The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 2 - VALENTINE'S DAY SPECIAL

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 2 12 FEB 2021

VALENTINE’S DAY SPECIAL ISSUE

THIS ISSUE COVER

Untitled Marlowe Pody Week in High Culture Alisa Caira and Lucien Turczan-Lipets What is Love— Baby Don’t Hurt Me Isabelle Yang

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS PRINTED BY TCI PRESS IN SEEKONK, MASSACHUSETTS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

TWITTER @THEINDY_TWEETS

INSTAGRAM @THEINDYPVD

Lie With Me Nell Salzman

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Dead Bird, I Love You Rachel Carlson Here and Now Dana Kurniawan My Valentine is a Missouri Homeownver Cole Triedman All of Our Stories Niyoshi Parekh Love Letters Camille Gros Thoughts on Radical Love Osayuwamen “Uwa” Ede-Osifo The Lens of Kenneth T. Mars Alina Kulman

02 WEEK IN REVIEW 03 FEATS

STAFF WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman

05 ARTS 07 LIT

09 S & T 11

X

12 EPHEMERA 13 NEWS

METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston LITERARY Audrey Buhain Alisa Caira FEATS Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger Emily Rust DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel

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METRO

SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

FROM THE EDITORS HOW TO FIND LOVE THIS VALENTINE’S DAY We know that nothing beats the thrill of reaching out for a freshly printed Indy at Starbucks on a snowy Friday afternoon and accidentally grazing the mittened hands of a masked stranger who— dare we suggest this—is just as much of an avid Indy reader as you are. We don’t want you to squander that opportunity to transform said stranger into ‘the one.’

Here is a collection of time-tested courtship tips compiled by Indy staff: 1. Swipe right if they write for the largest alt-weekly publication in Southern New England.

2. Or (better) ask out someone on Indy staff (if you haven’t already).

3. Wear socks on the first date.

4. Dress Indy. Left shoulder: Indy tote bag. Right shoulder: New Yorker tote bag.

5. Double mask, of course, but make sure you can reveal a lacy one below.

6. Exchange your favorite obscure theorists as an icebreaker while waiting for coffee.

7. Appear vulnerable (this is supposed to make people like you), but avoid actually opening up.

8. Do open up about your summer job quant trading on Wall Street—as a cog in the American neoliberal machine.

9. But post-date tag them on a Bernie mitten meme to show them your true political colors. #BernieBro 10. Before trading saliva, consult your housemates about proper COVID etiquette.

11. Kiss with too much tongue. Alternatively, kiss with your masks on.

12. Write an Indy article together.

13. If it backfires, make them cry at Crit(ique).

14. Not everything works out. Process your feelings in a thinly veiled Indy article about them. They are the editor.

Disclaimer: The Indy cannot be held liable if these tips get you ghosted on Valentine’s day. Submit your questions to Dear Indy at bit.ly/DearIndy if you want some actual advice.

— APA

BUSINESS Jerry Chen Evan Lincoln Isabelle Yang DESIGN EDITOR Ella Rosenblatt COVER COORDINATOR Sage Jennings DESIGNERS Malvika Agarwal Anna Brinkhuis Clara Epstein Miya Lohmeier Owen McCallumKeeler Issac McKenna Jieun (Michelle) Song Mehek Vohra Sojung (Erica) Yun ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Hannah Chang Ophelia DuchesneMalone Camille Gros Sophie Foulkes Baylor Fuller Mara Jovanovic Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Joshua Sun Evelyn Tan Joyce Tullis Floria Tsui Dorothy Zhang

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Osayuwamen EdeOsifo Tammuz Frankel CJ Gan Lucas Gelfond Leo Gordon Gaya Gupta Evie Hidysmith Rose Houglet Amelia Wyckoff Muram Ibrahim Nicole Kim Alina Kulman Olivia Mayeda Drake Rebman Issra Said Justin Scheer Ella Spungen COPY EDITORS Alyscia Batista Grace Berg Elaine Chen Megan Donohue Nina Fletcher Christine Huynh Madison Lease Jasmine Li MANAGING EDITORS Alana Baer Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer SENIOR EDITORS Audrey Buhain Andrew Rickert Ivy Scott Xing Xing Shou Cal Turner Sara Van Horn MVP Hannah Park

MISSION

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS A PROVIDENCE-BASED PUBLICATION WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, DESIGNED, AND EDITED BY STUDENTS FROM BROWN AND RISD. OUR PAPER IS DISTRIBUTED AROUND PROVIDENCE’S EAST SIDE AND DOWNTOWN, AS WELL AS ONLINE. IN ADDITION TO PUBLISHING 20 PAGES OF ORIGINAL WRITING, REPORTING, AND ART ONCE A WEEK, THE INDY FUNCTIONS AS AN OPEN WORKSHOP IN WHICH WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND DESIGNERS COLLABORATE AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON THEIR WORK. THROUGH AN EXTENSIVE EDITING PROCESS, WE CHALLENGE EACH OTHER TO BE RESPONSIBLE, INTENTIONAL, AND SELF-CRITICAL. 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.

High Week in Culture DRIVING (AND SCROLLING) THROUGH HEARTBREAK When the song “drivers license” became an internet sensation, I, as a good and serious College Hill Independent reporter, had to redownload TikTok. Looking back, I’m not quite sure how I started watching 30-minute Youtube compilations of TikToks explaining Disney actors’ love lives. Nor do I know why I cared whether Olivia Rodrigo, the singer behind the song, was wearing her ex’s jacket in the music video. But once I started to care, I couldn’t stop. Suddenly, all that mattered was a love triangle I had no involvement in and a song about heartbreak I never thought I would like.

Previously known for her role on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo released the song “drivers license” on January 8.

The lyrics depict Rodrigo sadly driving around her ex’s neighborhood after having obtained her license.

Only three days later, the song broke Spotify’s daily record with 15.7 million streams (!) and then again the next day with 17 million (!!).

So, what about this song made it so internet-breaking? Well, buckle-up Indy readers, because the story keeps driving forward. Fueled by emo-

tionally distraught TikTokers parodying the song and reflecting on their own romantic tribulations, “drivers license” gained traction as a TikTok sound.

Some users created alternate lyrics from the perspective of “that blonde girl who always made me doubt”, the ex, Rodrigo’s best friend and more. Others, meanwhile, used the lyrics as messages to their exes or as a backing track to videos of them crying.

Far from discussing the ludicrousness of addressing ex-related grievances through the public-facing medium of pop music, TikTok users collectively hopped aboard Rodrigo’s creation—the trope-filled universe where love is oddly uncomplicated. After all, that does seem like a quicker Valentine’s Day fix than unpacking the heartbreak of every TikTok user. That’ll be an Indy article for another week.

Off TikTok, the song gained recognition through thinly veiled shade targeted at Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s 20-year-old co-star in the show-withtoo-many-colons. Fans believe the two to be dating due to their very romantic nicknames for each other (‘Joshy’ and ‘Liv’) and chemistry as a couple on the spin-off-that-never-needed-to-exist. Currently, there’s no proof that they aren’t just, well…actors.

Even if they did find love off-screen, it seems we’re also going to ignore—as every news outlet has—the concerning reality that Bassett is 20 while Rodrigo just got her license.

Driving onward, fans took the song to, obviously, be about Bassett and wondered who exactly ‘that blonde girl’ might be. At this point, Sabrina Carpenter, 21 and blonde, enters from stage left as Bassett’s new girlfriend.

TEXT ALISA CAIRA DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT ILLUSTRATION BAYLOR FULLER

His frail teen heart throb ego at stake, Basset wasn’t able to handle being on the wrong side of the biggest song of the year. To retaliate, he released the song “Lie Lie Lie” which, you guessed it, accuses Rodrigo of lying.

Carpenter, too, couldn’t take being called “everything I’m insecure about” sitting down.

She released the most straightforward of the diss tracks—“Skin”—where despite singing, “you can’t get under my skin,” she seems to let Rodrigo crawl under hers. Hopefully, now that the trio has each released their own songs, we can workshop duets. Personally, I’m hoping Valentine’s Day brings another teen icon into the drama to form a modern day barbershop quartet.

Ultimately, “drivers license” might not astound the pretentious listener (I’m looking at you, Indy readership). Still, the song’s ability to capture the pain of heartbreak illustrates the power of first loves and the isolation of relationships in a digitally connected world. With love always a click away, modern technology removes mentoring figures (i.e. parents) from our love lives which means fewer awkward dinner table conversation, but also forces us back into our phones—or funny TikToks—when we do face heartbreak and loss. Today, TikTok ballads, Instagram gossip, and Twitter trends are how people hear their own heartbreaks echoed and overcome.

While it might not be ideal in the long term to reduce such trials of the heart into ‘Olivia Rodrigo,’ ‘ex,’ and ‘blonde girl,’ it is a start.

Now, for my Valentine’s Day gift to myself, I’ll be deleting TikTok, buying discounted chocolates, and, maybe, just maybe, listening to “drivers license” once or twice.

-AC

WHERE ARE YOU, NORMAL FRIENDS On January 12, acclaimed author Sally Rooney announced a new sure-to-be bestseller. According to the New York Times, Rooney’s eagerly awaited book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, “follows four young characters in Ireland as they navigate the pressures of work and relationships against the backdrop of political turmoil and fears about their economic futures.” The Irish, it seems, live in a society.

Readers will pick up on the resonances in this description with Rooney’s previous works, Normal People and Conversations With Friends, perhaps imagining that the characters will take a break from their busy and complicated lives in an Irish city—Dublin possibly—to visit an idyllic southern European bourgeois oasis, complete with a villa or a spacious apartment owned by the one of the more affluent characters. Here they might have a moment of bliss under the sun of warmer climes before realizing that their problems from Ireland have followed them to this enchanting new setting. Maybe Padriag wants to know if Niamh is alright. Maybe she’s been good, just work. They share a cigarette for the first time since Trinity. Padraig pushes his hair back. Seen anyone from home in Donegal, he asks. Not since term ended. An arousing shame surrounds him like a shroud. Niamh feels tired. Quotation marks, where are you.

TEXT LUCIEN TUCZAN-LIPETS DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT ILLUSTRATION BAYLOR FULLER

Fitting for such a well-anticipated book, fans took to the internet to express their excitement. One Facebook user tagged their friend in the New York Times post announcing the book and commented “can I just recommend this for you 9 months in advance without having read it yet.” But not all readers are so reverent of the author: one Times commenter cut to the heart of the issue with a terse [eggplant emoji], an allusion to the trepidation and passion at the core of her novels’ emotional and sexual relationships. One Rooney enthusiast expressed their reaction to the announcement, telling the Indy, “kind of reminds me of how i made rice yesterday and tonight i’m just adding parmesan and calling it risotto.” Certainly something to chew on for the obsessed Rooney reader.

Such bold assessments could be expected given the hype surrounding Rooney’s earlier novels; Normal People was met with such high regard that Hulu had it adapted into a show with 41 minutes of sex scenes. We, at the Indy, watched it only for the cinematic critique value. Moreover, the Hulu series was widely praised—as much for its fidelity to the novel as for its details. Connell’s chain necklace and Marianne’s bangs decidedly mark them as cosmopolitan, but approachable, extremely attractive yet somehow sensitive, unbelievably well-read, good at sex, and too Irishly humble for their own good. A rare balance

reserved for only the hot and smart.

Despite the ado surrounding this upcoming release, fans are still mulling over key questions: Which Househunters International Best European Homes landscape will we like more—the windswept Irish countryside, the Tuscan villa escape, or perhaps a more illustrious destination where class tensions can brew between bated breaths? Which passages will Hulu editors turn into porn? Beautiful world, where are you?

-LTL

WHAT IS LOVE—

BABY DON’T HURT ME

TEXT ISABELLE YANG DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION RACHELLE SHAO

FEATURES

A conversation with New York Times Editor Daniel Jones

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There is not a love story Daniel Jones hasn’t read. For this special Valentine’s Day issue, the Indy sat down with the editor of the New York Times’ Modern Love column, where hundreds of love stories from readers all over the world have been published over the past two decades. The stories retrace memories of getting cabin fever with a stranger, giving Grindr another chance, marrying a sociopath, dating an Italian cook, coping with the five-stage process of being ghosted, or living with a Vodou priest. There is no set-in-stone list of traits that Jones looks for in a story—as long as it is genuine. What began as a two-person job offer from the Times for Jones and his wife Cathi Hanauer, evolved into Jones taking over after his wife decided to work on her novel. Years later, Jones still takes on the unique position of reading, editing, and selecting from an infinite pile of submissions in the efforts of expanding our comprehension of love.

His role doesn’t stop at reading submissions. Jones has gone on to publish the book Modern Love, start the column’s podcast, and manage its Amazon Prime series. On Valentine’s Day, he and his co-author Miya Lee are anticipating the release of their newest book, Tiny Love Stories. As we continue to live life inside the walls of our homes, the book hopes to remind us how human connection can be found in ways previously unimaginable.

When the pandemic first hit, the column made a deliberate effort to center essays related to COVID. People searched for ways to love and receive love as they experienced isolation. The desire to peek into the romantic lives of others was not uncommon. The column came as a respite: an opportunity for readers to participate in a collective feeling of longing, and a platform for writers to voice these emotions.

Jones video-called me in the middle of the day from his apartment in New York. He had a mug in his hand and his sleeves were rolled up. For the next hour, we go on to discuss his editing process, changing definition of love, and challenges in the publication.

IY: I’m curious about your journey. You edit for the New York Times but specifically for the Modern Love column.

What drew you towards this?

DJ: It began back in 2002. My wife and I were at that spot in early marriage where we just got kids, had work, and stayed busy. She thought the issues that rose with this stage of life were interesting since they were shared experiences. So she went on to write the book The Bitch in the House which became an instant best-seller. As a male response, I went on to write The Bastard on the Couch. Our story ultimately grabbed the attention of a New York Times editor from the Style section. He called me up saying, ‘Hey I want to propose something to you. How about working for a weekly column about relationships?’

That was the official start of it all. During the summer of ‘04, my wife and I began figuring out what this column would consist of because it didn’t exist before. It wasn’t long before we agreed that this was a one-person job. My wife wanted to work on her novel so I took over. At the time I thought, you know, these columns have shelf-lives that last a couple years. Believe it or not, we’re in our seventeenth year.

IY: A column may seem to have a temporary lifespan but

love always feels like a trending topic. It is human nature to be interested in love. This seems most reflected in how the column branched out to become a book, a podcast, and now a TV show. People can’t get enough of it. How has your work from an editor to a consulting producer evolved?

DJ: The entire process has been really energizing. I’m a bit of a skeptic so when the podcast was first proposed, I was like, “Well why would anyone want to listen to this?” As for the show, the main thing about television is that there are so many screenplays and to make it through that gauntlet is rare.

But both products have been kind of a dream. They change stories, as these things do. Even if it’s the same written story, the interpretation now falls into the hands of the story-teller. For a sound engineer, the emphasis of emotion is inevitably different than it is for a reader. Some of the episodes from the series are faithful to the essays while others were completely rethought.

This was fascinating to me. During the production, I helped shape what kind of narratives should be focused on. In some cases I’d make suggestions of what the meaning of the stories should be about. Working with so much talent has been a complete surprise.

IY: Cinematic experience doesn’t always parallel written

FEATURES

narrative.

DJ: Right. I don’t write screenplays so I was surprised by some of their choices the team made for the episodes. But when I see them in the film medium, suddenly what wouldn’t work on paper would capture the right emotions cinematically. It’s a whole different kind of confidence. One that has global impact. It’s mind blowing to think that people in Brazil, India, Spain, Italy are watching the series.

IY: I want to get back on the editing aspect of your work.

How do you play the role as an editor in a field that is so intimate and authentic?

DJ: Part of the work is fact-checking and shaping the story. Determining the credibility of the writer is crucial. Especially when some stories involve divorce, crime, sexual assault… There are essays that require more work but are necessary to share. It’s sort of an art I’ve figured out over the years. What I’ve gotten good at is being able to mold something quickly into something that works.

IY: I can imagine that your definition of love has evolved with the influx of stories you read, edit, and revise. What changed?

DJ: I’ve learned I’m kind of a coward compared to these people. I get moved by the lengths people go to and how brave they can be.

Not just those that suffer through romantic loss, but also those that have health problems and serious obstacles in their lives. They don’t consider themselves brave either, but reading about how they are able to surmount challenges makes me optimistic about people.

IY: Do you think people are pessimists or optimists about love?

DJ: Optimistic. It’s the optimism and hope that fuels life. These are drives that are baked into us—the need to connect and make a life with other people. That’s part of being a human being.

One of the saddest divergences that I see are people that withdraw. When you go through something painful, you can either withdraw or you can immediately go after that thing again. The people that withdraw go on to lead sad lives and people that don’t go on to lead fulfilling lives. It’s not simple, but it’s clear in these pieces when people are bitter. They push responsibility and love out of the equation. When you go down that path, it’s not a good path at all.

IY: With the amount of submissions that are received for the column, how does the selection process work? What gets approved, what gets placed in the slush pile?

DJ: You’re getting into the most difficult part of my job. The column used to be manageable in a way that is not anymore. My work was limited to reading through material and selecting the works. Now, that is about 30% of my job. The amount of material that comes in has more than doubled in recent years.

Now we have two reading periods throughout the year to help us get through all the submissions. I work closely with another person who could not be more opposite in terms of background.

She’s twenty-four years old and grew up in lower Manhattan. So it’s really valuable to have her recommending things since she offers a different perspective. That said, we have a shared aesthetic.

It’s reassuring how much in sync we are.

IY: You could easily make a non-fiction book with the most romantic stories people have encountered. But that’s not real life. Do you find yourself attempting to find some sort of equilibrium between extraordinarily happy endings and difficult ones?

DJ: I’m constantly thinking about keeping a variety of all kinds of things—tone, gender, race, age. All those things float around my head because you want to represent as many perspectives as you can.

The most stories we get, honestly, are about death. And cancer.

Those are things we need to get into the column, but we can’t have a column called ‘Modern Love’ with only death and cancer.

The value in pieces comes from different aspects. One that comes to mind is about a guy who happened to date girls who have dogs and when they’re in bed having sex, suddenly the woman’s dog would be in the bed. He had three or four encounters like that which were funny and true and light. In ways, this is as equally intimate and difficult to write as other pieces but brings in an effortless value.

I don’t find stories depressing if the person learns something.

That’s inspiring. It’s lack of self-awareness that’s depressing.

IY: What kind of advice or epiphany do you come across when reading these stories?

DJ: I like the idea of storytelling being the advice instead of a book of rules. In the episode with Tina Fey and John Slattery, the screenplay writing was based on a more subtle essay by Ann Leary who is married to Dennis Leary. It’s about long-term relationships, and she has a natural metaphor of a tennis game.

For years, they play competitively which ends up mirroring the struggles of their relationship: trying to win arguments, beat the other player in that sense. They need to extend the game. Tennis is more fun, for a married couple, to hit the ball where the other player can return it instead of trying to hit it out.

This was a lightbulb moment for me. The kindness and cooperation that exists in this metaphor. This wasn’t a written out statement, I mean, what do you do with a quote that reads ‘Be kind, be compassionate’? This felt organic.

In this country, there is a narrative publicized about finding the right person. That’s what you’re congratulated for. That’s what a wedding is for. But really, that’s just the beginning. It’s easy to get married and have people give you gifts. All the traditional romantic movies end at that point. It’s something we’ve internalized to the point of damage.

IY: And what is next for Daniel Jones?

DJ: We are releasing our new book Tiny Love Stories that will be out by Valentine’s Day. It includes 175 true stories that venture into a wide definition of love.

Times audio is also a big and growing portion of our journalism. We’re in the midst of figuring out how to push that forward.

While the essays will continue to be the centerfold of the episode, we want the podcast to have both consistency and unpredictability.

IY: Our Indy community will have to get a copy when it comes out. Until then, I’ll be adding your latest podcast episode to my list. Thank you so much Daniel for this conversation on the topic of love and much more. +++ There is a lot to think about when it comes to modern love. Daniel Jones gives us an editor’s perspective on it. But for many of us, romantic pursuits and experiences are left unwritten, silenced, cornered somewhere in memory. After my interview with Jones, I went back to the Times’ Modern Love column. I gravitated towards clicking on the essays that captured some sort of serendipitous romanticism—joining someone on a ship for the Antarctic or staying up with a Michelin-star chef—written works that couldn’t possibly be reflective of my own life. Perhaps many readers of the column share a similar pursuit, pinning down the articles that excite us rather than embody us. As critical as it is to have a wow-factor in the love stories that get chosen, it is equally significant to pay attention to the ones that shake us in subtler momentum, making us introspect on our own, quieter realities of love.

ISABELLE YANG B’22 hopes that you send your own submissions to Dear Indy, our very own Modern-Love-inspired column.

04

Lie With Me

TEXT NELL SALZMAN

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

ARTS

a little novel with a life of its own

05

After Philippe Besson finished his 2017 novel Lie With Me, he thought he would never be able to write again. This is understandable; the work is so climactic and personal. Somehow, he’s stuffed all of the volatile feelings associated with young love and heartbreak into 150 pages, weaving personal narrative, description, and reflection into somewhat of a fever dream. For any hopeless romantic, his words ring true. What stands out in Besson’s words are the humanity and essential truths they hold. Besson tells a story that everyone can relate to—a story of the magnitude of young love and the emptiness of inevitable, ensuing heartbreak.

Readers are never told that it’s an accurate retelling, though the parallels between Besson and the narrator’s life are uncanny. The main character, also named Philippe, has strikingly similar characteristics to Besson. And it’s set in the small French town of Barbezieux, based on the town that Besson grew up in—Barbezieux-Saint-Hilaire. Though Besson explicitly says that he only writes fiction, readers of Lie With Me must constantly ask themselves if what Besson writes about actually happened. The first-person narrative, told from Philippe’s perspective, skips back and forth through time, alternating between middle age reflection and a 17-year-old’s point of view. Is it autofiction? Playful memoir? Lie With Me intentionally brings out these questions to offer a third way to think about events of the past—not as accurate or inaccurate, but rather as dissected and re-examined.

Besson himself is a well-known and prolific French writer. At 54, he’s written almost twenty novels in eighteen years, several of which were adopted for film. Lie With Me, translated by actress and author Molly Ringwald in 2019 for American audiences, is currently being made into a film. Besson’s work isn’t excessively lyrical and detailed; its beauty is that it doesn’t waste time. Besson uses spare sentences that beautifully sum up milestones. It’s a book you can finish in one sitting, and it knocks the wind out of you. +++ Besson supposedly wrote the novel after a life-changing meeting at a café in Paris in 2016 where he received a letter from a person in his past (further details of which would spoil the plot). This encounter causes him to reflect on an early love affair. From the beginning of the novel, Thomas Andrieu—the subject of Philippe’s adoration—is somewhat of a mystery. Philippe does what anyone with a distant crush in high school would. He fantasizes and longs, repeating Thomas’ name to himself in secret, and writing it on scraps of paper. He convinces himself that Thomas isn’t interested in boys, and so he chalks up his dreams to a strong one-way desire. But one day, to Philippe’s amazement, Thomas approaches him and asks him to lunch.

Thus commences their short-lived romance.

The two could not be more different, which makes it all the more intoxicating for both of them. Philippe describes himself as studious, feminine, and a bit awkward, while Thomas is somber, quiet, and hand-

some. Philippe’s father is a headmaster at a primary school while Thomas’ mother is a Spanish migrant worker, who helps run their family dairy farm.

Besson provides nuanced commentary on the class divide; Philippe has aspirations to be a writer, but Thomas feels he doesn’t have another option than to work on the farm for the rest of his life.

In their mid-80s small community, homophobia is inflamed by the ongoing AIDS epidemic and French nationalist efforts to promote the idea that the gay community threatens the entire population.

On their first date, Thomas tells Philippe that he can no longer be alone with the feeling of loving him, but that if they are to see each other, no one can know. So, they lie and censor their emotions in public, escaping to cloakrooms and sheds to make love. Philippe is bullied at school for never having a girlfriend. His classmates spread rumors and call him slurs. He is known as being bad at sports, off-beat, different.

There is only one moment in the book where the boys reveal themselves in public: when Thomas gives Philippe a motorcycle ride through the scenic vineyards and oat fields surrounding their town.

Though Philippe is scared, he says the only thing that matters is “that he’s holding onto him, and holding onto him outside.” As an openly gay writer, Besson fills the novel with questions of suppression of sexuality. Philippe asks himself when and how it began for Thomas and how Thomas can keep it so undetectable. He wonders if he is the first man Thomas has been with, and if he will be the last.

And from very early on in the romance, he asks himself whether Thomas’ outward suppression of his sexuality causes internal suffering. +++ Today, gay literature is more celebrated and accessible, but it has taken a long time to get here, and it still has a long way to go. Modern scholars have picked out themes of homosexual love in ancient texts, such as Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Symposium, and Virgil’s Eclogues. In the 18th and 19th centuries, subtextual ways of writing about homosexuality were often adopted, disguised as vampire tales and philosophical fiction. But it wasn’t until the 20th century, as attitudes shifted, that literature around the world began to more explicitly discuss themes of homosexuality. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams were all pioneers of this genre, writing about sexuality in ways that had never been done before.

Following Stonewall and through the AIDS crisis, literature became an avenue for gay authors, artists, and readers to find hope. As representations of people living with AIDS spread across the media, there was an abundance of visual and literary art.

These works have a sense of urgency that distinguishes them from the rest of the literary canon–– they raise consciousness about medical emergencies, the trauma of early death, socially oppressed groups, and more. Like Lie With Me, they often carry a sense

“Besson tells a story that everyone can relate to—a story of the magnitude of young love and the emptiness of inevitable, ensuing heartbreak.” of secrecy and stigma, fed by a society that suppressed and condemned the LGBTQ+ community.

For readers, an illegal and clandestine romance such as Philippe’s feels exciting—the forbiddenness makes it more enticing.

British writer Alan Hollingsworth, who became a well-known voice in contemporary gay fiction after his publication of The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, spoke to The Guardian recently about how he thinks the contemporary gay novel is “dead.” For Hollingsworth, the political purpose and novelty of gay writing has lessened. “I can see that I keep going back to the periods when things were more difficult and clandestine, because they seem from a fictional point of view to be more rewarding,” he said. This is what Besson does, too, harkening back to a time when Philippe and Thomas were forced to express themselves covertly.

Hollingsworth isn’t entirely wrong that these stories held more urgency during the 20th century, but what he misses is the large future for contemporary queer readers and writers. Though now there is a more outward sense of pride from the LGBTQ+ community, a great sense of loneliness remains.

In his article The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness, Michael Hobbes recognizes this tangible progress, but points out the reality of the modern gay experience: “Still, even as we celebrate the scale and speed of this change, the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades.” While Besson’s novel examines what it’s like to be socially unaccepted, modern gay novels are beginning to examine what it’s like to find a sense of belonging within societies that are opening their doors for the first time.

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Rita Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle: A Novel, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You all examine these issues, describing the experiences of a more economically, racially, and age-diverse queer community. Ultimately, the future of gay literature perhaps lies in what these works accomplish—telling the stories of a wider range of people dealing with feelings of loneliness and emotional trauma. Can contemporary authors redefine the way we label what we read, allowing readers to identify characters independently of who they chose to have sex with?

Or, perhaps the ultimate goal for this category is to move toward a more apolitical canon, appreciated as literature, not just queer literature.

ARTS

+++ Besson uses his matter-of-fact, spare style when describing acts of intimacy to prove to readers that sex is a part of life and love. He doesn’t sugarcoat, but he doesn’t under-emphasize. He sums up the relationship with one line in particular: “The rest of the time we stay in bed, kissing, sucking, fucking.” Besson even shares his experience in the porn industry in California. He focuses on the performers’ bodies, how they frolic and dance in front of the camera.

“Their vulnerability touches me,” he writes.

Besson’s scenes are revelatory. The work has a lot of parallels to André Aciman’s beloved novel-turned-movie Call Me By Your Name, the love story of two young men in an Italian seaside town.

For anyone who has read or seen it, one of the most memorable scenes is when the main character, Elio, sexually devours a peach, fingering and mutilating it.

In Lie With Me, it feels like Besson takes on sex in a less upfront and flowery way than Aciman. Besson’s prose is simple but incredibly intimate. Just as two lovers grow more open with each other the longer they are together, Besson becomes more open too, revealing the moments of “pure abandon” and “self oblivion” inherent with this feeling of comfortability.

He doesn’t rely on controversial depictions of gay sensuality to engage readers, but reveals it sensitively. If Call Me By Your Name can be summed up by an exploding peach, Lie With Me would be more appropriately summed up by a fallen soufflé. It’s less orgasmic and in your face, favoring a more delicate and provocative approach.

Molly Ringwald also achieves an elegant translation. As a teenager in the ‘80s, Ringwald portrayed young people struggling with their identities in Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986). In an interview with Vanity Fair, she expressed that she is drawn to telling the stories people of at this age because of how strongly emotions are felt. Philipe’s love story resonated strongly with Ringwald: “The first time you fall in love and get your heart broken will never hurt in the exact same way. Not to say that we don’t love again, we will probably love more deeply, but the newness of the first will always serve as a sort of template against which you compare later experiences.” +++ In the first 90 pages, all of the parts fall into place perfectly for Phillippe, but after Thomas and Philippe break up, the second half of the story is darker, interwoven with more metafictional elements and reflection. It feels like readers are writing the novel with Besson, feeling his grief. He describes propping up a photo he took of Thomas next to his keyboard as he writes and talks about how he builds characters from his own experiences. It’s during this part of the book that fact and fiction blend together.

Besson specifically writes that his books are entirely fiction—and that memoir doesn’t interest him. However, this contradicts much of what he has already told readers about how he constructs characters and builds life in words from the world around him.

The feeling that the readers themselves are inside the novel is common to the genre of autofiction, a form of fictionalized autobiography. Besson’s semi-autobiographical writing steps into this territory. Many French authors—Camille Laurens, Annie Ernaux, Pierre Mérot and Hervé Guibert, to name a few—are known to infuse their autobiographies with fictional elements. While the genre has its roots in France, autofiction is spreading in popularity. For some writers, autofiction can be therapeutic, allowing a better understanding of who and where they are in relation to the events they’ve experienced. For others, it’s a form of closure, or a way to make their stories more engaging.

In Lie With Me, Besson directly addresses his audience, explaining how he creates scenes: “As

you already know, I invented stories all the time, with so much authenticity that people usually ended up believing me (sometimes even I was no longer able to disentangle the true from the false). Could I have made this story up from scratch? Could I have turned an erotic passion into an obsession? Yes, it’s possible.” Are Besson’s words simply imagined?

Is this his story or fictional Philippe’s? The games Besson plays are frustrating, but by signaling to his active process of fictionalization, he offers a provocative way for readers to examine how he memorializes his past. +++ Though Besson dedicates the book to Thomas Andrieu, the book is not so much centered around the particularities of Thomas but the idea of him.

Readers don’t ever get a sense of Thomas’ thoughts; they only know him through Philippe’s projections of him. At the beginning, when the two boys are lying in a shed after having made love for the second time, Philippe constantly interrupts Thomas, bringing Thomas’ anecdotes back to what he is thinking about. In Philippe’s mind, everything ties back to himself. This makes sense; because Philippe himself is reflecting on his own experiences, he creates a world where everything Thomas does is for Philippe.

It’s a sort of inadvertent selfishness that could be interpreted as malicious, but it is more likely a depiction of Philippe’s tunnel-visioned experience with a first love.

The title of the novel in French is “Arrête avec tes mensonges,” which translates to “stop your lying.”

This is clearly a message about Phillipe’s desire for Thomas to stop lying to the world around him, to be open about his sexual preferences. However, it could also be a message Besson is making to himself about his own creation of a fantasy world surrounding his past lover. Because Besson never explicitly says that

his work is a memoir, could he be revealing his own exaggerated descriptions? When Phillippe’s infatuation grows deeper, he begins to inflate the good characteristics in Thomas, which may make him lie unintentionally. Perhaps, then, the blurriness between fact and fiction in the novel is just a statement on how memory can easily turn into self-deception.

The English title—Lie With Me—is wistful and more resigned. Like the rest of the novel, it’s intimate and simple. Besson sums up this wistfulness by commenting on the irreparable, non-changing reality of his situation with Thomas: “And then everything broke—like a firework exploding on a dark night in July that spirals out in all directions, blazing brightly, dying before it touches the ground so that no one gets burned. No one gets hurt.” It’s the finality of this ending—the harsh realization that the past can’t be altered or controlled—that sticks with readers the most.

NELL SALZMAN B’22 likes soufflé more than peaches.

06

I love you

TEXT RACHEL CARLSON, DANA KURNIAWAN

DESIGN MICHELLE SONG

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

LIT

dead bird,

07

I have never owned a cat, but my childhood neighbors had a particularly active one named Fuki. As a kitten, he would deposit dead birds in our backyard or on our porch—right at the foot of the door, so it was the first thing we’d see when we went outside. It was usually a clean job, but sometimes there’d be a trail of dripping blood left on the porch and traces of dried blood in his whiskers and on his black and white paws. He was breathless, victorious, and proud, always oblivious to the repulsion that would ensue.

Even then, I felt ashamed of my own disgust—I recognized that the birds were his gift, as if to say, “Look how much I love you!” I wondered if he realized that he became an animal instead of a pet in those moments, and if he could ever understand the reaction his welcome-mat murder scenes received, whether he might be a little embarrassed.

When I think about him now, I’m reminded of Julia Kristeva’s Approaching Abjection. The essay explores what it means to exist outside of the symbolic, or rather, outside a realm in which language can make distinctions between self and other. Her term “abjection” loosely refers to our response to this breakdown between everything I deem to represent myself and everything I reject—a phenomenon which “indicates to me what I keep permanently at a distance in order to live.” She references the idea of seeing a corpse: the way it reminds us of the limits of our constructed boundaries, “death infesting life.” +++ I think I will always be in love with you, you said at the beginning of August. The first time I heard any combination of those words directed to me in real life, inviting déjà vu for something I’d only imagined.

We were sitting behind the tennis courts in that park near my house. You told me you had cried recently. I was yanking blades of brown grass up from the mud by their roots, weaving them one at a time through the laces of my shoes.

I knew you never cried, which I always thought was funny, and that a few minutes ago, my stomach had started feeling like the grass stains on my shoelaces.

I still asked you why, because I wanted to confirm I was wrong. It could have been that some part of me wanted to hear the words that came next. Maybe part of me needed to make you say them.

That you regretted how you’d treated me. That you hadn’t realized it was wrong at the time. That you were sorry, and that you had been thinking about us a lot. That you had had these realizations while getting high.

With the final confession, I wondered if the apology actually counted and if drugs made people more thoughtful. I wondered if that’s where the term guilt-trip comes from or if I was the one who’d gotten high and was still imagining the entire conversation.

I had no idea how to hold these possibilities. We had barely spoken in over a year, and I was pretty sure you didn’t believe in love, since you reminded me so often that the words love or relationship don’t mean anything at all.

A little less than two years ago, you and I had spent the day at a bookstore in Downtown LA, where we had watched from behind a stack on the second floor a man publicly propose to his girlfriend on a couch on the first.

A few hours later, I found myself choking out the words I think I have feelings for you as you told me I looked like I was about to pass out. We ended up sitting cross-legged on that very same panopticonic couch in the center of rows of books on that first floor as we attempted to work out the details of our new “togetherness.” All I remember is hearing us fall into a book metaphor, something about this part of our relationship being a sequel and having multiple volumes, with writers who couldn’t stop making typos and editors who never caught them.

Back in the park two years later, I dug my fingernails into my thigh, remembering our conversation as I drove you home from the bookstore––how deep I’d had to dig to make myself laugh when you said you were still taking this really hot girl in your class to prom instead of me. Just to see what it was like. +++

I am trying to love urgently, and I love you, one of my closest and longest-held friends said to me when I picked up the phone.

She then confessed that she was worried she had told her boyfriend she loved him too soon. That she had deflated the words by saying them out loud.

She started crying, but I was kind of impressed. She has always known how to tell people exactly what she thinks, when she thinks it. Meanwhile, even asking for a library book I wanted to read took weeks of practice in elementary school—maintaining a steady voice, eye contact, and the confidence to say that I needed something.

I love you’s were even harder than things like no and I don’t want to, which required years of practicing assertion in my grandma’s living room. All the words were bulky coming out of my mouth, bones lodging themselves in the back of my throat. Everything was always somehow too much and not enough—the almost-right-but-not-quite translation of a thing that doesn’t have one. +++ A few years ago at a UCLA art exhibit, I saw the words Language is sexy.

Words are precise and sexy written in white on a black wall. I thought you’d like them too, but you weren’t talking to me at the time.

I still think about these words a lot, and how conflicted they made me feel—words might be sexy, but they rarely feel precise. If words aren’t precise, then what can be said about language?

Now, the image mostly reminds me of a dining-hall conversation I had with two friends last spring. A professor of German romance novels had once said to them, romance and seduction lie in the space between what we say and what we mean.

That Sunday, in the park, part of me thought you had said exactly what you meant. It wasn’t what I was used to. Snippets of that six-hour conversation outside a coffee shop crawl into my mind every so often. Maybe you remember how we had planned to discuss our relationship itself, but ended up going nowhere near it.

Sometimes, the space between what is said and what is meant is not seductive at all. Once you had asked, Does anyone know we hook up sometimes? I had responded, a few friends. What I had wanted to say was, I’m sorry if I embarrass you. Maybe your refusal to hold my hand or put your arm around me in public should have told me everything.

We didn’t just know what the other person wanted to say, and the notion that we did only fed the fantasy of complete mutual understanding without communication. That Sunday, though, I wished I had asked why you got to break the rules of the “relationship” two years too late, when your voice in my head is still so good at talking me out of saying what I mean. Still reminds me that phrases like I love you are also questions.

Do you love me, too? +++ After my friend described her I love you, she asked if I had ever said it myself.

I remembered sitting in the mud behind the tennis courts and how I stopped breathing a little when I heard the words for the first time.

I thought I might have been in love with someone else at the time, but I knew as soon as you and I left the park that I should not tell this other person.

Even the thought of saying the words out loud seemed more like a question of whether they could expose everything I needed them to, and whether or not I was allowed to have those feelings in the first place.

I started seeing someone, he texted me in November. Anyway, hope you’re doing well.

I wanted to respond, but it hurt a little more each time I started typing.

The text hadn’t left very much room for emotion, anyway. I tried, thank you for telling me and stopped thinking how the first letter he wrote me has spent the

LIT

u last eight months on my bedside table. It was only a few sentences long, which made it so much easier for me to simagine every word appearing below his pen.

He ended, here’s to the future!, and I hate the sound the phrase makes in my head when I think about it now. What future?

I told a few friends about the text, hoping someone would validate my need to feel something more than his business-casual tone. To tell me I wasn’t crazy or needy or hadn’t misinterpreted every conversation that had led to that moment.

At least he told you. +++ You and I always bonded over death, which has been more upsetting to me than it used to since our last conversation. Every once in a while, you’d send me a photo of something dead on the road, and I’d joke, I’m so glad that made you think of me (even though I really did feel lucky).

Once, we walked beside a railroad track and you said, we should just tell people we’re dating. I fixated on a bloody bird blending into the gravel while you explained that it was so much more convenient that way. The next day, a friend called me at school to say she heard that you broke up with me. I hadn’t known.

After I told you I needed to take a break from talking last fall, I started running up the same hill every day. There was a small curve on the road where I’d find a different dead mouse each time I ran. I had a mouse infestation in my house at the time––I heard them slipping between invisible slides and staircases at night while I tried to fall asleep. Some nights, it was comforting. Other nights, I lay awake preoccupied by the sound of my heartbeat, which amplified the scuffles and convinced me I wouldn’t wake up the next morning.

The last time I saw a dead bird, it was covered in fresh snow. I happened to be walking next to a different set of railroad tracks and heard our conversation again––the one about convenience.

RACHEL CARLSON B’23 is testing the limits of her constructed boundaries.

here and now here, we squeeze minutes into minutes, sandwiching ourselves between people on the MBTA, or any warm corner of our three-century-old abode — the heater ever boiling; the AC sorely missing. i’m starting to realize why people never leave california. the sunset melts sticky on the horizon; scatters its golden flecks across the glimmering Pacific; shiny glimpses as rare and common as everyday eclipses. here, love settles into the dips we trip into, makes its home in the sand beneath our toes, sends a gentle breeze caressing with familiar ease; a momentary safe haven. it’s pretty close to Heaven minus the traffic, but the freeway music makes up for it anyways, filling gaps between the sun-baked yellow-spotted highway from san diego to joan didion’s sacramento. in manhattan beach, the rules and steel of manhattan, new york city, are taken out to rust, welded into docked boats, taken out to sea, and hooked with live bait to see what this ocean brings.

DANA KURNIAWAN B’22 encourages blasting driver’s license in meandering freeway traffic.

this time; this vastness; this “last-ness” of sunset behind smog, signaling bigger realities of burning and climate and borrowed time —

08

My Valentine Is A Missouri Homeowner

TEXT COLE TRIEDMAN

DESIGN ERICA YUN

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

S+T

The girl I love is buying a house on Route 66

09

Sometime around mid-February, a girl will get the keys to the house she has bought in Waynesville, Missouri. She’ll unlock the front door, perch crisscrossed on cheap gray carpeting, and sigh, relieved to have made it out of her cramped apartment a few miles down the highway in St. Robert. I will stare out my window in Providence, smile and shake my head, marveling at the absurdity of past expectations.

For Valentine’s Day this year, the girl I love gets a house, and I join the proud ranks of poor souls in love with Missouri homeowners.

It’s a funny house. One-story, three-bedroom, one bath. It probably was originally built so its photograph could shine on the glossy pages of a 1970’s suburban real estate catalogue, but five decades of erratic Missouri winters have beaten down the exterior. The purportedly beige paint job seems to blend into the pale and blotchy yellows, browns, and greens of the overgrown yard in wintertime. Leaning over the rails of the back porch, you can see and hear where the backyard dips down towards a little creek, faintly gurgling.

The girl I love wrote her English thesis about being place-confused, or rather, being rooted in half a dozen different spots at the same time. Boise, Providence, Chicago, Denver, she stretches herself across the country, trying to show these places that she loves them all at once. How fitting then, that the United States military—the organization that she’s indebted to in exchange for four years of tuition— recently announced in a neat document that she will, for the foreseeable future, be reporting to a base snugged in the perfect geographic middle of the country, the nexus of all these cherished places.

Google tells me that Waynesville, Missouri is an old Route 66 town with a population of 5,627— come Valentine’s Day, that’ll be 5,628 and better for it. For me, Waynesville represents something of an American nucleus, a place whose narrative is written with all the contradicting joys and uglinesses that embody my conflicted relationship with my country.

Pulaski County historical markers around town will tell you how free-wheelin’ travellers stopped here for a night’s rest on the way from Chicago to LA,

just like they’ll tell you that dispossessed members of the Cherokee Nation painfully trudged through on their way to Oklahoma. The bold red, white, and blue of a Trump banner adorns the hill overlooking one end of Main Street, while elderly folk strolling along the river at the other end will greet you with indescribable warmth. My love landed in a place where a legacy of hatred and violence faces up noseto-nose with hospitality and kindness, an identity as conflicted as a gentle, empathetic Brown University English major serving in the US Army. Waynesville is becoming my heartland, where all of my American confusions live next door to the girl I love.

For centuries, Waynesville was on the way. On the way of some tragic or blissful American journey– certainly not the destination, but at least in-between.

The town can hardly boast that today. Highway I-70 now cuts straight across the flatter parts of Missouri, from St. Louis right to Kansas City, while Waynesville is at best an hour-and-a-half off the interstate. There’s really no reason to risk your life skidding out on winding, icy state highways, only to arrive at a town with more hardware stores than coffee shops.

Unless you’re me, of course. Her assignment and this house have given me a sustained reason to visit Waynesville, get to know it, not just as an inbetween but as an entity unto itself. I have stumbled into the very real possibility of finding belonging in Waynesville, Missouri. +++ For almost three years now, falling in love with the girl has also been falling in love with the grand, tragic, and complicated human geographies of America. Her deep desire to untangle American contradictions pairs naturally with her inspiring romantic clarity. She speaks about movement and oscillation, soil and roots, land and people, and I drive around the country in little lopsided circles.

In my career as a wide-eyed road tripper, I’ve learned how to crack sunflower seeds on the way and play harmonica from high places when I get

there. If performed correctly, these little rituals can momentarily melt a little bit of your spirit into a place, make you feel like you were a part of something even if you were only passing through.

Road trip sacraments, however, have beginnings and ends.

That is not so with a house, nor is it with love. A house is built for longevity, its foundation cemented in the soil of a place, and a property purchase contract has no expiration date. A house’s perpetuity is material, understood every time you pull into the driveway and walk inside; when a house is knocked down, it ceases to occupy the physical space it once did. Love’s perpetuity is more abstract. It’s a mutually understood energy exchanged between people, maintained with the tenderness of a garden that’s built to last. Love’s endurance is born not out of the fruits harvested from that garden, material gifts that provide a moment of sustenance and pleasure, but from commitment to the garden itself: growth for growth’s sake, life for life’s sake. Love sneaks up on you like a friend who says let’s go somewhere: you can either hop in before you have time to ask where you’re headed, or stay sitting around twiddling your thumbs. When you move in or leave town, that home and that love become your entire world.

Of course, I did not buy this house. I enjoy no VA loan mortgage options. Never in my wildest Americana fantasies did I entertain visiting Missouri before this whole episode, and I certainly don’t have any desire to put my roots down anywhere until I’m at least 30. But I am in love with this girl and hope to continue being in love with this girl. As such, both our love and her house, with all of their strange perpetuities, have molded quite absurdly with our journey. The house is now an object of wonder and uncertainty, intimately connected yet

S+T

spatially separate from the love we maintain from a thousand miles away. It seems that I’ve become a magnet being pulled towards the core of America, the charmingly unpredictable home of my love. +++ The girl I love invited me over to her place a few times after I first met her in the spring of 2018. She lived in a suite with two doubles, the stateliest dorm my wide freshman eyes had ever encountered. She seemed much older, more grounded. Once, when she let me in, a homemade pizza was in the oven and it filled up the common room with an easy warmth.

She had pictures on the wall in her room, I studied them hungrily in that blurry season’s spare moments.

There was a mutt with a big spot on a bright blue eye, old folks with wide crooked smiles, girls throwing their hands up in front of a lake.

I saw her again after a long summer. I remember the nauseating white of her single dorm’s naked walls, and trying to help her put up a few posters one humid September morning. They peeled off the painted cinder blocks as we each tussled with our future in our own heads. By May, I was taking those posters down, folding them haphazardly into cardboard boxes and lugging them to the basement of my childhood home on Wayland Avenue to store for the summer. For a few months, those relic-filled boxes sat in my parent’s basement, waiting for her to bring their contents back to life.

Later that summer, I helped her and her housemates organize their living room on Governor Street. I got a big Yucca plant that stuck around all year, through chaotic late-night study sessions and parties, new hairstyles and changing seasons.

When COVID hit, I more or less moved in. I played

her guitar, slept in her bed, spent time with her housemates, built and broke things. I livened the house and the house livened me. Then after a few hazy springtime weeks and a Zoom graduation ceremony, I helped her pack it all—photos, posters, rock chick clothes and army gear, earrings and baskets and drawings I’d given over the years —into her Acura. We pushed it across the country to her parent’s home in Denver, so full we could hardly see out the rearview mirror.

This winter break, when I circled back east after five or six thousand miles of driving around, she was with me. We were heading from Denver to Missouri.

But this time, when she piled things into the car, they weren’t pillows and shoes, four seasons of clothes or three years of cookware. This time, she loaded the trunk of my Subaru with the books and records she grew up with, tools and cutlery inherited from parents and grandparents, things to make a house a home. She was a girl on her way to fill up a thousand square feet of wood and plaster with glorious clutter, a girl determined to turn a Zillow slideshow into a wild anti-suburban paradise. A place you want to fill up with Lucinda Williams songs and pizza smells and friendly people.

When you fall in love with a person you fall in love with their spot, their stuff, the entire sensory experience of that person and the space they inhabit.

I’ve heard it time and time again from my friends.

Dude, her room had so much cool shit on the walls, I think I might try to see her again, or conversely, He’s great, but I can’t stand his roommates. If you stick around long enough, you’ll appear in some of the pictures on the wall. If you stick around longer yet, you’ll learn that it’s less about the brick and mortar, more about the people and knick-knacks and stories that get told the morning after nights of drinking.

And if you accidentally fall in love with a girl in ROTC, then years of packing and unpacking boxes may even culminate towards trading command strips and string lights for paint rollers and power drills, while you’re still 21. You’ll learn, as I have yet to, how to help the girl build—really build—her home in Missouri.

care like I could when her place was a five minute walk across Fox Point. I figure, maybe I can learn a thing or two from her pictures and posters, records and cookware. They are consistent yet alwayschanging forces in her universe, to be arranged originally in each new place, simultaneously novel and familiar. These things carry a certain ephemeral beauty, reconciling cherished memories with exciting possibilities, past love with love to be made.

When I’m with this girl, the good times unfurl just as effortlessly as smiles captured in pictures on the wall. She makes it easy. We tell each other stories of the past, plan trips for the future, and let the love wash over us in the meantime. And that’s how I’ll help put together her house, I suppose, just by being a part of the love that happens when we’re there, together. When I make it back to Waynesville, I’ll make her squid ink risotto and try to harmonize with her irreplicable soulful voice. We’ll make a brick oven to fill up the yard with pizza smells, paint the bathroom yellow. Build because it’s as fun as being in love.

This Valentine’s Day, a girl I love is moving into a house in the heartland of America, and I’ll get there soon. If you need me, you might find me there, helping to make a house a home.

COLE TRIEDMAN B‘21 is in the market for a bolo tie.

+++ For the two years and change we’ve been together, I’ve always been there to help her bring her stuff around, between dorms and houses, even crosscountry and back again. I’ve done my best to make myself available during life changes, and she’s done the same for me. Time and time again we’ve shown up with a set of hands strong enough to carry couches and a love continuous enough to absorb the shock of a life in flux. We buy each other Yucca plants to say this’ll stick around long enough to make this living room a place for living. It’s always been each other’s physical presence and the alwaysslightly-changing collection of sentimental clutter that turns the liminal into something beautiful.

Now I’m 1,300 miles away, and I won’t be able to help her move in on Valentine’s Day. In fact, I may not need to help her move in somewhere new for quite awhile—after a few UHaul trips from her St. Robert apartment she’ll be settled for some time.

The familiar posters will go up on the wall, and it won’t be her things that are in flux, it’ll be me.

For the coming four months, I’ll be at my desk on Williams Street, finishing my degree. And then?

I hope to become a man in motion, spanning the geography of this country in unpredictable ways. I may get a job in some coastal metropolis, or go to some forest to clear trails, some desert to teach kids, some hills to write. I hope that my post-pandemic momentum propels me over mountains and rivers, and back again.

How does somebody in motion possibly help the person he loves build a house? I can’t offer any hands to unload her UHaul in a few weeks, or offer physical

10

11

X

CAMILLE GROS

EPHEMERA

12

The Struggle for Black Liberation and Justice

TEXT OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIA

ILLUSTRATION JESSICA MINKER

NEWS

THOUGHTS ON

13

“To be human you must bear witness to justice. Justice is what love looks like in public—to be human is to love and be loved.” — Dr. Cornel West Love is inherently political. When one is Black in America, to love is always followed by a ‘but’ or ‘in spite of.’ For example, on the individual level, loving is seen profoundly in acting against hegemonic standards: one can love their wide nose, larger lips, collier hair, in spite of standards of beauty that would not have it so. The love of self, the love of body, and even romantic love operate on meaningful, yet smaller scales.

If being Black and loving oneself is resistance against white supremacy, the tradition of resistance on a larger scale, such as in socio-political movements, requires an incorporation of the varied locations—history, class, physical appearance, gender—of its body politic. Resistance is sustained by a love that is outward-facing rather than inward-facing: a radical love for others rather than an individual love of self. A life rooted in radical love reorients us away from personal suffering and survival and turns us toward continuing a tradition of Black resistance to state-sanctioned or state-complicit oppression and subjugation.

This Black History Month marks half a year since the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and other solidarity movements took to the streets, the press, the classrooms, and the offices to demand an end to the normalization of Black mortality and death at the hands of the police. The name of the #BlackLivesMatter movement foreshadowed how it would grow beyond what should be recognized as the bare minimum: sanctity of life. For a life to matter, the culmination of a human being’s experiences must also matter—having economic opportunity to support one’s family, walking freely without fear of hostile surveillance or policing, having access to affordable medical care with equal health outcomes.

One could look at Black social and political movements in America and argue that living on the brink of survival and scarcity produced civic engagement, but I would argue that these social movements can also be attributed to love as an ancestral practice.

The West created Blackness. There were no

Black people, rather disparate tribes of individuals who perhaps shared melanated complexions. The concept of Blackness is reductive in flattening the nuances of language, ancestral history, and more of Black individuals. Nonetheless, the categorization has been repurposed from Blackness as synonymous to oppression to Blackness as empowerment, as seen with the Black Pride and Pan-Africanisms school of thoughts. Black people become ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ to one another. “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!”—this famous song by James Brown characterizes the acceptance of the term “Black.” Against racism, love for one’s Blackness and for other Black communities became a source of power to combat racist individuals, ideologies, and institutions that would have Black people hate themselves. +++ Toni Morrison once wrote in The Bluest Eye, “...love is never any better than the lover… There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.” So, for people to remark that there is a lack of love in the world and that this deficiency has brought American society to such a polarized moment may appear to position love as an omnipotent recipe for

change, as opposed to tangible legislation or policy in the interests of activists.

When the lover ‘alone’ possesses their gift of love, their love is selfish and self-serving. One can love “black culture,” for example, and recite legendary rap songs and profess allegiance to their favorite Black athletes, but in the same breath chastise rappers or athletes for involving themselves with politics.

For their ambiguity and lack of direction, words such as love and kindness may be met with skepticism in social justice movements. They appear to be blankets thrown over the scantily covered, unburied, and limboed ghosts of American past. Black people, other marginalized communities, and white allies can’t suddenly join hands and proclaim, “We are the world.” All theory is incomplete and critiqueable, but in a month dedicated to uncovering critical developments within the Black community, radical love is a starting point to discuss what has already manifested in activist movements. Black activist movements tend to be romanticized, but in seeking the resonances of radical love within these movements, one can begin to imagine the potential for empathy within oppressed groups and between the oppressor and the oppressed. Make no mistake, radical love is far from an ode to peace or nonviolence. Radical love produces its own energy and conviction, derived from a tradition of resistance. Liberation is a collective fight and injustices are deeply linked. +++ Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher, who began to articulate radical love (although not in such express terms) in his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written in 1968. Writing in political exile from Brazil for subversive teachings, he sought to characterize the relationship between the oppressed and oppressor. In it, Friere asserts that the

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“To be human you must bear witness to justice.

Justice is what love looks like in public—to be human is to love and be loved.”

— Dr. Cornel West

oppressed do not incite violence: “It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves.” By unloved, Freire is referring to those the oppressors deem unworthy: disposable, dehumanized individuals only called upon when needed for extractive value. It is those already in power who realize their self interests through violence and coercion. The infamous images of a police dog set on a civil rights protest, of homes belonging to Black residents in Tulsa on fire, of Emmett Till’s disfigured body are the more visible stories in the long chapter of anti-Black violence in America. bell hooks, a Black feminist writer, described love as the practice of freedom. Conversely, she named the antithesis of love as a culture of domination—one that sustains itself on violence.

This is one of the greatest challenges of radical love: violence. How can one write about solidarity, love, and resilience in the face of direct violence that seeks to create a never-ending pit of oppression, devastation, and inequity? I find answers to the question of violence when looking at this summer’s activist movements. People put their lives on the line as police officers used excessive force to drag and tear them off, and how, within minutes, bail funds would appear for those detained. With rising unemployment rates and relatively unstable income for hourly wage employees, Black and brown persons in the wake of the pandemic shared mutual aid funds circulated on social media. They exchanged monetary resources and information to provide income, housing, food, and basic necessities to individuals who were virtually strangers. In a pandemic that exacerbated the vulnerabilities of each person, it is radical love to extend the little one has to familiar and foreign communities.

The principal strategy of the oppressor (white, landowning men) in America was to splinter the formation of radical love amongst marginalized communities. In America’s labor movements, race often prevented the coalescing of poor white and poor Black communities seeking higher economic opportunity. White laboring classes bought into white elites’ marketing that Black people were to blame for their financial woes. In the feminist movements of the 1970s, white women feminists such as Gloria Steinmen discouraged Shirley Chisholm, a Black woman politician, from seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. The irony being that the organization Chisholm co-founded, the National Women’s Caucus, endorsed a white man over her because he seemed more viable to win. Even within the Black community, there are fractures in visions of how the Black community organizes its demands: should we be relying on public assistance? Should we prove our autonomy and self-organizing capacity? Are these diametrically opposed ideas?

These movements broke down with individuals seeking out paths to preserve their respective goals.

However, most notably in the #BLM protests of Summer 2020, both Black and non-black individuals radically loved by redistributing economic or social privileges that put them at an advantage. There was direct intervention into improving the quality of life

for others by using oneself as a springboard. Radical love as a framework for future social movements can be thought of as sustaining cultures of interdependent care. Solidarity and allyship are a precursor to this culture, but instead of standing by or empathizing with the struggles of another, interdependent care is toiling and struggling together. Solidarity compels action. A thought process grounded in solidarity here would be: ‘because I believe an injustice is occurring to another, I must act.’ However, solidarity is complicated by what are artificially-construed competing interests of time and energy: Which issue is more dire? The concept also falls short where individuals over-emphasize reciprocity. If I go to your march, you must come to mine. However, solidarity need not be swapped out for radical love. When placing the two concepts in contrast, radical love is an acknowledgment of varied solidarities and a constant striving outside of the inner.

Friere’s quote shows that love is incomplete if it cannot be extended to others. It is an expansion of your knowledge, resources, and empathy. Social movements grounded in experience create a patchwork of distinct stories—an ever-expanding fabric draped around protests, dialogue, and civic action.

It is emotive; take one away and the fabric begins to unravel. Radical love is sustained by collective, community-bound engagement. When liberation and justice seem too ambitious to attain or too far after years of inaction, the community continues the struggle for those who cannot. +++ On a larger scale, practicing radical love is what gives society our humanity. If bearing witness to justice is an act of love, as Dr. Cornel West alludes to, then to ignore opportunities to fight for justice or to turn a blind eye to injustice is a lack of love. Seen through another lens, turning a blind eye is like the love of only oneself that Paulo Freire referenced. Radical love need not culminate in a productive or a readily translated piece of action. Rather, the journey itself of imagining one’s struggles (or lack of) as intimately connected to the struggles of others brings about a more conscious humanity. However, the desire to constantly improve upon the conditions of precarity for marginalized communities is the raison d’etre of socio-political movements. bell hooks further articulates this imagined world: “[Devoid of radical love] longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self centered longing for change.” What makes love so radical is intervention in a struggle beyond one’s own. In the movements of last summer, while the focus was on freeing Black individuals from the oppression of the carceral state, there was the reverberating reminder of those who could not march in tandem or show up in present—those whose plights were rendered invisible: trans folks afraid of violence at protests, persons with disabilities, and incarcerated folks.

With that said, radical love cannot become a form of governance, for the institutionalization of such ethos divorces it from the feelings and experiences that contribute to its realization. Instead of assigning radical love a cumulative or productive end, perhaps radical love in the Black liberation struggle is an acknowledgement of the sacrifices Black individuals and allies made to secure one’s own rights and a commitment to continue this legacy. It is a turn from the self to the world that crosses not only space, but time. Through demonstrating this love, Blackness is humanized against a backdrop that has used Black bodies as a canvas for experimentation, exploitation, and extraction.

In the face of an objectified Blackness, radical love brings dignity and humanity back into Black life. If even the most subjugated members of our society are given back their humanity and dignity via radical love, then all members of our society, interdependent, can become human together. As Dr. Cornel West says, “To be human is to love and to be loved.”

OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO B’22 is rooting for everybody Black (credit to Issa Rae at the 2017 Emmys).

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METRO ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER TEXT ALINA KULMAN DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

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THE LENS OF KENNETH T. MARS The life and images of a Narragansett photographer

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When Kenneth T. Mars Jr. walked around South Kingstown, Rhode Island—along a strip mall, or down a dirt road—he took out his camera to capture slices of life. From the 1960s through the early 2000s, this thin, wiry man, sometimes donning a trenchcoat, would train a cheap camera on people watching the tides roll in, feeding pets, running errands, or marching in a parade. After recording scenes of quotidian barns, stone walls, parking lots, body shops, and falling leaves, he would continue on his walks. Once he had the photos developed, he neatly glued the prints into hundreds of chronological albums.

Mars was of Narragansett and African-American descent. For 40 years, while working as a janitor at the University of Rhode Island (URI), he spent his free time taking pictures. Now, the South County History Center in South Kingstown is the steward of about 27,400 of his images of daily life, marked without captions. The center’s staff has painstakingly digitized what may be America’s largest surviving collection of vernacular photos taken by a person of color, at a time when photography of the everyday draws increased scholarly interest.

No one who knew him or has studied the work—relatives, colleagues, friends, photography experts—has developed a clear artists’ statement for his practice. For John Peterson, a photographer and longtime Mars admirer, the search has taken up countless hours: “Not every story needs to be understood, but it’s made me nuts trying to figure out why he did it.” And yet the vast collection, even without a concise explanation of Mars’ intentions, provides valuable insight into how a community and landscape changed over the decades.

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culture. She explained that since carpentry was a family business, “building that church was a family and community project.”

The 1940s were a period of regrouping for the Narragansetts, after decades of government derecognition campaigns. The tribe built official meeting spaces, like the Narragansett Indian Meeting House on what is now 1,800 acres of Indigenous reservation in Charlestown. The Peace Dale Church has remained an informal gathering point for the Narragansetts. “There’s been lots of family that have come there throughout the years, even people who are not ‘church people,’” LaRose said. “They still came to that church because it was a family place. It’s where weddings and funerals happen, so it has seen generations of native families.”

Kenneth Mars Sr. became a preacher there in the 1960s. He and his wife helped run the church for 30 years while Kenneth Jr. worked as an usher.

He took photos of church activities, like baptisms.

One photo shows two women, in straw hats and floral-pattern clothes, standing on the steps outside of church, as sunshine gleams on their polished black shoes and handbags. LaRose says those images serve as an important archive: “He was always in that church for all of these functions. So to know that there’s a record of all of that…has a lot of significance to the history of our tribal community that people don’t even really recognize. And he captured all that on film.”

In 1962, at age 22, Mars began working at the URI as a janitor at the student center, the Memorial Union building. A state resolution on the eve of his retirement 40 years later noted that as “door

opener and official greeter whose concern is always the students, Kenny takes it upon himself to see that the Union is opened earlier than the official opening time, ‘so the kids can get in out of the cold.’” The resolution also documented his photography, recalling him “leaping from behind a column and firing off his infernal flash” to take surprise pictures of colleagues.

Peterson first encountered Mars in the Memorial Union building, where Peterson’s father started the same year as a janitor. “My dad liked him, just thought he was a kind and gentle guy,” Peterson said. “They talked politics, they never talked about photography.”

Peterson, now 48, remembers his childhood encounters with Mars: “I’d see him in town with a trenchcoat and a camera. He was shooting things that didn’t make sense to a five year old. He looks almost like a sleuth in his coat, taking these pictures.”

Mars also frequented the Peace Dale Library, where Jessica Wilson, a reference librarian, remembers seeing him at work: “He would always go up in the same place, and he always put everything away.

Other people were not allowed up there, but he had his place.” She added, “He was grandfathered into whatever rules we set up.” With notebook and pencil, Mars recorded information from old issues of the Narragansett Times. He also sought out older locals to ask “what life used to be like,” Wilson noted. Peterson describes Mars’ memory as nearly photographic: “He could quote names and families and bastard children going back to the beginning of the town newspaper in 1860.” Peterson says Mars had a viewnoview “no one else would have ever had of the town.”

Kenneth T. Mars Jr. was born on March 29, 1940 in South Kingstown, a stone’s throw from the ocean.

His family belongs to the Narragansett Tribe, which traces its history in New England back thousands of years. Starting in the 17th century, when colonists arrived with enslaved people, the tribe intermarried with people of African descent. Government documents often intentionally misidentified Indigeous people as Black as part of efforts to deny ancestral connections to the land. By 1880, “detribalization” campaigns culminated in the state legislature’s declaration of the Narragansetts as “extinct.” The state stripped the tribe of its status and ownership of remaining lands. Legal challenges dragged on for decades, and by the time Mars was born, the Narragansetts had managed to be officially reincorporated.

Kenneth Jr. was the only child of Kenneth Mars Sr. and Lucille Greenwood Mars. Kenneth Sr., a basketball star as a young man, worked as a carpenter.

In the 1940s, Kenneth Sr. helped build a Pentecostal church, the Peace Dale First Church of God, on Allens Avenue in Wakefield. The white-trimmed brick building is on a sleepy, tree-lined street. Silvermoon LaRose, a cousin of the Mars family, is the assistant director of the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island, dedicated to Indigenous art, history, and

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As Mars cultivated his photography habit, LaRose explained, “All he did was walk everywhere.

He didn’t drive. He never had a drivers’ license. And people knew him, so they would pick him up and give him rides.” He apparently did not seek to try new photography techniques, or upgrade his equipment. He just made rounds, day after day, bringing home images of life by the thousands.

Perhaps he was making order out of his impressions of a neighborhood, or wanted to remember the change of seasons, or buildings or trees about to be swept away by construction. Maybe whenever he saw beauty, he wanted to take a treasured snapshot.

In one black and white photo taken on Kenyon Avenue, a blurry young couple walks down the sidewalk, hands around each other’s waists. In another, people sit watching the waves from cement blocks overlooking Narragansett Beach. Mars captured his close friends and family, the chickens he raised in his yard. People are almost incidental to the views of surviving rural areas, or downtowns where big-box stores were coming in and clunky older cars becoming obsolete. The photos have an ethereal quality and an intimacy. They record details and moments that only someone looking closely would see. A woman gazes down at a squirrel she’s feeding on her porch. A red and black car is parked perfectly centered outside a restaurant with the same color scheme. +++ John Peterson, who’d known Mars since childhood, enrolled at URI and began taking photographs. He became increasingly interested in what Mars was trying to convey with his camera. One day, while Mars was cleaning the floor, Peterson approached and asked, “Why do you do it?” Mars replied, “I just like cameras.” Peterson followed up, “No, you shoot every single day, you shoot at every single thing you see with that camera, you can’t just like cameras.”

Mars placed the developed prints in albums, which sat in his house and weren’t even shown to family.

Peterson remained curious. When he asked Mars to collaborate on a book, Mars declined.

LaRose, his cousin, attributes that to introversion: “I think he really just did it for himself. It gave him pleasure, it gave him joy.”

Mars passed away in 2011, at age 71. Peterson wondered what would happen to the photographs.

After waiting several months out of respect for the family, he contacted Ken’s cousin, Diana Mars, who had been handling his possessions. Peterson recalled that she said, in effect, “there were too many to keep track of.” They were still in leather albums, with several 3.5”x3.5” or 3.5”x5” images per page, some of them tinted or faded with time. Peterson brought them to a warehouse space, hoping to write a book about them. In leafing through, he even found a photo of himself, at age 5, eating tuna salad on his family’s porch.

Still stymied about Mars’ motivations, Peterson interviewed Mars’ mother Lucille. But because of her failing mental acuity, “over the course of talking to her, she kept realizing he was gone,” Peterson recalled. “I realized I was watching her relive his death over and over.” The photos stayed safe in the warehouse, and Peterson moved on to other projects. +++ A number of related troves of photos have surfaced in recent years. The works of the Black photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908-1998) have been preserved at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

The photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-1984), a Kiowa tribe member, received a retrospective at the National Museum of the American Indian branch in New York in 2014. Perhaps the most enigmatic collection of vernacular photography was taken by Vivian Maier (1926-2009), a longtime Chicago resident. She obsessively shot streetscapes, people, herself, and even her letters, bank records, and tax returns. Maier ended up impoverished, but after collectors bought her work out of her abandoned storage spaces, she was lionized. One of the buyers, John Maloof, promoted her work and spearheaded a documentary, “Finding Vivian Maier.” Pamela Bannos, an artist and professor at Northwestern University who wrote a book on Maier’s legacy, said the photographer’s story has largely been told by people who never knew her.

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Peterson, unlike Maier’s interpreters, kept Mars’ collection intact and never tried to invent underlying narratives. Peterson had faith that the mystery could be solved, of how and why Mars used his lens. But nothing satisfactory ever emerged, whether in the form of some misplaced notes or friends’ memories.

In 2017, he donated the photos to the South County History Center.

Relatives considered his work integral to his character, and a way of documenting his surroundings. “Sometimes you make contributions to the world without even knowing it. And he did that,” LaRose said. “He was such a kind, quiet person.

People like that often get forgotten, and you think they’re not making a contribution. But here he’s made an amazing one to the community. So I think we’re proud of that.”

LaRose says Mars’ work falls into a lineage of artwork that defies categorization or confinement to traditional forms. “It’s Indigenous art because an Indigenous person made it,” she explained. “He created a whole anthology across his life of just taking photos of a simple place.” Today, she is working with a younger generation of Narragansett artists, like India Reels and Lynsea Montanari. The museum has shown their work, in addition to Mars’ photos.

These young people’s prints will not sit untouched in a basement. +++ Mars’ albums now live at the South County History Center. In June 2020, the Center received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (part of $40 million distributed through the COVID-19 relief act) to archive Mars’ photos.

Hilary Gunnels, the collections manager, has spent months handling the albums. “There’s a preservation issue with having glue on the back of photographs,” she said. There is also minor mold damage, which Gunnels says could have been an archival “nuclear bomb.” Digital copies of each page layout will be turned into searchable scans. The Center plans to have a crowdsourcing campaign to identify people, places, and timeframes in the pictures.

Essentially, the public will be able to help reassemble the knowledge and relationships that Mars built on his daily walks. His presence, deeply felt amongst those in his community, will be recreated in a sense, as more people share their knowledge and memories of him and his subjects. (In fact, while I was exploring some locations of Mars’ photographs near the Peace Dale Church, a woman stopped to ask what I was doing. When I explained, she turned out to remember him, and she recounted her memories of his kind nature.)

As the Center posts Mars’ images on Facebook, people respond with fond recollections of him from URI. “One hell of a nice guy,” one friend wrote.

“Not only was Mr. Mars an excellent photographer providing an excellent legacy, but he was a decent and kind man,” another added. Other commenters simply identify stores, addresses, or long-lost cars.

Gunnels said that Mars’ collection is important for its depth and his breadth of understanding of his environment and community. “We recognize that the ways of knowing and creating knowledge about a place come from everyday normal people,” she explained. The center, she added, is devoted to Mars’ legacy as part of a larger effort to document “people who aren’t the old white powerful families” of Rhode Island.

Mars’ lens has altered her own daily perceptions. “I’ll leave work and drive down a road that he walked down, and I can see the world, and it looks like one of the photographs,” she said. “Depending on the quality of the print, they’ve got this yellow or purple tone. And after a day of processing them, it gets saturated into my vision.” She added, “I see the world around me like his photographs.”

ALINA KULMAN B’21 tries to look down Ives Street in yellows and purples.

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DESIGN MALVIKA AGARWAL

B U L L E T I N

BITES OF PROVIDENCE

GoingS On Weekly Car Rally: Solidarity with Incarcerated Loved Ones 3:00–4:00 PM EST • Rhode Island Division of Motor Vehicles • Sunday, February 14

Providence Flea at the Farm Fresh RI Market Hall 11:00 AM–3:00 PM EST • 10 Sims Avenue, Farm Fresh RI Market Hall • Sunday, February 14

A weekly car rally from the Division of Motor Vehicles to the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions has been organized by the family members of incarcerated people for the next couple of months to demand a robust response from the RI government over the massive COVID outbreaks within RI prisons. We at the Indy ask you to make some noise against the racialized injustice that is preserved by the carceral system and the inequalities in healthcare that have been exposed by the pandemic.

To learn more, visit this Facebook event: https://fb.me/e/y37jBTHq.

This pandemic season, we at the Indy find ourselves afflicted by a curious, often uncontrollable desire to thrift shop. Luckily for us, we have Providence’s award-winning vintage flea market at our doorstep, where you can buy from local artisans, support small businesses and community non-profits, and indulge your whims, while shopping safely of course. Hope to see you there one of these Sundays!

For more information, follow @providenceflea on Instagram.

Winter Farmers Market at the Farm Fresh RI Market Hall 9:00 AM–1:00 PM EST • 10 Sims Avenue • Saturday, February 13 This is the inaugural wintertime farmers market in the valley neighborhood of Providence where you can buy an assortment of fresh produce from a variety of local small farmers. We at the Indy love supporting local businesses by buying sustainably sourced food. We ask you to do the same!

You will find all details at this link: https://fb.me/e/y37jBTHq.

Private Visions, Public Ideals—The Legacy of Howard Ben Tré 9:00 AM–1:00 PM EST • 475 Valley Street, Providence • Weekly on Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday until March 7, 2021 Howard Ben Tré is a former MFA student at RISD who is internationally acclaimed for his unique sculptures and large-scale works of art. This exhibition, in addition to honoring his life and accomplishments through a display of his work, will also feature lectures, receptions and talks.

For more information, visit: https://www.goprovidence.com/event/ private-visions-public-ideals-%26%238211%3b-the-legacy-of-howardben-tr%c3%a9/40372.

Mutual Aid & Bail Funds Fang Community Bail Fund The FANG community is an abolitionist group that seeks to free folks being held in jails in Rhode Island and Massachusetts because they cannot afford bail. As the COVID pandemic has resulted in massive outbreaks within prisons, this work has found renewed importance. To oppose the cash bail system, an oppressive tool utilized by the carceral and capitalist prison industrial complex, you can donate via the CashApp at $fangbailfund, or at this link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ fangbailfund.

AMOR Community COVID-19 Support

Project LETS Trauma Healing Fund for Black Folks

The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance’s fundraiser helps purchase basic necessities such as food, cleaning and sanitation supplies, and formula, as well as provides direct financial support for childcare, housing, and other basic needs for the most marginalized of our community, including undocumented people, laborers, and people with chronic illness.

You can donate at this link: https://gofund. me/09e8b76b.

A Disability Justice organization, Project LETS seeks to prioritize solidarity in action and redistribute funds to those who are most directly impacted by structural violence. This fund centers the healing needs of Black folks, especially those who are disabled, queer, and trans.

Donate at www.PayPal.me/projectlets or Venmo @projectlets.

Some Restaurants We Recommend Aleppo Sweets

Chengdu Taste

Garden of Eve

A 2019 nominee for America’s best new restaurants, this Syrian cafe and bakery on Ives Street, owned

by Reem and Youssef Akhtarini— resettled Syrian refugees in Rhode Island—is one of the hottest spots in town, especially if you have a soft corner for buttery, flaky baked desserts like many Indy staff.

An authentic Szechuan-style restaurant now offering takeout, located at 495 Smith Street in

One of Providence’s few Haitian restaurants, this family-owned-andoperated restaurant on Federal Hill, is renowned for its oxtails and jerk chicken. Call in to pick up some of the best Carribean food you can dig into in New England.

Jahunger A restaurant at Fox Point that serves Uyghur cuisine. Yelp has been inundated with rave reviews by Indy staffers about Jahunger’s in-house special noodles and it’s fruit tea.

The Bulletin Board is a space for grassroots organizers, local small business owners, and other community members to collectively list events, businesses, and mobilize support for direct action against structural violence in Providence. Please write to us at indy@gmail.com if you want to plug your event.

BITES OF PROVIDENCE

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DEAR INDY