goldman Alisa Caira Laila Gamaleldin Drake Rebman Morgan Awner Elana Hausknecht Rhythm Rastogi Nicole Kim Lucas Gelfond Rose Houglet Joss Liao Nicholas Michael Belinda Hu Leo Gordon CJ Gan Vicky Phan Tammuz Frankel Amelia Wyckoff Auria Zhang Olivia Mayeda Justin Scheer Gaya Gupta Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Marina Hunt Issra Said | Copy Editors Christine Huynh Grace Berg Jacqueline Jia Elaine Chen Sarah Ryan Jasmine Li Nina Fletcher Madison Lease Alyscia Batista | Design Editor Daniel Navratil | Designers Anna Brinkhuis Katherine Sang Kathryn Li Isaac McKenna Miya Lohmeier Clara Epstein | Illustration Editor Sylvia Atwood | Illustrators Sandra Moore Katrina Wardhana Floria Tsui Mara Jovanović Hannah Park Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Yukti Agarwal Sage Jennings Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Joyce Tullis Charlotte Silverman Simone Zhao | Business Isabelle Yang Lauren Brown Evan Lincoln | Web Designer Sindura Sriram | Social Media Christina Ofori | Alumni Relations Jerry Chen | Spanish Translation Felipe Félix Méndez | Senior Editors Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn Cal Turner | Managing Editors Audrey Therese Cabrera Buhain Andy Rickert Ivy Scott | Managing Designer XingXing Shou *** The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

09 OCT 2020 VOLUME 41 ISSUE 03

@INDYCOLLEGEHILL WWW.THEINDY.ORG

week

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BY Kaela Hines & Nicholas Michael ILLUSTRATION Ophelia Duchesne-Malone DESIGN XingXing Shou

In last week’s presidential debate on September 29, President Donald Trump and Former Vice President Joe Biden went head to head in a 90-minute scrimmage. The night was carefully curated to feature six segments: the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence, Trump and Biden’s records, and election integrity. Each candidate was allotted two minutes to respond to each question without interruptions. But a flurry of insufficient answers and all of the interruptions Trump could fire at Biden was all we got. And the worst part? No commercial breaks. Fox News anchor and moderator, Chris Wallace, unfortunately found himself caught in the middle of the heat. That night, online dictionary searches for the word “moderator� increased by 3,500% (according to CNN). Evidently, no one bothered to discreetly pass any of those definitions along to Wallace.

When discussing the COVID-19 crisis, Trump practically stuck out his tongue, put his fingers in his ears, and whined that Biden couldn’t have done better than him with the management of the virus. Biden pointed to the over 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 while Trump mocked Biden’s big masks—an ironic move coming from the man who tested positive for coronavirus just days after the debate. Yes, the man who called the virus a hoax and only took precautionary measures months after a global pandemic shut down the country, actually contracted coronavirus. What are the chances? As Trump said before,“It is what it is.� Best wishes, Mr. President.

Later in the debate, Wallace asked Trump to publicly condemn white supremacy. Joe Biden and the rest of America chanted in the background, “Do it!

Say it!� as Trump’s forehead glistened and his mouth ran dry—a much-needed break from the night’s chatter.

Tripping over his words and prejudice, Trump responded, “What do you wanna call them? Give me a name.� He then referenced a white supremacist militia group known for participating in and inciting violence during the Charlottesville riots, offering, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.� Trump’s call to action terrifyingly excited members of the group, who immediately added Trump’s words to their slogan. Earlier in the debate, Trump summarized his thoughts on racism, saying he has done more for Black Americans than any president in history, with the “possible exception� of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps by “more,� he doesn’t mean more for the better.

In between the disruptions and Trump’s personal attacks, Biden clutched desperately at the few remaining moments of airspace and used this precious time to set the story straight: he isn’t that liberal. When discussing the Sanders-supported Affordable Care Act, Biden replied, “Listen, I beat Bernie Sanders...by a whole hell of a lot.� Weird flex, Biden. With a flash of those iconic veneers, Biden emphasized that his ideas were not the Green New Deal but from a completely unrelated “Biden plan.� Nevertheless, his game of ping-pong between liberals and moderates beats out Trump’s anarchic, rigged games any day. The “Biden plan� intends to rejoin the Paris Accord and weatherize homes while Trump’s plan proposes to plant a billion, beautiful trees in America—sure to solve all of those pesky Californian wildfires!

While the word count for those three hours was likely off the charts, perhaps more striking is what was left undiscussed: chiefly, any policy nuance at all. Last week’s riddles and mindless babbling left America with more questions than before. On-the-fencers remain, well, on the fence, and the near future of America feels more uncertain than ever. Will there be a peaceful transition of power in November or just the peaceful passing of Trump instead? —KH

The pandemic has delivered many things without precedent, though perhaps the most exciting of these offerings has come in the form of stork deliveries. Early months of lockdown were laden with Los Angeleno libido, producing a long list of celebrity Libra babies. Whatever was in the water has brought the gift of life, as a surfeit of celebrity offspring have made their way into the world this past week, filling Instagram feeds and People columns alike. A few questions: What might a high school full of our favorite star-children look like? Will Stormi Webster, who sported a $12,000 Hermès backpack to her first day of school, and the still-to-be-named Malik/Hadid baby be the best of friends? And is it normal to be envious of a five-day old? This Indy writer is still mulling these questions over and is definitely not jealous of a certain Stormi’s literal ‘baby Birkin.’ Amongst the celebrity couples who announced their quarantine babies this past week are some of Hollywood’s most (and least) favorite pairs. Tommy girl Gigi Hadid and ex-boy-bander Zayn Malik gave birth to their daughter on September 23. The 1D heartthrob took to Twitter to announce the birth of his daughter: “Our baby girl is here, healthy & beautiful to try put into words how i am feeling right now would be an impossible task. The love i feel for this tiny human is beyond my understanding. Grateful to know her, proud to call her mine, & thankful for the life we will have together x,â€? he wrote. Malik’s baby might not yet ‘know she’s beautiful,’ but fans do—and some are already seeing green. “is it too late to be reincarnated as zayn malik’s and gigi hadid’s baby pls lord,â€? a Twitter user wrote on August 28 in anticipation.

Some babies weren’t quite so lucky, facing the ultimate threat of Twitter cancellation by proxy. Earlier this summer, the unanimously annoying and very pregnant Glee star Lea Michele faced backlash for her accused microaggressive comments on set. “I will shit in your wig,� she reportedly said to a Black co-star.

Yet, Michele was able to walk away unscathed from the Gleeks of Twitter, giving birth to her son Ever Leo with husband Zandy Reich on August 20. Maybe she can channel the resilience she’s gained weathering the storms of cancel culture into a lesson for motherhood. After all, the belligerent cry of angry Twitter users and the screams of a newborn have been said to share striking similarities.

Joining Michele in the motherhood are fellow Scream Queens cast members Billie Lourd and Emma Roberts. Lourd and husband Austen Rydell announced the birth of their son over Instagram to the surprise of many fans, as the couple had made no prior suggestions that they were expecting. Lourd opted for the name “Kingston Fisher,� after her mother Carrie Fisher, paying homage to the recently-passed Star Wars actress. Fisher’s Star Wars co-star Mark Hammill was quick to tweet the couple a congrats: “Congratulations to #BillieLourd & #AustenRydell on the arrival of their firstborn child: Kingston Fisher Lord Rydell!!!� the Luke Skywalker actor wrote. “I can’t think of another baby with both ‘KING’ AND ‘LORD’ in their name. Nice .� Roberts will be the last of the trio to give birth, announcing her pregnancy on August 31 via Instagram. “Me...and my two favorite guys ,� Roberts captioned the photo of her, her boyfriend, and her new baby bump.

Other celebrity couples who have ostensibly had a “Love Lockdown� in Kanye Westian spirit are Nicki Minaj and Kenneth Petty (2.5/5 stars: 5 for the Barbs, 0 for the man and his absolute clownery), Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara (5 stars: they are both hot and named the baby River), Amanda Seyfried and Thomas Sadoski (3 stars, I guess), Usher and Jenn Goicoechea (4 stars: “There Goes My Baby�), Kevin Hart and Eniko Parrish (1 star: Kevin has short-man syndrome), and Meghan Mccain and Ben Domenech (unrated). Is having a baby one of the most narcissistic things you can do? Perhaps. Are the hours of labor worth it so long as your Instagram engagement improves after posting a postnatal photo? Probably. Are the ethics of bringing a baby into a world of Covid-19 and Trumpian turmoil questionable? Maybe so. But does this Indy staff writer still love seeing the photos of the cute babies debuted on Instagram? Most definitely. —NM

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THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM PARADOX

Palestine, Kashmir, and the ideological incongruities of Indian nationalism

content warning: discussions of state violence and the national security interests of the Indian state. The sexual assault Modi regime—by forging and fostering ties with Israel and withdrawing support for the Palestinian national On August 5, 2020, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign affairs cause—is rectifying this long-drawn ideological published a press release announcing a collaborative anomaly that puts India’s foreign policy on Palestine project between India and Israel. The project allowed at odds with its doemstic policy on Kashmir. Ironically an Israeli delegation to travel to India to collect voice enough, it took the Modi government’s brazen recordings and some 20,000 samples of saliva within subscription to the violent and divisive politics of popunine days. This plan intended to conduct breath tests lism to expose India’s sustained hypocrisy; advocating and regular swab tests on Indian patients in Delhi who abroad for the Palestinian right to self determination had tested positive for COVID-19 to further scientific while denying the same to Kashmiris at home. research on the development of a rapid testing system in Israel. This is only one among the many projects of +++ bilateral cooperation that emblemize the era of flourishing Indo-Israeli relations that were consecrated in India’s territorial claim over Kashmir is rooted in a 2014, when the charismatic and insidious demagogue British colonial-era law, the Government of India Act Narendra Modi assumed the highest office in India, of 1935. This law offered Kashmir’s ruler, Maharaja buttressed by a populist, right-wing, Hindu nationalist Hari Singh, a choice between accession to the newly government. independent states of India or Pakistan or indepenThe irony of Indian and Israeli cooperation in dent statehood once British rule ended. A few months the realm of pandemic research is not lost on those after the independence of India and Pakistan in August familiar with the plight of Kashmiris and Palestinians. 1947, before Kashmir’s status had been determined, These are populations resisting colonialism at the a handful of tribesmen with purported links to the hands of their respective occupying states—India and government and Pakistani intelligence crossed the Israel—who have unreservedly resorted to weapon- border and infiltrated Kashmir in an effort to coerce izing the pandemic as a form of collective punishment Hari Singh into surrendering the territory to Pakistan. against these people. Earlier in July, soldiers from the Hari Singh, cognizant of Kashmir’s inability to withIsraeli Defense Forces demolished a COVID-19 rapid stand a Pakistani military offensive, had no choice testing center under construction in Hebron, a city but to turn to India for help. Indian Prime Minister in the occupied West Bank, and confiscated valuable Jawaharlal Nehru agreed to send Indian troops to medical equipment bought by the Palestinian Health Kashmir on the condition that Hari Singh first sign an Ministry. In occupied Kashmir, on the other hand, Instrument of Accession that would accede Kashmir to internet services are restricted by the Indian state to India. control the occupied population’s access to communiIn the first Indo-Pak War of 1947–48 that followed, cation and information, making online connection so the Kashmir region was divided into Azad Kashmir to the slow that Kashmiri health care providers are unable to west (governed by Pakistan) and Jammu and Kashmir download medical guidelines for treatment purposes to the east (governed by India). The two regions were in COVID-19 hospitals. separated by the Line of Control (LOC), the internaThis bilateral cooperation project comes at the tionally recognized, UN-endorsed boundary running head of an unexpected policy overturn by the Modi between India and Pakistan. Although Prime Minister government on the question of Palestinian state- Nehru had promised the people of Kashmir a popular hood last year. In June 2019, India’s representative referendum after the war to ascertain their views to the United Nations Economic and Social Council on the accession, he refused to do so until Pakistan (ECOSOC) took the unprecedented step of voting withdrew its troops from Azad Kashmir. Several UN in support of an Israeli proposal that denied entry to Security Council Resolutions, such as UNSC Resos Shahad, the Palestinian-Lebanese human rights group 47, 51, and 96, have called for the plebiscite to reaffirm seeking observer status at the council. As per Article the legitimacy of the accession through a popular vote; 71 of the United Nations charter, ECOSOC is autho- they also demand a Pakistani withdrawal of troops to rized to extend observer status to non-governmental pre-October 1947 lines. The political deadlock has organizations whose activities revolve around matters nevertheless persisted, haunting Indo-Pak relations of interest to the UN. This was a breach of a decades- and plaguing the fate of the Kashmiri people strangled long voting precedent set by India at the UN in 1947 to by this clash of political egos. always vote in favor of Palestine on issues concerning Indian policy argues that Hari Singh’s signature on human rights, signalling India’s gradual shift away the Instrument of Accession has made all of Kashmir from a historically entrenched foreign policy of support an “atoot ang” or an integral part of India, even though for Palestinian statehood under the Modi regime.

India has never exercised sovereignty, including de This shift in India’s voting pattern at the UN, facto control over Pakistan’s zone of control. India grounded in its burgeoning economic and military rela- claims that the Constitutional elections of 1951 that tionship with Israel, underscores how India’s historical constituted the first parliament of independent India, pro-Palestine foreign policy has long been at odds with in which Kashmiris participated, acted as a de-facto the fundamental principle of Indian statehood: priori- referendum for the disputed territory, and validated tizing territorial sovereignty over the Kashmiri people’s the undemocratic fashion through which India had collective right to determine their own political future. wrested control of Kashmir. They argue that this has This is clearly evidenced by Indian-occupied Kashmir, naturalized India’s sovereign right over the territory where the Indian military has always had a free pass even without the referendum. Pakistan, needless to say, to repress, vilify, and terrorize the Kashmiri people disagrees. Until August of this year, Pakistan considwhose political will is perceived to be a challenge to ered the Indian administered portion of Kashmir to

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BY Anchita Dasgupta ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN XingXing Shou

be disputed territory whose legal status could not be determined until India upheld its avowal to conduct an impartial plebiscite for the inhabitants of the region. Imran Khan’s government reversed this policy on August 4, 2020, announcing unqualified Pakistani claims to Indian occupied Kashmir as a strategic reaction to India’s unilateral decision to revoke the region’s autonomy last year. This only further entrenches the image of Kashmir as a political football trapped in the quagmire of volatile bilateral relations that characterizes the geo-politics of South Asia.

From the 1950s until the late 1980s, the Indian government denied Kashmiri people economic opportunities in India, barred political speech that was antagonistic to Indian national interests, and bribed Kashmiri politicians into adopting a conciliatory position towards the central government. In 1987, the Indian government rigged a major local election in Kashmir that was contested, for the first time, by a coalition of anti-India parties that enjoyed mass support in Kashmir, as opposed to the pro-India puppet parties New Delhi had cultivated and patronised in the region. The ensuing frustration and political tension in the region gave way to violence as an anti-Indian militant insurgency swept through the Kashmir Valley in 1989. The Indian government saw this uprising as an opportunity to consolidate its control over the region.

Designating all Kashmiri insurgents as terrorists, the Indian government justified a ruthless military offensive that effectively crushed all organized resistance in the region within a year. To add insult to injury, in 1990, the Indian legislature passed the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) to shield members of the Indian Armed Forces from judicial accountability for human rights violations in Kashmir.

What resulted was an ongoing military occupation that has lasted over three decades, unparalleled in nature, magnitude, and extent of violence. Nearly 50,000 people have died, while another 10,000 have been forcibly disappeared. Sexual assault, killing of peaceful protestors, and torture of civilians in custody are routinely employed by Indian security forces to humiliate and punish the Kashmiri population. One of the most opprobrious tactics of violence mobilized by the military is the widespread use of pellet guns to blind innocent Kashmiris, including children, with near complete impunity at any time a soldier deems them a threat to India security interests.

To rationalise the preposterous breadth of state violence in Kashmir and inject the normalcy of its necessity into the Indian psyche, the Indian state has manufactured a homogenous national consensus on the military’s right to maim the Kashmiri people in the name of security. An example of this that stands out is the story of Farooq Dar, a young Kashmiri man who the Indian occupation forces brutalized, tied to the hood of a military jeep, and paraded around Srinagar in 2017, as blaring loudspeakers warned onlookers that a similar fate would befall them if they dared to throw stones at soldiers like Dar allegedly did. As videos of this blatant and unabashed exhibition of cold-blooded inhumanity found its way on social media, Indians celebrated the heroism of the Indian soldiers who had tied Dar to the jeep.

This is a manifestation of the thoroughly and carefully curated policies on education and media that pit the patriotic, nationalist, brave Indian soldier against

09 OCT 2020

the young, hot-blooded, radicalized, stone-pelting, Muslim Kashmiri youth, of which Dar is the unarguable prototype. So pervasive is this manufactured consent that has been produced through the militarised control of popular humanity that in New Delhi, a small clothes manufacturing company began to sell shirts that picturized Dar tied to the jeep to capitalize on this mass desire to participate in and personalize the celebration of Indian nationalism. On the question of Kashmir, the state and people are of one mind— Kashmir does not have the right to self-determination, especially not at the cost of Indian sovereignty and its territorial sacrosanctity. That the Indian state has been able to beat India’s vibrant, discursive democracy into a unified, uncritical opinion on Kashmir can attest to how central this principle is to Indian statehood. Indian media, mainstream Indian academics, even the most left leaning parties on the Indian political spectrum, refuse to acknowledge that Kashmiris are a people occupied by the Indian state. +++ The similarities between India and Israel, when it comes to the repression of Kashmiri and Palestinian self-determination, are too glaring to be overlooked.

These go beyond the lived realities of checkpoints, curfews, midnight raids, arbitrary detentions, and the gamut of other forms of unrestrained military violence that Kashmiris and Palestinians have endured daily for generations. Parallels also include each state’s totalitarian projection of a state ideology onto its people through the creation of a mythical narrative of the “other,” such that people identify more with their state’s right to sovereignty than their collective right to humanity. From Golda Meir’s denial of a Palestinian national identity independent of Arab nationalism to increasing global submission to an alarming alt-right definition of “new anti-Semitism”––where criticism of Israel or even its illegal policies are viewed as hateful rhetoric directed at a non-existent, deliberately constructed, monolithic Jewish identity––Israel has succeeded in shaping Israeli statehood and nationalism as antithetical to the Palestinian existence.

Given that this manufactured hypernationalism is at the heart of the principle of statehood which both India and Israel exploit to thrive––sovereignty at the cost of human rights, one would expect Indian foreign policy in West Asia to align more closely with Israeli statism than Palestinian nationalism. Yet, historically, this has not been the case. For years, the leaders of the Indian national movement resisting British colonialism denounced Zionism for what it was: a settler colonial project furthered by British imperial interests. In his publication The Harijan, prominent Indian nationalist leader, M.K. Gandhi, wrote in November 1938, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

It is wrong and inhumane to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.”

Gandhi’s protégé and the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, toed the path of his mentor

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

in the realm of foreign policy on Palestine. India voted against the UN Partition Plan to divide Palestine in 1947. Through the 1960s and 1970s, as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, Indian leaders acknowledged that the struggle for statehood in Palestine was part of a global decolonization movement. Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s successor, shared deeply personal relationships with prominent advocates of Palestinian statehood in the Arab world, like Gamal Abd Al-Nasser and Yasser Arafat. Additionally, because of India’s antiWest and anti-United States positioning during the Cold War, it wasn’t until 1991that India allowed Israel to open an official embassy in New Delhi. Until 2016, no Indian Prime Minister had ever set foot in Israel.

But now, under the Modi regime, the true colors of India’s ideological anti-Palestine stance are beginning to surface. While India’s economic ties with Israel have expanded significantly since the Cold War period, the External Affairs Ministry has always been reluctant to shy away from its uniform pro-Palestine voting record at the UN. Ever since Prime Minister Modi’s right wing coalition won its first term in the 2014 elections, this policy has begun to slide. In 2014, India abstained from voting on a widely favored UNHRC resolution that welcomed an internal investigation into purported war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli Defense Forces in its 2014 war on Gaza. Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj refused to make a public statement criticizing Israel for its disproportionate use of force in Gaza in 2014 that killed nearly 2,300 people.

In 2014, after the Modi government came to power, India and Israel signed a comprehensive agreement that would expand cooperation between Israeli and Indian military and police personnel on issues relating to “public and homeland security.” This, in addition to Modi and Netanyahu’s personal rapport and the recent Indian vote that refused Shahad observer status at the ECOSOC, only reaffirms public qualms about India’s “rightward” shift on the question of Palestine.

What the Indian media and opposition political parties fail to reconcile in their critique of Modi’s revisionism on Palestine is the ideological anomaly upon which India’s pro-Palestine stance was historically premised. As regime after regime of Indian politicians called upon their international counterparts to support Palestinian self-determination, back at home, corrupt leaders and parties infiltrated Kashmiri politics and rigged Kashmiri elections. Throughout the 2000s, as Indian foreign policy practitioners shied away from designating Hamas’s acts of violence as acts of terrorism, the Indian military ruthlessly murdered every separatist voice that called for Kashmiri freedom, using the rhetoric of “counter-terrorism.” +++ India’s moderate leaders have recently steered away from changing India’s status-quo on Palestine.

They have not done so because of their idealistic belief in Nehru’s principled anti-colonialism; rather, they are afraid of losing the “Muslim vote” in India—a large voter base of Indian Muslims who are loyal to the Palestinian cause. In Modi’s hypernationalistic, Islamophobic, Hindu-supremacist India, where gangrapes and mob-lynchings of Muslims are on the steep rise, the police and the judiciary have joined hands to pardon mob demolitions of mosques, and

Hindu supremacist shootings of peaceful Muslim protesters occur, appeasing Muslims is no longer necessary. Evidenced recently through the passage of the Constitutional Amendment Act of India in December 2019—in tandem with a proposed National Register of Citizens—the Modi government, through a series of slyly crafted legislations is attempting to render Muslims stateless and voteless in the country.

In the northeastern state of Assam, the process has already begun, as second and even third-generation Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, who have lived in India for far longer than many members of the Modi government, are being thrown into ICE style detention centers, separated from family and loved ones, with little access to food, water, and healthcare. It is this perverted spirit of undisguised, Islamophobic hypernationalism that the Modi regime has stoked within the Indian people that has emboldened the government to move away from India’s historical stance on Palestine.

Whatever the push may have been, this change in India’s stand on Palestine has undone a sevendecade-long misleading gap between Indian policy on Palestine and on Kashmir. What is at the core of Israel’s self-justifying need to occupy Palestine is also what has historically driven India’s belief that Kashmir is its “atoot ang.” The dehumanization and othering of Palestinians that has spurred decades of homogenized public opinion in Israel through state propaganda is identical to the popular conflation of Kashmiri liberation to Pakistani terrorism that the Indian state has molded into the mind of every Indian child. The veneration of a four-year-old Palestinian who throws a stone at an armed IDF member and the celebration of an Indian soldier that uses a Kashmiri ‘terrorist’ as a human shield is premised on the same principle: The state comes before the people. India’s policies on Kashmir have long reflected this while being sheathed in it’s counterintuitive support for Palestine. It is about time this changed.

While it is unfortunate that this much needed exposé of India’s ideological hypocrisy on Kashmir comes from a xenophobic, right-wing government headed by a man like Narendra Modi, the global attention that this shift has drawn can open the world’s eyes to the stark parallels between the human rights abuses in Palestine and Kashmir. Modi’s outright, abrasive, settler-colonial, and occupational rhetoric to browbeat Kashmiris into submission reveals the decades of toxic nationalism under moderate rule that Indian occupation of Kashmir is predicated on. The similarities of the lived experiences of Palestinians surviving colonization and generational erasure articulates a new language and provides a theoretical framework through which Kashmiri oppression can be understood.

What Modi’s hypernationalism has unintentionally unmasked—the farcical paradox of centrist Indian politics that extols self-determination in Palestine while denying it to Kashmiris—is also what will usher in a new era of transnational, transcendental solidarity between Kashmiris and Palestinians. This is an era when Kashmir and Palestine will cease to be discrete geo-political conflicts in obscure parts of the post-colonial world order, instead participating in a global movement of resistance that will dismantle the violences of overarching, immutable power structures premised on identitarian supremacy across the world.

ANCHITA DASGUPTA B‘21 calls for the abolition of all states and institutions and asks you to do the same.

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The Mayerling Incident

BY Kate Ok ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Puppets, adorned with tinsel encrusted hats and straightened pony hair, rustle to the murder-suicide of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his lover, Baronness Mary Vestera. Calloused fingers pluck at steel strings in confusing patterns—the string quartet is playing—and bits of holographic ribbon are released from a pressure-triggered trap below the puppets, actors, and scene technicians. The wooden theater is about ten meters in length, width, and height: adjusted five months ago so Björn Johan did not bump his head as he lifted Rudolf ’s little stick arms. The theater was famously lauded in a style magazine for its innovative cubic shape, where an audience could effectively see from each side of the cube as the actors performed at the center.

Björn was a Swede creative imported, like the diorama papers, by a university council of Russo-intellectuals who appreciated his Scandinavian pastiche of upright masculinity. His face possessed a high nose, a low forehead, and a birthmark above his right eyebrow. This brow was broken in youth, so the right one pointed down and the other, up. In certain lights, however, the brow would look as one long divide, with his forehead separate from the rest of his features. Björn wrote The Mayerling Incident in two months immediately after marrying his wife in Hong Kong. Upon first performance, The Mayerling Incident was mutually adored by the university journalist activists and children. Every first Sunday of the month, the population of Marks and Christys and Skylars gathered together under the city arc to pearl-clutch at Empress Elisabeth’s weeping frenzy and her hounds (cake fondant molded in the shape of Salukis and Italians), who broke the news to the hunting party.

In just two years, The Mayerling Incident had been adapted into literature, short film, radio, and television. It was publicly criticized and beloved for its nationalist tones, but most early media blogs and Internet threads would examine the glove-making magnate, who commissioned the play and who was involved in the 2004 nationwide union-busting scandal.

Björn changed his name to Barnes Johan after gaining citizenship in 2008. In the interim period between 2006 and 2008, Barnes was accused of historical plagiarism by one of the last living Hapsburgs who had apparently descended from the dead Prince Rudolf ’s lineage.

Brandon Hapsburg took great offense at the media flutter around The Mayerling Incident, writing a moving op-ed on what it meant to have his history fictionalized sans-permission and what the First Amendment and subjective experience now meant in 2007. This commentary was widely viewed; the blog that hosted his entries generated over thirteen million visits per month, according to third-party analytics provider SimilarWeb. The only blog-based publication that beat out the Hapsburg’s account in statistics was the briefly-leaked sex tape of a dot-com-boom venture capitalist and his personal financial assistant. The accuser’s tragically defunct royalty and personal tragedies leveraged with previous public outcry against the glove-making magnate’s donations convinced Barnes to renounce ownership of The Mayerling Incident and submit the play into public domain. +++

In a Tudor-style country house on the coast of a fjord, Barnes sat in his office. The house was compounded for recreational reserve after the previous owner, a shipping company mogul, went bankrupt, and that is when Barnes’ lawyer, Rampling, had negotiated the house for his client on its new market low.

Outside a bay-style set of windows, the house grounds lay modestly against the cypresses and complex arrays of weeds and grasses; a mouse creeps by the left-most corner of the house’s foundations; a spider-like drone is eagerly flown by a tourist at a golf course a few kilometers away.

Barnes lay his eyes about his loafered feet, and he thought nicely about how his office was worth the price and the nice feeling that he felt after speaking with Rampling the other day. He had thought at great lengths about what motivations could lie behind Rampling’s poetic legal gestures. The theory that his wife had proposed and accepted was that Rampling was one of the last few good lawyers who humanely dealt in intellectual property restitution during a time where ideas were owned by no one.

Top of the desk, under the wrist, on a paper sheath, Barnes had written down what he could remember of his and Rampling’s exchange.

ON THE PAPER SHEATH: R: “I just had an interview with Justine...”

B: “... I have quite understood them” R: “Then you should trust that you are not dealing with a man desirous of playing part at any price or striving for a position...”

“If you say ‘no’ you will remain to me a client and my counsel is relieved...” “...I did everything in my power. Your misfortunes are not on my conscience” B: “And I know you to say this honestly...” +++ The teeth clacking had mostly stopped by the time Rampling had mailed Barnes the Romania Air sponsored press junkets. Whether this teeth clacking suggested teeth gnashing by dental prognosis, Barnes felt a little hysterical each time he tongue-kneaded his teeth to check for a tell-tale iron-y taste or a noticeable sandy abrasion.

His wife was asleep—pregnancy-induced melancholy—but by this evening, the last of The Mayerling Incident’s legal settlements would be settled.

Ramperling would represent Barnes in the city’s cool glass office while the playwright would remain at the estate organizing the tour junket-itineraries.

Barnes was due to visit Romania next week sans wife on a sort of creative-rehabilitative sabbatical. Led by Kundalini yoga certified doctors who believed in a Divine Feminine, Barnes read on the shiny slips of paper, the clinic promised a plastic re-melding of his inner child even if clients were not women. There was a pretty white lady with huge boobs on the cover; she was wearing all her hair up in a turban. Neck folds and large earlobes and a peace sign. Rampling had insisted on the visit to the Romanian clinic as part of what he called a “final say”—Rampling’s final guidance as Barnes’ lawyer.

Barnes might have just swallowed a clonazepam, but he still could get anxious and wait for Rampling’s call.

EIGHTY MINUTES LATER, THE CALL: B: “Were they mad?”

R: “They love you,” B: “Why didn’t you just ask them if they were angry?”

R: “Because they weren’t,” “Which means you just keep an eye on your account in Romania next week” B: “Fantastic. I want to fly away,” RAMPLING’s hand falls; it flips and tumbles down to his pocket. He takes out one of the original five, non-replica, Mayerling dolls. He presses down on the hardened fondant eyeball of Prince Rudolf and thought it would be a million year interim period until he could press down on the vague tinge of a legal, final yes. BARNES sleeps.

KATE OK B’22 has legal advice.

05

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09 OCT 2020

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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AUSTERITY

BY Leela Berman ILLUSTRATION Simone Zhao DESIGN Miya Lohmeier

A JUSTICE BUDGET FOR RHODE ISLAND

September 22, at the foot of the Rhode Island State House, mother-of-three Sucely Murillo recounted the abuse she had faced from landlords during the pandemic: “I just got served with a letter again that I need to vacate by November 1, because…there is no because. Just…out.” She was gathered at the State House with a vast network of community members, grassroots organizations, and progressive legislators coming together for a Press Conference for the “Justice Budget.” The goal of the press conference was to advocate for a budget for Rhode Island that, rather than cutting public services during a time of need, increases access and equity.

The vision for the budget combines housing, economic, and criminal justice to keep situations like Murillo’s eviction from ever happening again. The budget emerges from overlapping historical movements: austerity within Rhode Island, the coronavirus pandemic, and Black liberation calls for police and prison defunding in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In the midst of the pandemic, a coalition of long-existing progressive and radical community organizations, including DARE, Formerly Incarcerated Union, Rhode Island Working Families Party, Reclaim RI, and more, came together to confront these intersecting injustices head on. The product of this effort, the July 2020 Justice Budget vision document, is driven by a deep analysis of why housing injustice, economic injustice, and criminalization exist. It declares: “White supremacy and racism, capitalist exploitation, patriarchy, heterosexism and ableism are the root causes of our fractured society and unbalanced economy.”

The work of this coalition asks Providence to think about how budgets relate to racial capitalism, and how they, as arms of the state, can be manipulated toward justice.

and public services and the heavy funding for policing and prisons, which particularly harm Black and brown communities.

Furthermore, especially in the last few decades, massive tax breaks for the rich are coupled with “austerity”(trying to reduce budget deficits, when state expenditure exceeds revenue, through cuts in social services). A state budget like Rhode Island’s is hundreds of pages long, full of heavy economic jargon and legalese which can make invisible the ways that budgetary and fiscal policy impact the everyday lives of people. It is therefore useful to turn this on its head and understand how a budget works and what it tells us: the institutions a state chooses to uplift in its budget and the institutions it discards say a lot about its priorities.

The Providence Police are an example of this type of funding choice. In a Providence Journal article from early June, Kimberly Decupe writes:

communities of color recognize that so much money is spent on policing and incarcerating the same communities whose children must attend crumbling schools. For the current fiscal year, the Providence Police Department has an operating budget of more than $86 million, while $93 million of city revenue comes from state coffers.

The city spends the equivalent of nearly every single dollar it receives from the state on police.”

“If these are trying times, should we not prioritize funding essential services? Believe me, as an AfroLatina from Pawtucket who has spent my life in underfunded communities and neglected schools,

+++ Budgets are not new. They are, in fact, as old as the state governing apparatus itself. The Justice Budget vision document, notably, recognizes that the injustices seen throughout the last few months of their organizing, including anti-Black police violence, housing insecurity, and unemployment, are systemic, connected to what they call “white supremacy and racism, capitalist exploitation, patriarchy, heterosexism, and ableism.”

But in the past, rather than help address these root systemic causes, budgets have supported them: allowing the state to protect the wealthy and their capital and underfunding important public services people need to survive and thrive, like education, access to housing and health care, and a livable wage.

The lens of racial capitalism, an analytic tool in the Black radical tradition and term coined by Cedric Robinson, emphasizes how creation of racial hierarchy, anti-Blackness, colonialism, and slavery are at the basis of the development and expansion of capitalism.

Racial capitalism and racism exist within the domain of the state: think to the underfunding of public services and the heavy history of state-sanctioned discrimination. A racialized labor hierarchy is intertwined with the history of the United States, in which enslaved Africans, and then Black and brown communities, were exploited so that wealthy white people could protect property and power. In Rhode Island, the repercussions of these vast inequalities and systems of exploitation continue today in the underfunding of public schools

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Amidst a theoretical and historical framework in which budgets often overlook the most vulnerable, the Rhode Island Justice Budget is an attempt to make this tool work for the people, during the middle of a crisis. Tal Freidman, an organizer with ReclaimRI and Demand Progress, said that the vision for the budget was centered around the needs of those most impacted by economic exploitation, incarceration, and housing insecurity, explaining: “People who know these problems intimately, know the solutions to them.” This is why the Justice Budget Press Conference included not only legislators talking about their rationale for the budget, but renters, Ministers, those whose families have been harmed by the police, and community organizers. Those speaking highlighted key points of the Justice Budget, honing in on housing, economic, and criminal justice.

The comments of speakers touched on the intersections between three categories. Suzette Cooke spoke about how “there has been an excessive amount of money put into the new police barracks… the incarceration that we have of people in the community… this is money that could also be placed also back into our communities, where people can actually sustain themselves...we also have our geriatric individuals that are also incarcerated, and during this time, they need to be let out.” From the audience, somebody shouted, “let them out!”

Visions of decarceration and increasing investment in underserved communities existed long before the pandemic, but their need has been sharpened and heightened in its wake. The Justice Budget focuses especially on the closure of the high security facility at the ACI, halting the construction of new police barracks, and implementing a geriatric parole starting at age 50. Coupled with affordable housing and shifts

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

toward economic inequality like increased taxes on the very wealthy and a $15 minimum wage, it envisions a Rhode Island that actually keeps people safe during a pandemic. Even after months of preparation, the Justice Budget is in for a tough battle if it’s going to get passed—it not only has to fight against trends toward budget cuts in Rhode Island now, but against a much longer economic endorsement of austerity and tax cuts for the wealthy in the state. +++ In 2006, Rhode Island passed some of the most regressive tax laws in the country, placing more of the burden of paying taxes on the low-income and middleclass Rhode Islanders while cutting taxes for the rich.

Rhode Island’s economy, struggling with a decrease in manufacturing over the past 50 years, has consistently lagged and bumped along, a story often told with a focus on productivity rather than people. Samuel Bell, State Senator and Rhode Island State Coordinator for the Progressive Democrats of America, muses that “Perhaps it is just a curious coincidence that this happened as the effect of the income tax cuts for the wealthy passed in 2006 began to kick in, but I suspect not. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that it was these tax cuts that triggered the collapse of our economy.”

Furthermore, the most vulnerable communities were sidelined in favor of austerity. In October of 2006, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in DC analyzed 2006 State Taxes and determined that the full effects of the revenue loss in Rhode Island would not be seen for another five years (a $7 million loss in FY 2008 but a $73 million loss by 2012). This, of course, did not include the impacts of the recession. A National Conference of State Legislatures analysis highlights the damage caused by the spiraling housing market and rising unemployment in Rhode Island (note, of course, the relationship to housing justice and economic justice). A New York Times article by Katie Zezima in May of 2008 elaborates, “The state is in the midst of its most severe budget crisis in years,” and details a series of moves by the state to cut public services, including some welfare benefits being drastically cut and health care for state employees.

These cuts to social services were justified through the logic of “balancing the budget,” without consideration of how some of these imbalances could be addressed through raising taxes for the wealthy.

Friedman explains, “A misconception is that when revenue is down, spending needs to go down, because you have to run the state like a business.”

Friedman’s understanding of revenue and spending connects back to the relationship between the state and capital, and the role of the state in protecting capital. In the end, the Justice Budget helps divert funding to services rather than the protection of private property, using the logic that states aren’t businesses. Unlike a business that might shut down during the pandemic, Rhode Island could borrow at low rates now and state expenditure can increase economic growth and provide stability during crisis. The Rhode Island constitution requires a balanced budget, often used as an argument against increased spending, but only if one views tax increases as impossible. If the wealthy in Rhode Island were taxed more, increased spending on public services could help the most vulnerable. Due to the perpetual evils of racial capitalism, the most vulnerable are often poor communities of color. A 2018 Providence Journal analysis of census data revealed that Black households had a 48% lower median income than white households. The poverty rate for Black people was 30%, for Latino people 38%, and white people 8%. These racial inequalities, rooted in systemic injustice, were only exacerbated during the pandemic.

During the financial crisis, as the logic of austerity and public spending competed, austerity won out and the most vulnerable suffered. In a 2015 analysis, Bell wrote that Rhode Island’s tax cuts for the wealthy were

the second biggest of the decade—a cut in personal income tax for the wealthiest Rhode Islanders from 9.99% to 5.99%. Although the 2006 tax cuts happened under a Republican governor, they were supported by a Democratic general assembly.

And yet, Democratic politicians have an air of forgetfulness around them when it comes to this fiscal history. In 2015, Speaker of the House Mattiello claimed, “there haven’t been tax cuts to the rich.” Statements like this serve to complicate the already muddy process of navigating through fiscal policy.

Now, austerity is still going strong in Rhode Island.

An August 7 memo sent out by Rhode Island Office of Management and Budget Director Jonathon Womer told state departments to prepare for a potentially 15% decrease in budget.

The Justice Budget was birthed out of a knowledge of Rhode Island’s past of opting for austerity during the fiscal crisis. Friedman told the Indy that, people saw “that the crisis was happening, and how it was effecting their communities,” realized the potential for austerity politics, and wanted to provide the “counter-narrative that, actually, in difficult times, we need those who can afford to step up to the plate and pay their fair share in taxes, and everybody else needs social services that help keep Rhode Islanders safe, healthy, housed.”

In a statement released the day of the Justice Budget press conference on September 22, Chair of the Judiciary Committee Rep. Bob Craven said, “We have to be willing to raise taxes on those who can afford it, not just to be symbolic, but to balance the budget — prioritizing social needs, poverty, education, and COVID-19 relief.” No Fiscal Year budget for 2020-2021 will be decided until after the elections in November, as legislators hope for more coronavirus relief for the Rhode Island economy. The position of the budget remains uncertain, but Friedman believes “It’s clear that the majorities of Rhode Islanders are not interested in seeing cuts to public institutions.” +++ Given that budgets have for so long been ways for the state to maintain bloated budgets for systems of violence like policing and incarceration, underscore historical injustices like redlining and segregation, and control and limit access to services like health care and welfare, what does it mean for one to provide ‘justice’?

Under racial capitalism—which won’t go away with merely shifting the numbers on a budget—can one ever really attain justice? It may be useful to consider that the budget will exist as long as the state exists, and therefore to fight for a just budget is to fight against state violence as well as organizing a mass ecosystem of people thinking and dreaming for a better Rhode Island—and a better world.

A Justice Budget which seeks to reckon with white supremacy and exploitative capitalism is begins the process of redistributing wealth to promote housing and economic security and support for those most impacted by the pandemic (and, of course, by white supremacy and exploitative capitalism), and defunds arms of state violence like incarceration. A Justice Budget shifts to provide necessary funding to things that actually keep people safe, like access to housing and economic stability, while rejecting carceral and economic logics of incarceration and austerity. It allows for mass organization, can reveal state violence which has been made invisible, and gives way to a potential revolutionary network. It is a means to manipulate fiscal policy in the direction of justice.

LEELA BERMAN ’23 believes the Justice Budget is only the beginning.

METRO

08

SEARCHING FOR STABILITY When I think of home, I do not picture the house I grew up in. Instead, I’m eating dried apricots with my best friend Madeleine, chatting about books in her kitchen in the early morning. Our lives have been intertwined for over a decade. When the pandemic hit, she was the home I craved, so I spent the first six months of quarantine in San Francisco with Madeleine and her brother, Tobias, watching our city change.

In her May 2019 article, “How San Francisco Broke America’s Heart,” Karen Heller wrote, “For decades, this coruscating city of hills, bordered by water on three sides, was a beloved haven for reinvention, a refuge for immigrants, bohemians, artists and outcasts… In a time of scarce consensus, everyone agrees that something has rotted in San Francisco… You no longer leave your heart in San Francisco. The city breaks it.” When I first read these words last spring, they encompassed everything I felt about home. It was a place I cherished, and one that was disappearing. In March, the city was unrecognizable from how I left it last summer, and an eerie, unusual emptiness hung in the street. Over the months, as unhoused folks were forced out of closing shelters, tents filled the sidewalks. Now, the city continues to face a public health emergency alongside an unprecedented housing crisis, leaving its growing unhoused population without refuge from the state fires’ lethal smoke. Though I have a deep, almost irrational love for San Francisco, its transforming landscape makes me question who is still able to call the city home.

My parents were evicted before I was born and moved to the house I grew up in, where our landlord’s mother lived next door, watching us. I was afraid she would catch us doing something wrong and get angry or kick us out. In second grade, I stayed up late writing letters to our landlord, begging for a dog or to paint my room pink. I knew that the walls of my home weren’t mine, and that there were limits to how I could change the space to reflect who I was. Now, our house stands lonely and so expensive that my bedroom is rented out to another college student so we can afford it. To escape the chaos of my home, I moved in with my boyfriend during my senior year of high school. His mother’s warmth overwhelmed their small two-bedroom apartment, which always smelled of incense and basil. There was coffee waiting when I woke up and apple tea on the nightstand before bed. I felt cared for in a way I didn’t know was possible. They were evicted at the end of our senior year, and we packed up the warmth of the apartment where they’d raised two children and moved across the park the weekend before our graduation. His mom tells me she still gets chills when she hears the word ‘eviction.’ +++

This spring, the city was crumbling while I sat with endless free time, so I emailed the Housing Rights Committee and asked if they needed help. Suddenly, Tobias and I both had internships with HRC and were working with the Westside Tenants Association, a tenant-led organization funded through HRC.

The last weeks of spring passed in a blur and left me feeling nauseous. I spent hours on a colorcoded spreadsheet tracking every eviction in San Francisco. On the phone with a representative from the SF Rent Board, she apologized for the delay in sending the records I’d requested, explaining, “When COVID hit, we were still stuck in 1999.” With all evictions filed on paper and no one allowed in the office, they were six weeks behind on inputting their data into the system.

Strangely, the Rent Board insisted on uploading files to a thumb drive and mailing them to my house, rather than sending them electronically. I was frustrated.

The Rent Board’s dated system allowed evictions to be filed without delay but drastically hindered our ability to organize against them because we didn’t have the information we needed: when evictions were

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happening and to whom.

To take a break from our work, Maddie and I took our puppy, Sutro (named after the 1973 landmark Sutro Tower), on a walk around the neighborhood and fantasized—as we often do—about the home we someday hope to own. We call it our upstairs-downstairs. The top floor will be mine because I’m not as clunky when I walk. By then, Sutro will be old and slow, making her way up and down the stairs between our flats and playing with our kids and kittens. There will be rounded bay windows where we sit and read books. We pointed to different houses as we walked, imagining our future selves walking through each one. +++

BY Evie Hidysmith ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Clara Epstein

school in 1980 to join the League of Revolutionary Struggle—an undercover communist organization.

“You work with a small group of people because… meeting with too many people will attract attention.

We all had pseudonyms too.” I asked if he would tell me his and he responded, “No! I can’t tell you that! It’s like your internet password.” +++ Don, Cynthia, and I text each other updates as we try to make sense of constantly changing housing legislation. In March, people unable to pay rent due to financial hardship caused by the pandemic could temporarily defer payment without facing eviction.

Local legislation was passed in July turning this unpaid rent into consumer debt, which must be settled in small claims court. These protections were repeatedly extended––without notice––just days before they expired, forcing tenants to live in a constant state of anxiety.

On August 3, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3088 into law. Publicized as a protection of tenants’ rights, it only created confusion. No one—not even elected officials—could explain how state and county legislation would interact. Even as we struggled to uncover the nuances, Don, Cynthia, and I agreed that these legislative rulings were half-hearted attempts to protect tenants. Instead of using change necessitated by the pandemic as an opportunity to examine and redesign our housing system, legislators have left hundreds of tenants to grapple with harassment and the possibility of losing their homes. San Francisco’s tenants demanded from the beginning that no one be evicted during the pandemic. Our local and state governments did not listen. Don and I brainstormed how to protect each others’ homes, even if our elected officials refused to.

We settled on a car caravan and rally, set for the first day that evictions were publicly scheduled to be heard in court: September 21. Tenants would block traffic, listen to speakers, and chant at the courthouse doors. We planned, slowly, with many conflicting opinions. Building a community where tenants’ voices are heard and valued is critical because there is so much shame ingrained in this experience. I hear it in tenants’ voices who don’t know if they can pay rent. I see it in my mother’s continued refusal to attend our meetings.

When tenants facing eviction ask if they can listen in anonymously. Our government tells us that if we cannot pay for a home, we do not deserve to have one.

We are constantly trying to unlearn this.

In early June, Tobias and I biked through Golden Gate Park for our first tenant organizing meeting. They were instantly welcoming. Aileen, a bubbly and brilliant school teacher, spoke with overwhelming kindness. Cynthia, a heavily tattooed, recent Brown grad and HRC employee, led with a grace I someday hope to learn. They talked about gardening and showed photos of their tiny new chickens. Don, whose backyard we occupied and whose windows were papered with faded political posters, sat quietly. We spent two hours in the shade eating sticky, warm pork buns from Clement Street, sharing stories, and preparing for the eviction moratorium to end.

As the meeting came to a close, Cynthia asked, “How do you think what we’ve done today contributes to the wider housing rights movement?” Don responded first, in his stern voice, “This is the movement. You know, I’ve lived in this house, in this city, my whole life. Sitting here with all of you, my tenant neighbors, sharing our stories—it’s invaluable. Making our voices heard is the heart of this movement.”

Don and I talked throughout the summer. He is a second-generation San Franciscan, born to Japanese parents in 1965, and one of the most committed activists I’ve ever met. He often exits our weekly meetings with phrases, “I’ve actually gotta run, I’m meeting a bunch of old communists.”

Don became an activist as a teenager in the ‘70s when hundreds of elderly Filipino residents at the International Hotel, a low-income single-residence-occupancy building, were facing eviction. Community members organized a phone tree to defend the I-Hotel.

“You’re just sitting at home and you get this phone call… and you go out… and there’s so many people there that you can link arms with each other and encircle the entire block… And that was the tactic: we’re going to link arms so the police can’t break through. And we’ll have multiple layers. So if they break through one group of people, then we’ll try and close ranks. You’re linking arms with the people beside you, and grabbing the person’s waist in front of you so it’s like a human wall.” Tragically, a link in the phone tree gave out one +++ day, and Don never got called. He “woke up the next morning and heard that the eviction had happened and In late August, Madeleine, Tobias and I left San [he] was really upset. But they had put on a good fight.” Francisco in a musty gray Prius, lovingly dubbed I was unsurprised when Don told me he quit grad “The Murph,” to drive back to school. A few days later,

09 OCT 2020

Redefining home in San Francisco

California began to burn. Curled in a mosquito-filled tent outside of Rochester, Indiana, the fact loomed over me that in eight months, I will likely graduate into the worst job market in decades. I think, often, of following Cynthia’s path: working long, underpaid hours at a San Francisco non-profit like Housing Rights.

They look tired, overworked, but happy. They live near McLaren park in a funky house with dark wooden walls and chickens. A life like theirs feels possible, hopeful.

Don’s voice in my mind makes me question this version of my future. He says that after the Reagan/ Thatcher era, “Foundations began to fund organizations that had political aims and social justice goals, and schools began to teach cultural studies and social movement theory. The gradual result of this was to harness the radical ideas of the past and ‘mainstream’ them by legitimizing their expression in non-profit jobs… A new generation would be radicalized in the sedated environment of the college classroom and steered into professions in poorly funded organizations… Capitalism was essentially teaching them how to ‘organize’ in a way that was never going to be a real threat to its existence.” He sees non-profits as a tool the system has created to “harness all of this unrest in a way that is totally ineffective.”

I didn’t know if I agree, but I return to this argument often. I cling to a job like Cynthia’s in imagining my future because it seems stable, and the parallels between our lives make it feel attainable. Don remains a mystery to me. He goes to work at a job he doesn’t talk about in a fancy office with bad internet. I don’t know if he’s ever been married or how old his kids are or what his favorite color is (though I’d make a wild guess that it’s red). I know who he is by how he sees the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

world—through empathy and action—but I don’t know here.” what a future like his would entail.

I wonder if this is still true. The longer protests continue with fervor, and the closer we get to the elec+++ tion, the more this moment feels revolutionary. I think of a younger Don—grasping arms with strangers at the From Providence, I continued to meticulously I-Hotel—and wonder how far we will go in sacrificing track evictions as Cynthia talked to tenants and their our bodies, our safety, in defense of our homes. lawyers. On September 14, a week before our action at the courthouse, Cynthia texted Don and me, “I have +++ bad news... eviction cases have been sealed to the public, so what we see on the court docket doesn’t actuI sit in my peaceful front yard in Providence as ally reflect all the eviction cases being heard. There are California burns and evictions proceed in San Francisco 19 being heard today…” Though legislative changes court. The quiet of this city feels incompatible with the to housing policy had been loudly discussed, no one myriad of ways peoples’ homes are being taken from knew that the expected wave of evictions was no longer them on the opposite coast. This dissonance makes the imminent—it was already here. already apocalyptic nature of this moment feel all the On September 21, I watched the protest livestream, more unreal. anxiously pacing around my kitchen in Providence, as There is stillness in the upstairs-downstairs. It fifty tenants gathered on the corner of McAllister and hovers in my mind, quiet. Home has always been Polk to block the doors of the San Francisco courthouse. seeped in instability, but there were years in which this Their colorful banners declared, “Stop Evictions, Save dream—of a home that wasn’t—felt attainable. Though Lives.” The camera spun to show stopped traffic, and I crave it more than ever, it has begun to fade; the aspiI heard blaring horns and the sound of the Brass ration of owning a home in San Francisco is built on Liberation Orchestra accompanying chants. Tenants wealth that displaces people. I still hope to grow old facing eviction and unable to pay rent spoke proudly— in my city. To sit with Madeleine in our kitchen in the there was a sense of conviction, love, and pride. early morning and take Sutro for runs on Ocean Beach.

But this dream only exists in a version of San Francisco +++ in which everyone has a home—one that may take a revolution to create.

Don told me once, in the middle of the summer, “The challenges we face right now are much different EVIE HIDYSMITH B’21 hates when people say San than the challenges we faced back in those days. At that Fran, Frisco, Cisco, etc. time, people thought that the revolution was going to happen. We just had to work at it but it’s going to get

FEATS

10

The Future Future Memory of Food

BY Rhythm Rastogi ILLUSTRATION Hannah Park DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

In the warm, yellow light of the afternoon sun, my mother’s and my hands look the same.

Poking around to find a sweet spot in the soil, a cautious and tender touch to the stalk, slightly dirty brown under the fingernails. We’re planting some basil today.

My hands orchestrate as hers do; they mimic her movements and treat her afternoon hobbies with reverence. Perhaps this is a genetic predisposition—to be as my mother is, and to do as she does. This routine ritual of ours is a transmission of heritage, a modern heirloom passed down from my mother to me. The hands that remember these practices of growing and eating food, also hold the imbibed cultural meanings, values, and family histories of food.

It begins to make sense how, in this moment of disconnection and atomization, we are turning to food.

The global consensus made to cope with these struggles is to dig into our soils and pour into our kitchens looking for home-cooked comfort. Halfway across the world from home, my best friend Niyoshi attempts to trace her family’s food lineage using only the tools available in a college dorm kitchen. Every night is spent with a different aunt recreating a new recipe through video call and crafting a new connection. As she attempts to build a repository of family memories, I think she learns that no matter where you are, you can always find your way back home.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Delhi, a Gurdwara (a place of worship for Sikhs that also hosts a free community kitchen) now serves meals to over 75,000 workers daily who lack both employment and nourishment amidst this pandemic. For a people that associate food with a shared community and consider sustenance to be a service, activating empathy seems like second nature. An age-old ritual now adapts itself to the needs of today, and manages to bring people together while they remain both socially and physically distant.

At home, this connection shines through a bit differently—my mother serves bhindi ki sabzi (okra curry) for lunch for the fourth time this week, grown right outside on my balcony and blossoming in abundance. She’s always enjoyed cultivating a little garden outside our house. Most mornings, her post-domestic duties are tending to her potted plants and flowers.

My grandfather used to tend to a mango orchard long ago that has since been sold, and my mother tells me stories of her childhood summers spent under those trees, helping her father pluck mangoes to bring back home a bountiful harvest. More recently she’s taken to growing vegetable crops, and I get to see glimmers of her childhood as she carries heaps of lemons and spinach from the garden to bring into our kitchen.

It doesn’t take a secret spice to know that food is linked to memory and nostalgia. Foodways are everyday maps to forgotten histories, and every cookbook is an archive of its own kind—a bank of cultural stories, family kitchen secrets, and collective knowledge. When the Partition of India forced millions of people to leave behind ancestral homes and native soils, they carried their legacies with them across borders in the form of tandoors (clay ovens). Before the separation, women in the villages of undivided Punjab would gather around a communal oven to cook rotis and soon turned it into a space where friendship blossomed.

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When these families were forced away from their villages and into far away refugee camps and cities, strife was rampant; a taste from the tandoor was their most wishful respite. Fast-fading memories of home quickly sprung up in corner meat stalls, roadside dhabas (restaurants), and kitchens around the country, attempting to reclaim identities being erased, one tandoori roti at a time. +++ When my mother married young, she found herself in a strange new city in India that brought in a bountiful abundance of loneliness, ripe with sore memories. My father worked late nights, and she had neither friends nor an understanding of the local language, so she turned to tending to a few plants on her balcony. The ferns and creepers quickly became her vernacular, and the greenery her creative expression. Today, when I see my mother in deep conversation with her amassed family of plants, trimming their leaves and without remorse over the sweat trickling down her head, I know what it means to carry your familiarity with you as you are uprooted.

Increasingly, scientists have begun to discuss the ways that plants communicate with their environments and the merits of learning their unique tongues. In The Language of Plants, Monica Gagliano talks about how “through their crafty use of this chemical language, plants are able to breathe out their message by encoding it with a single scented word that nonetheless conveys multiple meanings depending on the intended recipients. By adding just a bitter whisper of nicotine to their bouquet of nectar volatiles, for example, plants are able to discourage unwanted visitors such as florivores and nectar thieves; yet, this same nectar constituent is simultaneously used by the plant to manipulate the behavior of desirable floral visitors, such as hummingbirds.” In order to ‘hear’ what these plants say, we need to prick up our senses to detect their unique gestures, colours, and shapes and effectively understand how these symbols—like all languages—are a mechanism of expression and a tool for communication.

In a way, crops and food open up windows for a kind of seeing and listening. Examine closely, and they’ll narrate the tales of the strong women who fed our families, of how some traditions came about to be, and of the struggles to sustain life. They convey to us the practices of transformative care through feeding communities and of the sustenance of our needs.

These linguistic behaviors reinstill the values we need moving forward, and have the potential to catalyze our social revolutions. When the food we eat is a way to communicate, its voice can be of resistance. In fact, we can look towards Indigenous communities and grassroot struggles to learn how a close relationship with plants and food can bolster movements and achieve liberation. Everyone who has worked with their hands to reap rewards from hardened soil has known this all along. +++

variety of indigenous and heirloom seeds that preserve a rich history now being stripped away from the land and its people. In the face of thousands of local trees being burnt and uprooted, these seeds, although tiny in size, represent a greater hope: a hope for self-determination in the ongoing fight against settler-colonialism. Similarly, all across the world, Indigenous people remain spiritually and emotionally connected to their land, grounding their relationships on community participation and mutual survival. Their traditional food systems rely on climate-resistant crops, are treated without chemicals, and use community-based strategies of conservation and crop resilience. The fight for food sovereignty is thus not a product of chance, but a marker of identity, a result of cultural values and historic struggles. Turtle Islanders also maintain the idea of using the symbolic experiences and political correlations of food as platforms of protest and tools of preservation.

The sustenance of our cultural practices can contribute to our ongoing battles for physical sustenance. Our entanglement within convenience, capitalism, and hierarchies of class and race are reflected by our eating habits. The industrialized food systems that dictate our eating are heavily influenced by socio-political factors that disproportionately affect the marginalized. The chemical-intensive agriculture that produces crops in high quantities is low-nutrient and fails to nourish us sufficiently. Thus our food is inherently political, and those who control who eats what and how much, also control our bodies.

In this pandemic era, various food justice efforts are springing up to tackle emerging food insecurities, and they inspire a hope for a new social order, one perhaps built on the basis of our relationship and communication with food. By taking back the control over what we eat, we fight back those who curb our freedom.

Growing our own food at home helps us understand how sustainable food is a non-negotiable right, and how our nourishment needs to be self-determined.

We have learned over time that the simplest of acts of carrying clay ovens and forming seed banks can be the most radical. We have learned that we can simultaneously discourage oppression and encourage solidarity with bitter whispers of resistance.

Disobedience is a practice we can cultivate at home. Some of my greatest life lessons have taken place right there, in my mother’s tiny garden. Under her guidance, I’ve learned how a strong support at the roots helps a plant grow tall, how the most nourished soil yields the fleshiest rewards, and how lingering patience of this sort is the virtue of growth. I believe it isn’t just about planting some herbs, or cooking dinner for one in the kitchen—it’s about self-sufficiency, about healing community, about nourishment and finding our strength. When the inequalities and uncertainty begin to consume us, we in turn, look closely at what we consume. We cultivate more networks to provide food, and offer care and shelter. We sow the seeds of dissent in our gardens, and strengthen solidarity in our kitchens.

RHYTHM RASTOGI '22 wants to let everyone know In Palestine, a precious library contains the agri- that her tomato plant just bore fruit! cultural heritage of the country’s most prized crops: a

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During the Decembers of my childhood, I visited my grandparents in their Floridian refuge, where my family played shuffleboard and ate tuna salad. Almost every day, we would walk out the gate of their complex down a path of sandy wooden planks, hot against our bare feet, and plant ourselves on the beach. My grandparents would sit far from the water in that driest part of the sand that is loose and strenuous to walk upon.

Alongside my mom, dad, and brother, I ventured toward the water to swim and search for treasures. My grandma wore a white visor over her swoosh of dyed brown hair and my grandfather tied a sweater around his shoulders, regardless of the heat. Seated in fold-out chairs, they watched our family set out and the tide come in.

My mom and I would walk along the shoreline for hours, our progress slow as we stopped often to examine the seashells sprinkled at our feet. We admired conches and murexes, their segments gently growing with each turn of the spiral. I stuck my fingers inside the opening and reached around the curl, imagining I could touch the source. The scallops wooed me too; their geometric base and curved ridges both dainty and ferocious. In the sea of variety, I remember the thrill of those particularly immaculate shells: a caramel fighting conch the size of my palm, a tiny cerithium smaller than my thumb whose narrow cone wrapped in twelve repetitions. The rings along the tip drew me near, so minuscule I wondered if they might continue for an eternity beyond the scope of human sight. +++ In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard weaves through the musings of a number of French writers, artists, and natural philosophers, on a quest to understand shells, their way of being, and what they mean to us. He begins with a reading of the poet Paul Valéry’s work on shells, which examines the puzzle of form and its relationship formation: the shape of a thing, and how that shape is created. For Valéry, “a shell stands out from the usual disorder that characterizes most perceptible things. They are privileged forms that are intelligible for the eye, even though more mysterious for the mind, than all the others we see indistinctly.”

Bachelard identifies Valéry’s fascination as spawning from formation rather than form. By Valéry’s logic, a completed shell, even one whose repetitions gesture at infinity, is comprehensible. Its arrival from nothingness is the mystery. Bachelard calls Valéry’s thinking Cartesian, believing in the separation of self from body and environment. His appraisal of the shell requires a dissociation from the mollusk inside.

While I knew that shells housed animals, at seven, I had trouble conceptualizing these vessels’ relationship to anything alive. I imagined shells as treasures spit out by the sea, in which tiny slime beings would grow within until they dried out and left the smooth artifacts behind. I never imagined that mollusks built their own homes, neglecting that these were bones worn on the body’s surface. The tendency to divorce the pleasing mathematical structures of the world from individual creatures clutched me at an early age.

My school teachers presented nature’s forms as holy, abstract entities, part of a singular nature harnessed and accredited in equations and phylogenies. Animals

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Maxime Alexandre, La peau et les os We know perfectly well that to inhabit a shell we must be alone.

Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace

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My shadow forms a resonant shell And the poet listens to his past In the shell of his body’s shadow

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BY Mariel Solomon ILLUSTRATION Sylvia Atwood DESIGN Daniel Navratil

and their emotive potential are a mess whose wildness warrants fear. I considered shells most beautiful when they had dried out enough to erase any trace that they were ever a home. Like memories, they aged away from embodiment into immaculacy.

Still, in my shell gathering ventures, my obsession with particularly intricate specimens reached beyond admiration to a kind of worship. When I discovered one of these treasures, I became completely consumed; the wondrous architecture fused with my being. Like a missionary eager to spread my amazement, I showed every family member who would look. Hermit crabs are often configured in nature as scavengers, squatters in abandoned houses, but their adoption of lost shells is not unlike the way I would burrow myself in the beauty of what I held.

Whether a shell is to be considered a mollusk’s house, its body, or its skeleton is a question of perspective. Regardless of this label, a shell protects the mollusk and supports its survival. In observing Valéry’s struggle to reconcile the vital purpose of the shell with its formal excellence, one wonders why the two must be mutually exclusive. Concluding his analysis of Valéry, Bachelard discusses the illustrations made to accompany Les coquillages chapter of Valéry’s anthology Les merveilles de la mer. Paul A. Robert calculated the valves of his brushes and the relationships between pigments before he began to paint. His hands pursue the image with utmost intention and care, an expression of Valéry’s formal ideal rather than the mollusk’s own means of production, exuding its shell with both necessity and indifference. In the book, Bachelard remarks, “The house turns out to be so beautiful, so deeply beautiful, that it would be a sacrilege even to dream of living in it.”

What is so unfathomable about beauty as a shelter?

Humans seek this comfort all of the time. My grandparents’ annual migration south to vistas and warm air for half of the year was a pilgrimage for sensory pleasure, a reach for its blanket of ease. To live in a beautiful place is to know that the morning will bring wonder and appreciation, reveling in a landscape that draws you into its details and depths. +++ Shelled creatures, both in and out of the sea, fall within the phylum mollusca, which spans a variety including bivalves, shipworms, and squid. Their unifying trait is the mantle: a unique dorsal epithelium, or outer tissue layer, that secretes calcium carbonate, the shell. The chemical bonds that comprise calcium carbonate form a crystal that does not dissolve in water and so, keeps the form floating in the sea. In shells, soft biological matter seeps into the crystals and exerts pressure, causing the material to compress. This strain makes the structure extremely difficult to disrupt, yielding fossils that outlast their makers by thousands of years. When shells eventually deteriorate, remnants settle on the seafloor where they collect and compress into limestone and marble. In tandem with decomposition reactions and gravity, mollusks build the ground we stand upon and the surfaces we treasure.

During the time I spent grazing the Gulf ’s periphery, my dad and brother used to journey into the water to search for sandbars. Hours would pass before their specks of silhouette reemerged and grew, nearing

return. Over our blanket they laid out heaps of sand dollars, heavy with life. Invoked in the species name, they presented their bounty as riches, a successful harvest. Too small to stay afloat on these expeditions, I envied their access to the store of perfect individuals, who, once dried out and dead, became a garden of pristine, chipless flowers. Though not technically mollusks, sand dollars blurred into the tessellation of calcareous structures surrounding my sunken feet. White, stiff, and smooth, I supposed their visceral mass was equivalent to the conches, only even more reclusive as they lacked an obvious door to the outside world. The sand dollars I found washed ashore always had broken edges and cracks through their central pentagram that left me yearning.

Shell collecting is believed to date back thousands of years in multiple parts of the world. Shells have been recovered in the ruins of ancient Pompeii and in a crypt in a Mayan pyramid in Yucatán, suggesting ancient collections. The hobby as it exists today, equivalent to the collection of coins or stamps, emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries in England at the peak of the Pacific and Asiatic trade. As exploration revealed the islands of Asia to Europe, they began importing shells first as curiosities and later for collection by the rich.

During the 1850s and 60s, shell auctions were relatively common, with particularly remarkable or perfect shells drawing high prices from bidders. The value placed on such specimens inspired a surge of expeditions hunting them. Thus, the shells became less rare and coveted, spurring a decline in the hobby’s popularity. Shells bring out the human’s insatiable desire to possess what is special, which often manifests in the pursuit of other people and lands.

Aside from a few memorable corinthians, the majority of the shells I waded through as a child were repetitions of the usual Floridian array. Of the common types I catalogued, my favorite were the jingle shells, brittle and dainty. Under the right angle of sunlight, they flashed golden beams that dazzled my young eyes.

Separate from the splendor of their intricate geometries, the instantaneous quality of the jingle’s gleam evoked a magic I recognized and knew not to question.

I gathered as many as I could, as if to reunite these fragments of charm into collective power. To amass them had little to do with possession but rather became a type of devotion.

My mother was fond of the jingles, too. After we plucked as many as possible from the sand, she would hold the golden, translucent rounds up to my crusty curls of hair, a similar shade at that age. She always lamented how it would fade to brown as hers had in time. The urge to possess a shell is distinct from the thought of making a home in one. Possession is about control; it limits the active ability of what is being possessed. A home can be bought or acquired, but it possesses its inhabitant just as much. The walls impose limitations unlike objects clutched in a hand. A home full with family and food brings nourishment, and an empty one loneliness, or perhaps a sign of detachment from place.

Over years of visits, my family accumulated hundreds of shells, perhaps robbing a small limestone mountain from some site on the seafloor. I remember the piles of specimens left out on my grandparents’ balcony year after year, crusty homes abandoned first

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by their inhabitants, and then again by their collectors.

I imagine my grandpa tossed them in the trash after our departure. In the confinement of the human home, nature’s fragments eventually expire into reeking cadavers. +++ Last October, I visited Truro, a town in Cape Cod where my dad’s brother has a summer house. Two friends and I took a walk along the beach, which was barren at the gray time of year when tourism trickles out.

We passed by a few stragglers, an elderly couple, and a pair of men in baseball caps. Eventually, we noticed a cluster of three people ahead of us, standing still. As we neared the group, it became evident that they had stopped for a reason; a gray mass lay at their feet. From afar, we could not tell what it was they were looking at.

Standing beside them, our curiosity deepened.

The dark mass spread out vast before us, a lily pad the size of a large coffee table. Just past the center point on each side spanned a slender, long fin—white and pointed at the tips, perpendicular to the abdomen. On its backside, three broad scallops remained, descending into the sand. The whole thing lay almost flat against the beach, reaching mid-shin height at its peak near the front. There, two ridges emerged on the surface, their crests dusted white, one extending all the way to the edge where it culminated in a rounded nose. The other led to a pale pink ring surrounding the wet cavity of a mouth. Between them, rested a smaller, rounder fin, which lay flat, and in the direction of the mouth, a raised eye covered by a quahog shell. I lifted the shell, a disproportionately sized shroud, and revealed a dark hollow, shadowy yet glistening with clear jelly along the bottom. A few flies floated inside.

I crouched down beside the corpse, bringing my face close to its mouth. Who are you? Before any of us could ask, one of the three walkers exclaimed, “It’s a sunfish. They’ve been finding them washed up all

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around these parts. No one knows why.” With certitude in his tone, the man made himself out to be a local. He seemed somewhat concerned with these exhibitions of death, spit out by the rising sea onto the fragile cape, but before I said anything else, he walked away.

My friends and I stayed with the creature for a while, walking its perimeter and inhaling its stench of dank sulfur. Of the three of us, I got closest, testing the textures of its skin on mine, peering into its orifices. In their darkness, I sunk into the wonder of my childhood shells; what had it been like to be in this body? I thought of the indifferent waves that had delivered the animal here. I was of course curious how it had died, but the question did not linger. My friend, on the other hand, spoke waveringly, “Why are the fish dying? It’s so sad.”

Her sorrow carried a current of unrest that resounded further than the fish’s body and our own.

Beached remains of unfamiliar creatures have precipitated human horror and awe for thousands of years at least. In the 16th and 17th centuries, a number of engravings depicting beached whales and their encounters with humans were produced by Dutch artists. Among the most famous is a rendering by the artist Jan Saenredam of a whale at Beverwijk, held in the collection at the New Bedford Whaling museum, not far from where I encountered the sunfish. The engraving shows the immense body lying on its side and a crowd of people gathered around, using various techniques to attempt to understand it. Lilliputian townsmen scale the creature with hobnails and knees; others operate a tube to extract its blubber and spermaceti, the thick substance particular to sperm whales, for later use in oil-based products. The artist even includes himself at the bottom left, finishing off a sketch, which can be inferred to be an early version of the engraving.

The artist includes a depiction of a plague that struck shortly after the whale’s appearance, suggesting the whale as a portent, a common apprehension in the early modern Netherlands. Inscribed at the bottom left are the words, “Voracious Time shall never rob memory of

this wondrous omen; it is being safely entrusted to the eternal almanacs.” +++ I have not been back to Florida in five years. My grandmother’s muscular dystrophy progressed to a fatal condition by the time I was thirteen. My grandfather now lives in Boston year round, in a clean white room at a nursing home where family photos loop on a digital picture frame. The flashing of my face at every age spirals toward some kind of eternity, but when I visit, he can never remember our last meeting.

Each moment is singular and groping at some fossil of context.

When we speak, I hear echoed back only a shell of the man I’ve known, and yet when the day comes, he will leave behind no artifact for me to hold on to. I see his skin sinking deeper by the day, his bones peeking white out his thin ankles. A body that has always been old to me still decays, exhibits what it is made of. The shells taught me the way beauty contains death, and I want so badly to believe that the reverse might be true.

Certainly, the cycling of our species has the capacity to mesmerize. Still, I know that day will be only devastating for my mother, her sisters, and my brother, who inherited grandpa’s face. In his wake, we will be the ones to form shells, secreting tears necessary for our survival, and carving, with our finest hands, his memory in a most exquisite shape.

MARIEL SOLOMON B’21 sells seashells by the seashore.

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JUSTICE AS SEEN ON TV Searching for peace in murder media

BY Anonymous ILLUSTRATION Hannah Park DESIGN Audrey Therese Cabrera Buhain

content warning: discussions of assault, police violence, The victim has justice when the perpetrator is suffimentions of rape, mentions and depictions of murder ciently invisible. Ironically, the protagonist must create more violence in his search for peace. Idris Elba’s title character in Luther embodies this contradiction. In My senior year of high school, I listened to My Favorite one scene, Luther goes so far as to punch someone to Murder every night on my drive home. Each week collect his DNA evidence. The YouTube comments on the podcast, hosts Georgia and Karen would tell section for this clip reports widespread approval. two gruesome stories in hoarse valley girl accents. One commenter writes, “This had to be the creepiest Horror paired well with my already jittery drives home villain from all three series” and another expressed through the skeletal woods that separated my house their flat-out support, “Gets the job done, my kinda from school. When I arrived, I’d stop the car, turn on cop.” BBC Studios titled the clip “Outrageous DNA my phone flashlight, and sprint the few yards from the Gathering Technique.” The video description reads, driveway to my house with my key at the ready. I was “Now it is a race against time to stop Burgess once petrified, and I loved it. I soaked up the little details of and for all. Even if it means collecting a DNA sample each modus operandi, Googled open cases for updates, without his consent.” Here, assault by a police officer I even joined the MFM Facebook group to see women accelerates the path to justice. Each abuse of power is tell us their ‘hometown’ murder stories. This fascina- simply buying back time from the laws that limit it. The tion began to dominate my viewing habits as well; I protagonist may be imperfect, emotionally unavailable, devoured episodes of Sherlock, seasons of Broadchurch, and vaguely violent, but he shirks bureaucracy and and hours of Hannibal. Unlike my twin brother, whose authority to deliver the petrified viewer peace of mind. self-described “appreciation for the grotesque” kept At the end of every manhunt, this vigilante cop delivers him hooked on a case, I had no interest in why these the suspect to the court to be proven as guilty as he was men killed. Their violence seemed obvious and inevi- assumed. table, but it made sick sense to me. I am afraid often; I needed the shows I watched to provide a solutrue crime shows reminded me that I had good reason tion. The chaos of the vigilante cop destabilized the to be. rational sequence of events that I craved. I began to see I was initiated into the study of violence with a slap the violence I was facing replicated and amplified to a to the face near the baseball field, at dusk. A bruise systemic level in the justice process depicted on screen. from my then-girlfriend and the turbulent six months My ex-girlfriend had disregarded my boundaries and that followed made me a survivor, an identifier I didn’t invaded my privacy. Cops would do the same with know how to claim. I was distant from myself and from both of us. The system was itself an abuser; involving it my immediate reality, so I turned to TV. Detective would only exacerbate the problem. Each time I imagshows gave me a simplified world to place my own ined police intervention, the number of people hurt story in. The victims, who often only appeared in the expanded rapidly, with me at the epicenter. I knew I opening crime scene vignettes, didn’t have to explain would be subjected to interrogation; I barely believed themselves. Their bodies were proof enough. The evil my own bruises, and I didn’t have any faith in my ability that hurt them was unimaginable and grand but encap- to convince someone else. Juries required objective fact sulated in one man who could be caught and contained. where there was none; they were tasked with untanI desperately wanted someone to show up and solve my gling the guilty and the innocent from our twisted web case. of blame. The clean endings promised by TV seduced In April of my junior year, a friend noticed a mark me, but unequivocal, uncomplicated adjuration would on my arm. I stared at the poster of the fifth declen- leave me exposed and unsatisfied. On TV, I loved the sion that was sticky-tacked to the wall of the Latin rationality of it all, the way everything fit into its neat classroom until my eyes dried. He asked me what I little evidence bag. I wanted to see a detective pick wanted him to do, and I told him that I wished it would apart a killer’s crime and dismember a crime scene all just go away. True as those words were, they never like Bundy did his victims. I liked the hunt and drooled represented a legitimate solution. The out of sight, out at the way each puzzle piece fell into place. I liked the of mind approach of the detective shows I watched bodies, strewn across each other, evidence of their fulfilled this impossible wish. Each show begins with own victimhood. In real life, there would be no outline a crime (or a string of similar ones) which upends a of my body on the pavement or grieving family to beg community: a family is left grieving, a city is thrown the town to honor my memory. There was no rape kit into chaos, a sleepy country town is forced to grapple or sperm sample or blood spattered on the plaster wall. with death for the first time. One event throws a Juries would pick my living body apart and make my community into instability. The protagonist––the cop–– flesh a contested argument. The ziplocked answers I solves the crime and eliminates the source of disquiet. saw on TV promised me nothing but a reminder of my Violence is compartmentalized, dealt with, and put own untrustworthiness. away. Incarceration mirrors this erasure. In her article The dissection of my body didn’t feel worth it “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial when considering the end result. One option was innoComplex,” Angela Davis describes how prisons simply cent, which would end the justice ordeal but not my remove a person from view instead of addressing the abuse. The other option was guilty, which might end root of the issue. The isolation of the suspect approx- my abuse but not our pain. I was not under the illuimates justice as the TV villain disappears: a grieving sion that punishment would rehabilitate; I knew that mother feels closure and kids resume walking to school any consequence would hurt her more. We’d both be through a tranquil village. outed, something that guaranteed more violence for

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both of us. She was no textbook villain; she was a child (but old enough to be tried as an adult) with a mother to miss her and brothers she helped raise, a community that needed her, and a survival story of her own.

Punishment promised horror for her and an unfillable absence for those who loved her. I didn’t want revenge. I only wanted safety for myself and for her partners after me. On screen, I saw a doomed and reassuring finality for the victims and their killers. In front of me, any ‘resolution’ promised only more questions. Immutable justice loomed, waiting to apply its one-size-fits-all approach to each body involved. This specter of justice haunted me more than Hannibal Lector’s cannibalistic four course feasts.

I recently listened to an episode of My Favorite Murder for the first time in a few years. Karen presented a closed case, and she made sure the audience knew what a great job the detective team did. Georgia emphasized how she hopes the suspect goes to jail for a very long time and that the family gets the “justice they deserve.” But, justice doesn’t promise a happy ending; in the sleepy little town, things just keep getting worse.

The detective is haunted by what he’s seen, his wife and teenage daughter leave him, and the townspeople start locking their doors at night. Although it isn’t shown, there is more harm in store for the now-incarcerated suspect. The anticipated second season promises another crime and a new grieving mother. I want the cycle to end at season one.

Finding transformative justice (TJ) made resolution seem closer than ever before. TJ is an abolitionist practice separate from the state that focuses on repairing and strengthening a community instead of punishing a perpetrator. I was introduced to it my freshman year of college when I began to talk about my experience as a survivor. On her blog Leaving Evidence, Mia Mingus writes, “At its most basic, [transformative justice] seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence. TJ can be thought of as a way of making things right, getting in right relation, or creating justice together.” This framework, created and practiced for generations by Indigenous and Black communities, centers the needs of the survivor and the community. Practicing transformative justice turns harm from a destructive force into an impetus for change.

One of my friends sent me a link to a blog called Transforming Harm. Each post described a step in an ongoing community accountability process. The survivor, Kyra, wrote, “While I don’t think ‘forgiveness’ is the word to describe what I feel because I personally don’t believe forgiveness is something that can or necessarily should be given to abusers, I no longer feel the intense hatred for Malcolm that I used to.” That quote resonated with me more than any of the shows I had long relied on. Kyra’s pain didn’t disappear, and it didn’t have to. Instead of a solution, the blog depicted an honest conversation that adhered to the boundaries Kyra set. Transformative justice doesn’t follow a formula like procedurals do. Each process is tailored to the needs of the survivor and their community. This uncertainty is terrifying and liberating, but it holds more potential for true resolution than any verdict. I

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knew my feelings would take years to heal. With transformative justice, my ex-girlfriend could sit across from me and acknowledge them. It would be messy and complicated, but it’s a path that could lead to real change. Although it hasn’t happened yet, the possibility has given me some solace. In the abolitionist journal In the Belly, I.J. writes, “[Abolitionists are] not promising a world without harm. People hurt each other, and that won’t change. But why do we all just accept that the appropriate response to harm is more harm, administered by the state?” The violence I once saw as inevitable, even comforting, feels less permanent in a process separate from the system I’d seen on TV. Since freshman year, murder media has become less of a staple in my Netflix rotation. I tried to watch Young Wallander last month and the blatant bootlicking made me click ‘Exit’ midway through episode two.

But something about true crime still has a hold on me.

The trailer for American Murder: The Family Next Door began playing at full volume when I opened Netflix last night. It startled me; my heart started beating and my palms grew sweaty. I felt my throat constrict a little.

Maybe my nervous system is addicted to adrenaline.

Maybe I, too, have an “appreciation for the grotesque.”

The movies no longer make me feel better. This one will leave me unsettled and unsatisfied. I’ll probably still watch it.

ANONYMOUS B’22 is no longer dreaming of a closed case.

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Shaking up the State House An interview with State Senate Candidate Tiara Mack

BY Sara Van Horn ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Isaac McKenna

On September 8, Tiara Mack won her Democratic primary race for Rhode Island State Senate, beating long-time incumbent Harold Metts with more than 59 percent of the vote. Raised in the South and educated at Brown University, Tiara is currently an educator and youth organizer at Planned Parenthood and a board member of the Women’s Health and Education Fund.

The significance of her primary victory against Metts, an anti-choice candidate with more than 14 years in office, cannot be overstated. In addition to reflecting a widespread desire to elect champions of reproductive justice—as over 70 percent of Rhode Islanders support pro-choice law—Tiara’s victory also signals a growing discomfort with the conservative Democratic establishment, many of whom are known colloquially as DINOs (Democrats In Name Only).

Tiara is a member of the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, an organization that collectively ran a slate of progressive candidates to mount primary challenges against some of the most conservative Democrats in the state. Tiara, running on a platform of affordable housing, $15 minimum wage, and a Green New Deal, is part of a powerful Progressive movement that brought an unprecedented and earthshaking challenge to Rhode Island’s political establishment last

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month.

On the patio of Seven Stars Bakery on Hope Street, the College Hill Independent sat down with Tiara to talk about why she believes she won, what she has learned about political organizing, and what needs to change within the walls of the Rhode Island State House. +++ The College Hill Independent: Can you talk about how you got into politics and what motivated you to run for State Senate?

Tiara Mack: I did a political internship through Planned Parenthood the summer after my sophomore year [at Brown University]. That was my first foray into Rhode Island politics. I was under the illusion that I was in the liberal North, that this was a blue state, everyone's like blue, blue, blue. Then, during that legislative session, I realized that the politicians who were in power in our state did not reflect the ideals of the conversations around me. That was when I was introduced to the term DINO: Democrats In Name Only.

And that was when I really got involved.

The Indy: Do you remember a specific moment or experience that really motivated you to run and solidified your resolve?

TM: Oh, one hundred percent. It was basically the entirety of the RPA [Reproductive Privacy Act]. I've been an abortion funder in Rhode Island since 2015, working with the Women's Health and Education Fund as a volunteer. After graduating, I stayed a volunteer and became a board member in 2016. That translated into going to the State House and fighting for safe legal abortion to be codified into Rhode Island law. I testified several times in the Judiciary Committee and Health and Human Services. I went to the State House Tuesday through Thursday for weeks and weeks, months and months. And I had an elected official [Harold Metts] who heard those testimonies of hundreds of people—doctors, lawyers, committee members, folks who had had abortions, folks who are supportive of a person's right to choose—and literally his line was something like, “I would rather have faith in God than in man.” And that was where I realized: this is not someone who is reflective of my ideals. I had an anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ rights incumbent as my [State] Senator, who had been there for, at the time, ten

09 OCT 2020

"I’m trying to bring fantasy novels to life through policy.

It's such an escape, and it shouldn't have to be. It should be reality." years, but now 14 years, and I realized someone had to was infringed upon because of a very harmful voter take him on.

ID law that exists only in states like Texas and South Carolina and…Rhode Island?

The Indy: Relatedly, can you talk about the organizing work you’ve done around reproductive justice and how The Indy: You’ve talked before about the inaccessithat’s shaped you and what you intend to do in office? bility and lack of representation in Rhode Island politics. What would you like to see changed not only about TM: I grew up in the conservative, Christian south. who represents Rhode Islanders at the State House, but In the sixth grade, I signed an abstinence pledge and also how conversations are conducted and how policy that was my only sex education. An abstinence pledge decisions are made? where I wrote down that the people who would keep me to my abstinence pledge are my mom, my future TM: I live eight minutes away from the State House; boyfriend, and my friends—some 11-year-old bullshit I can literally drive my car there in eight minutes. I like that. Going to Brown, on top of being Black and could ride my bike there in 11. I can walk there in 25 to low-income and not having any tools to talk about my 30. It is so fricking close and there are so many Rhode own body, about race-class narratives, about wealth Islanders who are afraid to step into that building. That narratives, I just felt like a fish out of water. And so that giant, white building with all those quote-unquote really inspired me to start teaching sex ed, because ‘fancy people’ who look nothing like me and who know if I had these feelings as a low-income, Black student nothing about my story and [yet] who make laws about going to this institution with no idea how to talk about our communities. That is scary for some people. So my own body, about my own autonomy, about sex— demystifying that building: there's gonna be a queer, which everyone seems to be able to talk about freely Black woman with, like, six tattoos up in there so come and I felt so uncomfortable about —then there must on down! I think that's one of the powerful things. be other young people who didn't have comprehensive, culturally specific, sexual health education. It was The Indy: Your platform includes support of the really exciting. It was a really awesome way to learn Green New Deal, which aims to stop climate change how to advocate for something that I never had. and create millions of good jobs. Can you talk about the urgency and necessity of the Green New Deal and The Indy: As you were knocking on doors, what were how you intend to make that happen? some of the issues and concerns that you were hearing from folks that Senator Metts had not been addressing? TM: The Green New Deal is a way that we're going to address the housing crisis. It’s a way that we're going TM: Well, one: he had never knocked doors. He was to address the economic crisis. It's a way that we're running on his longtime name in the community and going to create a livable future for all of our future so never really felt the need to knock on folks’ doors. generations. We are creating climate refugees in our And the fact that I could do so in English and Spanish, I own country. Californians are having to make the decithink that was the biggest thing. And folks were really sion of whether or not to restart their life in California upset with his lack of progress in socially progressive or pick up and move to somewhere else that is going to ideas. Even after marriage equality had been passed in be livable for maybe another decade. We see it right 2015, [he’s someone that] still did not vote for solemni- here in Rhode Island. Our coastline is shrinking every zation of marriage licenses in Rhode Island. Someone single year. Soon, we're going to have Warwick underwho's very anti-choice, who’s put Bible quotes on State water. We're the Ocean State and we're going to literHouse stationary, someone who introduced the really ally be consumed by the ocean in a matter of decades. harmful voter ID laws. That was one of the things that We have a robust labor force right here in Rhode Island folks said was the final straw. Most people were like: that we're not using because we're not building clean “Oh, he's a product of his time. Homophobia? cool. Not and green energy. We can create green new jobs and everyone’s pro-choice. But voter ID laws in Rhode sustain those jobs over the next decade by creating Island? Fuck that, dude.” schools, housing, rail lines, bus lines, roads that are all better equipped to make sure that people can travel to The Indy: Do you know why that issue was so and from where they need to go in green ways. important?

The Indy: There’s been a resounding call to defund TM: Well, voter ID laws impact so many people in our and abolish the police both in cities across the country state. Imagine all the people who don't have access to and here in Providence. Why do you think this is a driver's license, low-income folks who rely on public important and how do you think we get there? transportation to get to and from work. They don't have a driver's license—they have no need for a driv- TM: I believe that defunding is a tool that we are going er's license—and now their right to vote has been taken to use to abolish the police system. We see that there away. We have an aging population, especially on the are so many social programs that are significantly East Side, Mount Hope area, folks who've been in this underfunded. Most folks who are arrested are very community for years and who walk to the grocery store poor and put into our legal and criminal system. It's or take public transportation and never had a reason to not because they are bad people; it’s because they do get a driver's license. All of a sudden, their right to vote not have access to the resources they need to survive.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Most crime happens not because people are willfully committing crimes; it’s because they literally have no other option. So we invest in a livable wage. Families that have a livable wage are less likely to commit crime.

Families that have access to better education, that have access to after school programs and recreation for our young people, are less likely to get in trouble with the law.

We also have communities that are overly criminalized based on their zip code, their race, their class, and that is extremely wrong. [We need to do] things like legalizing marijuana and expunging the records of all the folks who are in the criminal justice system with marijuana charges. Things like legalizing sex work and making sure that we are medicalizing and not criminalizing addiction in our communities because it is a public health crisis and not a criminal justice crisis. We are funneling people into the criminal justice system with no way to rehabilitate. Prison recidivism is at its highest in our country because we are not working on social programs. We’re overfunding our police departments and underfunding all the ways in which we can actually eliminate the ways in which people are entering that system in the first place. Plus, why are we putting more money into the police during a global pandemic and not putting more money into our schools or our healthcare or into workers pockets and hazard pay?

The Indy: Who are your role models right now?

TM: I'm going to make this about fantasy novels because that's what I do. Seeing afrofuturism has been really powerful. Seeing worlds that are created with Black characters, characters free from the gender binary, and seeing futurescapes where there is equity and equality. Even something as simple as Star Wars, seeing them overcome those evil senators through a saga— The Indy: Is that what your campaign feels like?

TM: [Laughter] Yeah. I’m trying to bring fantasy novels to life through policy, making the world that we see in books. It's such an escape, and it shouldn't have to be an escape. It should be reality. We should be able to read those stories and say, “It's not weird that we have social equity. It's not weird that no one blinks an eye when this character comes out as trans or when they're gender nonbinary, or when you don't have to refer to someone as their race and we are all equal.

[It’s not weird that] the environment is actually cared about in the future and [that] we're not destroying our planet systematically [or] seeking to escape to another planet.” Because this one's on fire.

This interview was co-published with UpriseRI and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

SARA VAN HORN B’21 only reads fantasy novels and her local weekly paper.

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These community health centers accept all insurance and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance.

Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls 722-0081 Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & North Providence - 351-2750 Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 These clinics provide free and/or low-cost health services: Clínica Esperanze, Providence - 347-9093 Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347

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If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit https://health.ri.gov/covid/testing/.

Para más asistencia en español, llama a la línea de apoyo de AMOR: 401-675-1414.

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Sign-up to phonebank for the Green New Deal through Sunrise RI: https://bit.ly/2EKZVhF

Ongoing: Drive-thru Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular at Roger Williams Park Zoo. Surround yourself with a sea of intricately carved pumpkins from the socially distant vantage point of your car. Trail open every night 6:30 to 11pm through the end of the month.

Ongoing: The Sunrise Movement is offering online courses on defunding the police and more. Sign-up here: https://bit.ly/2C1T0jb

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Sunday, October 11: PVD Flea Market from 10am to 2pm across from 345 South Water St. There will be artisans, vendors, live music, and food trucks. Mask required for entry.

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PRONK! 2020 opens with the Blackout Festival (Friday, October 9 from 3 to 6pm), a youth-led performance-based protest in support of defunding the police and funding anti-racist arts organizations in Providence. Catch the Climate Justice Celebration on Saturday 10/10 from 12-2pm, featuring Providence EJ community org Movement Education Outdoors and tunes from the Clam Jam Brass Band.

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Friday, October 9 / Saturday, October 10: PRONK! 2020! The 13th annual Providence Honk Festival will be taking place this weekend at 97 Admiral Street. This year’s PRONK! will be taking place at reduced capacity but promises to uphold the legacy of beloved PRONK!s of past, featuring socially-distant collaborations between BIPOC artists, activists, and community organizations doing anti-racist work in the city.

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Designed by Mehek Vohra

Healthcare Reso urc

This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to coronavirus relief and mobilize for racial justice, in addition to our traditional event listings.

AMOR COVID-19 Community Support Fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit https://tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer.

FANG Collective Community Bail Fund.

As jails and prisons continue to become coronavirus hotspots, they present extremely unsafe conditions for those inside, many of whom are held because they can’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Corrections and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective: https://gofundme.come/f/fang-bailfund Project LETS Mutual Aid Fund. Project LETS is working in coalition with grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to provide direct financial assistance to the most marginalized and vulnerable in our community. Donate here: https://projectlets.org/covid19