The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 8 by College Hill Independent

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 8 2 APR 2021

STAFF

THIS ISSUE Constructions Matthew Cuschieri Week in High Spirits Karlos Bautista & Loughlin Neuert

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

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

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Playing the Blame Game Evan Lincoln Imagined Intimacies Chong Jing Gan In the Confessional Drake Rebman Aposematism Olive Huang

COVER 02 WEEK IN REVIEW 03 S&T 05 ARTS 07 LIT 08 EPHEMERA

WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston LITERARY Audrey Buhain Alisa Caira

09 FEATS

FEATS Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger Emily Rust

Is it love poems: reflective nostalgia Madeleine Amavilah

DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn

Disability Justice and the Project of Abolition Jack Doughty & Rose Houglet

Quiet Fires Alex Valenti

METRO

The Invisible Burden Antonia Huth

NEWS

at the drop of a head Gala Prudent

April Fools Edition Gemma Sack, Cal Turner & Sara Van Horn

DEAR INDY

Francis Wayland, Economics Textbook Bilal Memon

LIT METRO

EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

FROM THE EDITORS If I get three hours of sleep and then drink four cups of coffee, I’m usually semi-functional the following day. The only sign that anything is off is the dark bags that form under my eyes. One time, they got so dark that the man serving me espresso told me I had soot on my face. There are many types of bags: love bag, sex bag, money bag, brown paper bag, whiskey bag, doing no one any good bag. It doesn’t seem fair that in some places, there are slim bag selections, while in others there are too many bags to choose from. Baguette bag. Bucket bag. Muff bag. Saddle bag. Wash bag. Duffel bag. Barrel bag. Battle bag. Bracelet bag. Guitar bag. Army bag. Garment bag. Tennis bag. Carpet bag. Diaper bag. Garbage bag. Camera bag. Messenger bag. Bowling bag. Beach bag. Hand bag. Ziplock bag. Shoulder bag. Lunch bag. Coin bag. Belt bag. Grocery bag. Tote bag. Sometimes, when I’m sad, my mom gives me apple pie in an Indy tote. - NS

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 Evelyn Tan Joyce Tullis Floria Tsui Dorothy Zhang

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Matthew Cuschieri Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo 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 Sacha Sloan 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 Audrey Buhain

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.

WEEK IN REVIEW TEXT KARLOS BAUTISTA + LOUGHLIN NEUERT

WEEK IN HIGH SPIRITS Paranormal Probes

below, the red spirit wasn’t a red spirit at all but horror much worse: an actress in a kitschy student film production. She threw on a black coat over her red costume and held a banana in her hand, watching the playback on the director’s camera. Defeated, deflated, I grimaced at the PIU plans in front of me while the all-too-human red spirit belted out three more screams for the next take. The paranormal activity that we had sought after for so long was in fact an artistic expression of local college students. Subsequently, PIU’s funding will be relegated to our Arts Team, leaving local ghosts to wreak havoc unencumbered by pesky student investigators, and artists free as ever to scream outside St. Stephens before 9 AM. - KB

Bongcloud; Counter Bongcloud Gambit; Hotbox Variation Last month, two of the world’s strongest grandmasters lit the chess world on fire. Their game was short and ended in a draw, but it will be remembered forever as the first grandmaster-level tournament game to employ a joke opening strategy: The Bongcloud. The Bongcloud is defined by white playing their King forward, to the e2 square, on the second move. The move flies in the face of all chess principles and logic, endangering one’s own King for no good reason. It’s so silly, you would have to be smoking something to play it. Hence the name. The opening has long enjoyed a cult following online. Within a game based on rigid and unchanging principles, the appeal of the counterculture stoner approach is clear; avoiding getting lost in the weeds of chess’ hundreds of rank-and-file named openings. The Ruy Lopez? Too boring! The Sicilian? Too sober! The Queen’s Gambit? Overdone! When faced with the dizzying scale of establishment chess theory, going forward with admittedly clouded judgement seems almost freeing. It would be these two players, World Champions Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, to blaze this new trail. Carlsen and Nakamura are two of the most public-facing figures in the chess community. Though other commentators and streamers enjoy a great following: Anna Rudolf, Eric Rosen, Alexandra Botez, and Daniel Naroditsky to name a few, Carlsen and Nakamura are by far the strongest players to consistently reach out to amateurs and beginners through their content. Any game between the two is a must-see event, and they could be sure that their joke had a ready audience. Carlsen and Nakamura have played Bongclouds in dozens of unofficial, online matches, but nobody thought they would bring such an idea to an actual tournament, until Carlsen put his hand on his king and inched it forward, that is. The initial Bongcloud move had commentators cackling with laughter, but Hikaru’s response turned Magnus’ joke into a joint effort. He built upon the world’s first official Bongcloud with the world’s first counter-Bongcloud, playing his King forward as well.

The two, it seems, had been puffing and passing together. Chess forum users across the internet have rallied behind a shared nomenclature for the opening: The Bongcloud Counter-Gambit—Hotbox Variation. We at the College Hill Independent recommend this nomenclature and eagerly await new strains of Bongcloud theory. Chess.com’s database lists the March 15 game as the only time in history that a grandmaster has played Ke2 on their second move in an official game. Most games become unique sometime around the twelfth move; this one diverged from recorded chess history on white’s second. Online proponents of the Bongcloud, those in the stoner-rebel-chessplayer universe, were shocked to wake up on March 16 to see that they had gone ‘mainstream.’ Not all in the chess community welcomed the Hotbox Variation. Antonio Radić, who runs the world’s most popular chess-themed Youtube page, has built a subscriber base of over a million people by covering high-profile chess games in detail. His

analysis is dense, and his videos average out at 15 minutes. His upload on March 15, “First Time Chess Made Me Sad,” shows his revulsion to Nakamura and Carlsen’s joke: “This isn’t the way guys, this just isn’t how you do it,” he says. Radic, it seems, just says no to both bongs and clouds. For every sad Radić, there are countless overjoyed Bongcloud afficianadoes. The current top post on r/anarchychess, a major chess memes subreddit, is a quick video of the game, entitled “the greatest moment in chess history.” The convergence of high society with high society underscores a promising direction for the game. Chess is getting messier, funnier, and less rigid—it’s top players are learning not to take themselves too seriously.

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

Allan Poe’s ghost was purportedly looking for that one copy of that one novel that’s out of stock on Amazon. It turned out to just be a raven visitor, caught inside the pristine library. One morning, preparing for PIU’s next investigation into the Ratty, I looked across the street at St. Stephen’s through the window of my little room. A strange site: a man with a cigarette, book, and brown boots sat reading in front of one of the church’s doors. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. When I got back to my window, I noticed the man now had a companion, a woman clad all in red. I ran to grab my ghost camera. Rummaging through my closet, I heard a scream. The spirit’s first victim? Was this it? Who would break the story the Indy’s loyal readers had been waiting so patiently for? I had to find the camera. But the spirit was gone! I timidly approached my window sill and saw that directly

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

This month, the faithful returned to in-person worship at St. Stephen’s Church in Providence. While the pandemic halted live worship last March, the last weeks have seen a loosening of restrictions to allow for more indoor capacity, up to 75 percent, in tandem with more vaccinations. On Sundays, a consistent and modest-sized crowd of believers—faces covered—spill out of the church’s two doors once the service is over. Unbeknownst to the worshippers, new church goers joined their ranks while the church lay dormant. After a steady stream of paranormal activity reports, the College Hill Independent’s Paranormal Investigative Unit (PIU) started nightly stake-outs at St. Stephens, along with other haunts in Providence, in hopes of exposing the unwelcome spirits. Equipped with headlamps, night-vision cameras, ectoplasm detectors, spectre-sensors, Ouija boards, tarot cards, and trip wires, PIU spent night after night bundled up between the church’s pews. Other than the rain, snow, and a lone ambulance siren, no ghostly presence graced us. Satan’s hour—that’s 3 AM for our less superstitious readers—summoned no demons; rather, it welcomed inebriated Wriston residents to urinate on the statue of Augustus Caesar in front of the nearby Sharpe Refectory. Disheartened, dismayed, and deprived of sleep, PIU closed its investigation into St. Stephen’s this month following the return of human visitors. Other PIU projects have similarly failed to produce results: at the Providence Athenaeum, one lead claimed Edgar

- LN

S+T ILLUSTRATION GEMMA BRAND-WOLF TEXT EVAN LINCOLN DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

In June of 1988 during the height of the AIDS epidemic, famed gay playwright and HIV/AIDS activist Larry Kramer wrote an open letter to American National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, telling him, quite bluntly, “you are a murderer.” Kramer did not mince words in calling him a “despicable Reagan-era holdover” and a “drug company mouthpiece” due toin the fact that Dr. Fauci oversaw clinical trials of HIV/ AIDS treatments that did not appear to be making much forward progress. For Kramer and many HIV/AIDS activists alike, Dr. Fauci had blood on his hands in his apprehensive and sluggish response to the epidemic. “The fact that your clinical trials aren’’t meant to save our lives is no secret,” Kramer stated, signaling that underneath the empirical face of state clinical trials were politically-motivated delays that were actively causingleading to death— violence in the name of science. Today, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci is a hero. For many Americans, Fauci provided psychological relief with his level-headed, science-backed public health information campaign against an ill-prepared White House. But for Kramer in the eighties, Fauci’s appeals to scientific truths—that appease the public today—were back then a destructive deflection, a state -method of calling upon the objectivity of science to avoid accountability for thousands of lost lives. The mass deaths in the AIDS epidemic and the COVID pandemic can be attributed to governmental failures. Yet, governments seem to be so astute at convincing the public to point the finger elsewhere. The AIDS crisis was easily blamed on the sexual practices of gay men—from condomless sex to bathhouses, gay sex was readily moralized to be socially-harmful in its opposition to marital, reproductive heterosexual sex. In the case of Fauci, state negligence could be rationalized in the form of lengthy and ineffective ‘clinical trials.’ Both public health crises—COVID and HIV/AIDS—demonstrate that governments are quick to place the burden of viral spread onto individuals, especially the society’s most vulnerable, and the public takes on this state disciplinary power through the policing of others. Such is the case for the HIV-prevention

PLAYING THE BLAME GAME pill PrEP, a potentially-life saving drug whose reluctant rollout can be tied back to state-inspired moral policing. +++ In October 2020, the National Health Service of England made PrEP publically available, a stark development for communities vulnerable to HIV transmission. But the NHS’s rollout was originally announced to be in March 2020, with plans to begin the rollout a month later, but according to the NHS, COVID put a hamper on things. Those waiting for the release of PrEP in England were quite familiar with delay—instead of making PrEP available immediately upon its release, NHS England instituted (questionably) a three-year clinical trial to determine the logistics of the rollout. Four years of waiting for communities vulnerable to HIV, and the NHS did not appear to mind. PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, is an HIV-prevention pill that, if taken once -daily, can prevent sexual transmission of HIV at a rate of over 99 percent. Upon its discovery in 2016, PrEP marked a specific breakthrough for gay men and trans people, whose communities had been devasted during the AIDS crisis as a result of a negligent

and phobic public health response. Chiefly, the pill proposed the possibility for the elimination of HIV-transmission fears in gay sexual subjectivity. More specifically, PrEP not only allowed for sex without HIV contraction but also permitted sex without the need for a condom, the original (but slightly less effective) HIV-prevention tool. Despite the fact that PrEP had a transformative potential for LGBTQ+ health, it was not immediately welcomed with open arms in queer communities. This was because condoms were instead viewed as an object of salvation against HIV—their physical barrier came to serve as a psychological barrier against HIV/AIDS. In the United States, those who took PrEP were initially dubbed “Truvada whores” (named after the market version of the pill, Truvada), in that taking the pill allowed them to engage in what was viewed as the gravest gay sin: condomless sex. PrEP and condoms can be used together to prevent both HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections, but PrEP’s potentiality for condomless ‘risky’ sex was enough for it to feel like a moral danger. These discourses trickled into the British public. In the Daily Mail in 2016, PrEP was framed as a ‘promiscuity pill’ whose users participated in risky, devious sex practices. PrEP, in this way, was

S+T

The moral politics of HIV-prevention during the COVID pandemic seen to be a hedonistic medium for immoral sex, rather than a public health-oriented prevention mechanism. Sex with condoms had been graced with such a virtuosity that its abandonment conjured the agony of the AIDS epidemic. This misplaced grief led prominent British AIDS charities to decry that PrEP as an HIV-prevention tool was in fact “dangerous” to queer communities. Quite bleakly, the homophobic revulsion towards “promiscous” gay sex during the AIDS crisis became subsumed into the sexual politics of gay men today. Just as the state weaponized these sexual moralizations to justify their lack of public health action during the AIDS epidemic, these gay men laid the groundwork for the British government to do just the same with PrEP. The NHS England seemed persuaded by these British AIDS charities. In the UK, new drugs, such as PrEP, must receive federal funding for the public to receive them at no cost. And the NHS

had no intention to fund PrEP. An NHS spokesperson stated that funding PrEP would hinder the development of other treatments. Despite the fact that PrEP did not necessarily prevent the funding of any other medication specifically, the spokesperson stated that PrEP could take away funding for children’s cystic fibrosis treatment, falsely pitting the purity and innocence of children against queer communities. This spokesperson’s evocation of children sharpened the contrast of the ‘promiscuity pill’ against a sexually-pure heterosexual public. Thankfully, in 2016, a British High Court ordered that the NHS England was required to fund PrEP. In their coverage of the decision, the Daily Mail was quick to point attention to the £20 million in annual ‘taxpayer money’ that was required to make PrEP available. Nevertheless, the NHS still held their ‘uncertainties’ over how to effectively roll out PrEP, prompting them to initiate the three-year long Impact Trial, leaving queer communities further in suspense. The Impact Trial, according to the NHS England, aimed to provide quantitative research to plan for an effective distribution of the drug. The trial allowed 26,000 participants who came from groups designated to be the most “at-risk” for HIV transmission: men who have sex with men, trans people, and people whose partners live with HIV. The 26,000 figure was a mere fraction of the total populations of these communities and excluded those who were not deemed to fit within these specific risk categories, leaving thousands waiting in line or excluded altogether. All in all, the Impact Trial did not seem incredibly necessary. This was certainly the position of LGBTQ+ activists, who repeatedly advocated for an immediate end to the trial. ACT UP London held a series of protests that lead with the slogan #WeWantPrEPNow, demanding for PrEP’s public availability. According to a doctor from the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, nine men contracted HIV while waiting to be placed on the trial by the time it ended in early 2020. F, and for these activists, was each was a transmission that could have been prevented. The Impact Trial vividly echoes Larry Kramer’s criticism of the American clinical trials during the AIDS crisis. The trials justify state public health apprehension both through their scientific rationalism and their mobilization of sexual moralism, reducing the state’s obligation to promptly respond to HIV/AIDS. +++ COVID became a rife cultural moment for the belief that viral transmission oughtis to be blamed on each other. New videos and images of large maskless gatherings seemed to go viral on social media each week, met with indignant responses at the perceived irresponsibility and recklessness of those not following proper public health guidelines. Anti-maskers and COVID-deniers became the premier source of condemnation for the hundreds of thousands of deaths to the virus, not the lackluster state public health response. Similarly for HIV, the transfer of state public health responsibilities to its people can be reflected today in the criminalization of individuals that do not disclose their HIV status to sexual partners. In some ways, this criminalization is the most insidious outcome of the state’s abdication of public health accountability—why are individuals transmitting the virus the criminals and not the government that fails to take necessary efforts to prevent transmission? At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in May 2020, the 56 Dean Street sexual health clinic in London (—England’s most prominent gay health organization) —proclaimed in a Guardian article that the pandemic raised their hopes at the possibility of an “end to transmission of HIV.” Implicit in their claims is the fantasy that people were going to stop hooking up with strangers during lockdown, leading to a decrease in HIV transmission rates. However, one could have easily logged -in to Grindr to realize this was not the case. But this excitement about a public that does not have sex with strangers in order to prevent HIV and COVID reflects a specific ideology that the prevention of viral transmission is somehow a completely individual responsibility. 56 Dean Street never mentions PrEP as a manner to lower HIV transmission rates, even though PrEP poses a

more convincing possibility forof an ‘end’ to HIV. In this way, the British government is readily able to evade responsibility for public HIV-prevention when the blame is placed upon sexual deviants or lockdown-defiers. Around the end of 2020, thean Instagram account named @GaysOverCovid rose to prominence through its name-and-shame style exposé of gay men engaging in parties or other large social gatherings. The account accrued such a following that it received a feature on Good Morning America, to a national heterosexual public. @GaysOverCovid was a hit because its moral project was sound: it internalized homophobic tropes of gay men as ultimately selfish in a never-ending quest to experience socially-transgressive pleasure, in other words, as moral antagonists to heterosexual society. In other words, @GaysOverCovid extendedtook the same set of morals that were used to demonize gay men during the AIDS epidemic and extended them to gay social and sexual behavior under COVID. A most gruesome but illustrative example of this moral history was displayed in the (now-deleted) Boston offshoot of @GaysOverCovid, whichwho publicly disclosed the HIV-positive status of a gay male partier. If it was not clear in their constant celebration of cops shutting down gay parties, @GaysOverCovid was fully-aligned with the state’s project of blame game-as-deflection of responsibility. As such, the same moral politics were at play during the AIDS crisis and are most likely behind NHS England’s PrEP rollout delays, as these discourses are fertile grounds to evade state accountability. If individuals are responsible for preventing HIV, the state does not have to. If gay men’s sexual and social practices are not always in-line with the state’s preventative mandates, they become antagonistic to the state. If individuals are supposedly defying the state’s public health response, the state “no longer” has to help them (when truly, they were never helped in the first place). NHS England could take the expense of delaying the PrEP rollout through the Impact Trial because they framed PrEP users as socially-irresponsible and not warranting preventative assistance from the state. NHS England could further delay the PrEP rollout during COVID because it was gay men’s interpersonal responsibility to abide by lockdown orders and not have sex with one another. Furthermore, NHS England participated in a larger phenomenon of casting queer people as immoral, socially-antagonistic others: they are supposedly separate from the “children” that need cystic fibrosis treatment and the, they are separate from “taxpayers” that are burdened in their funding of PrEP. As if all of these categories were mutually exclusive—--but homophobic moral projects need not make sense to be effective. +++ What we can and must learn from the AIDS epidemic is that moral discourses of blame and shame will always trickle down to society’’s most marginalized. People, regardless of sexual orientation, have ‘risky’ sex practices that go against public health guildelines of ‘safe’ sex. But the danger arrives when when sex becomes moralized around these binaries of risky vs. responsible, safe vs. unsafe: the sex practices that were made visible by the AIDS epidemic served to culturally associate gay men’s entire personhood with immoral, abberant sexuality. These moral legacies haunt the HIV-prevention efforts of today, where gay men still have not succesfuly eliminated HIV-stigma from the discourse of gay sexuality to the extent that a tranformative pill like PrEP could be uncontroversial. As COVID continues to disproportionately affect working-class communities of color, our shamings and call-outs do no good to vulnerable people, if not at times direct harm. They merely serve to further a state project of violence. Public health responses must be compassionate, just as we must be compassionate towards one another during epidemics and pandemics. EVAN LINCOLN B’21 thinks it’s time for you to unfollow @GaysOverCovid.

IMAGINED IN Visions of queer cinema in Your Name Engraved Herein

DESIGN MICHELLE SONG

ILLUSTRATION CHONG JING GAN

ARTS

content warning: article includes discussions of homophobia. 你不觉得在电影里面比人生好玩的多吗？ Don’t you think things inside films are more fun than in real life? +++ Four schoolboys stand stiffly at attention in front of two parallel rows of bunk beds as their housemaster and disciplinarian walks through the thin space between them, conducting a nighttime room inspection. Unbeknownst to him, though, a fifth figure who does not belong here has silently slipped into the room, stealthily following behind him. This truant boy invisibly slips amongst the other boys as the face of authority turns to scan the room once more before leaving. The other boys shove the newcomer angrily—are you trying to get us all in trouble? He ignores them and sidles up to one boy, who’s been staring at him the whole time. “Birdy?” the other boy asks. Birdy flashes a grin at him—at A-Han, the boy he’s come to see. This image: of the invisible, rule-breaking boy, hiding behind authority’s back to see the boy he loves, will accumulate enormous symbolic weight in 刻在你心底的名字, or Your Name Engraved Herein (dir. Patrick Kuang-Hui Liu). The film tells the story of Birdy and A-Han, two boys who meet in a strict Christian high school and fall for each other. But they can never openly express their love, which lingers unspoken in the air between them. It will never fully materialize; it is slowly suffocated by the schoolmates who bully and harass queer boys and the teachers who punish and scold students into conformity. Too many stories of queer love end on a similar note of tragedy, in which relationships irreparably fall apart and lovers tearfully part ways. When repeated ad nauseam, they become a trope—more than that, a trap, in which tragedy seems like an inevitable fate that awaits queer love, precluding the possibility of happiness and of alternative ways of queer relation and being. But in Your Name Engraved Herein, there are certain moments when the film reaches outside of the confines of itself toward a glimmer of something beautiful, pushing through the very surface of the cinema screen to grasp at a vision of what could be. In these moments of rupture, when the fourth wall falls, the film examines its place in a lineage of films that represent queer love and lives. It challenges the same stereotypes and tropes of queer stories that it also reproduces, and resists the same old tired tragic endings that are imposed upon queer love by cisheteronormativity. It taps into that innate power of stories—the power to imagine—and imagines a different relationship between film and life, between desire and reality.

TEXT CHONG JING GAN

+++

Half an hour into the film, A-Han and Birdy, in a spurt of mischievous teenage fun, trespass into a dusty storage backroom in a cinema, cluttered with old film reels lining shelves along the walls and stacked along the floor. In the middle, a few rows of wooden chairs are arranged before a screen. Birdy turns on the projector, flooding the screen with a blank white rectangle of flickering light. The only sound you can hear is the quiet whirring of the film gate and shutter. Birdy wanders wondrously right in front of the screen, spinning in a circle with his hands out-

stretched, basking in the glow. Still standing next to the projector, A-Han stretches a curious hand, index finger outstretched, before the projector lens, casting a shadow-puppet-hand on the screen, where Birdy stands. With the index finger, he playfully beckons Birdy over to his hand, and his shadow-finger scratches Birdy’s head. They are standing across the room from one another, but in the eye of the camera, with A-Han in the foreground and Birdy in the background, they appear superimposed, flattened against the screen into a single plane. Caught up in the theatrical playfulness of this moment, of being before and on a screen, Birdy turns to the left, throws out a melodramatic arm, his face contorted in faux-anguish, and proclaims seriously: 直到现在，我没有忘记你当时的样子。Even until now, I haven’t forgotten the way you looked back then. A-Han stares at Birdy, suddenly enraptured. We cut back to Birdy as he continues—still speaking, to the left, to a person we can’t see, 不要跟我玩捉迷藏了。你简直...你简直就是在虐待我嘛。Stop playing hide-and-seek with me. You’re practically… practically abusing me. He spins, with a flourish, so that he’s now acting as the other, henceforth invisible character, his face now one of hesitant concern, his voice a wavering, higher pitch. 你...你什么意思？What...what do you mean? Another spin, arm extended once more. 只有傻瓜才不知道我的意思。Only a fool wouldn’t know what I mean. We see A-Han, his head tilted to a side, his eyes fixed on Birdy, but gazing far away. Birdy forces his eyelids shut and puckers his lips into a silver screen kiss, and suddenly, A-Han’s shadow-hand is there, fingers pursed into a makeshift mouth, brushing against Birdy’s lips on the white screen, and we see A-Han, in his seat, leaning forward, his lips forming a kiss to match Birdy’s. The kiss breaks, and Birdy spins around as if he’s felt something, a surprised smile spreading across his face, his eyes meeting A-Han’s. A-Han and Birdy are separated by the length of the room, but on the cinematic screen, for a brief moment, they meet, if only in a split-second of shadow and skin. Through performance, puppetry, and play, the boys stumble into feelings that they haven’t been allowed to feel yet. As one shot cut to the other, their bodies were stitched together on the screen, and in that glowing rectangle of fantasy they found a space where their unspoken queerness could be played out, played with. Afterward, Birdy tells A-Han that he wants to make strange films because they’re more fun than real life. As he speaks, his face is aglow, lit by the projector’s light, insistently living in that world of play-pretend where he can be as strange, as queer, as he wants. After all, Birdy belongs to film, not the real world. Birdy is a nickname taken from the eponymous character of the 1984 film Birdy, which portrays the intimate friendship between two men (played by Michael Modine and Nicolas Cage) as they seek to escape their own traumatic experiences of war. His name marks Your Name Engraved Herein’s intertextual connections to other films, and to the genre of queer cinema. By reincarnating the friendship of Birdy in the love of A-Han and Birdy, Your Name Engraved Herein unearths a queer reading of that film, as the two Birdy’s become mirror images of one another—in the insanity of Michael Modine’s character, our Birdy sees himself, and the way that his queerness is perceived as aberrant by those around him. And so he escapes into the solace of his fictional namesake, stretching out his arms on the back of A-Han’s motorcycle, screaming into the wind, imagining flight, imagining an escape. But this escape will remain an image, a fantasy,

unable to materialize into life. For, when A-Han and Birdy grow closer and more affectionate, A-Han’s friends, who have growing suspicions that Birdy is trying to seduce their allegedly straight friend, corner him on the upper floors of a school building to give him a beating. A-Han hears a sudden commotion and rushes upstairs to see Birdy squirm free of his attackers and clamber up on a ledge. The last feature on his face is a wild grin. Then he turns, and flapping his wings wildly like Michael Modine, leaps off the edge. Shouting in horror, A-Han rushes to the ledge and peers over. But, much like in the ending of Birdy, he looks down to see Birdy alive and unscathed, getting to his feet on the ground. At first, it seems as if Birdy has truly survived, that his fantasies have bled over into the real world and enabled him to defy the laws and norms of the world and escape death. But, as the film progresses and Birdy grows colder and colder toward A-Han and enters into a heterosexual relationship, it becomes clear that the Birdy who lived in the movies, and not real life, the queer, strange, crazy Birdy, did not walk away from the fall. The cost of surviving that fall was the death of Birdy’s queerness. After A-Han graduates, before he leaves for college, he calls Birdy one last time, and plays him a love song that he wrote for him—the theme song of the film, which shares its title. They clutch the receivers tightly in their hands, as if they could imagine they were holding one another—but in the end, the fantasy dissolves, and all they have is that—a disembodied voice, a song, on the other end of the telephone. +++ Following that final phone call, the film abruptly jumps forward in time. A-Han, now a middle-aged man, finds himself in Canada to pay his respects to Father Oliver, a priest who mentored both him and Birdy in their high school days. He visits Niagara Falls alone. As the thunderous cascade of water fill the frame, Your Name Engraved Herein once more moves itself into relation to another piece of queer cinema—this time, the 1997 film Happy Together (dir. Wong Kar Wai), considered one of the seminal queer works of its decade. In Happy Together, the Iguazu Falls represent an unachievable ideal of the relationship between the two protagonists, a destination they were never able to reach together. They share a cramped room in which a table lamp, on which an image of the falls is painted, quietly fills the background. The lamp is a motion lamp, a magical mechanical wonder dating back to the 1950s in which rotating sheets of metal stencils cause the image on the lamp to appear to be moving, the water falling gently and silently, as if it’s a film screen. In this lamp, Happy Together, like Your Name Engraved Herein, steps into metacinematic commentary, and suggests that the realm of cinema corresponds to fictional ideals and fantasies that offer reprieve from the mundane struggles of material life. When one of Happy Together’s protagonists finally journeys to the falls alone, the camera cuts to a birds’-eye view shot that circles around the falls from above in a spiralling motion, mimicking the spinning circular motion of the lamp. The omniscient, floating perspective of the shot makes it clear that this isn’t an embodied, realistic vision of the falls, but rather a beautifully heightened visualization of the same yearning fantasy of the lamp. But you can feel the trembling shudder of the pounding water, feel the cool wash of disintegrated water droplets flung skyward into your face. That’s the beauty of the moving image—it temptingly approximates the

ARTS

NTIMACIES temporality, motion, and sensuality of life, an illusion that approaches reality in an asymptote. But it will never quite meet it. In the shot, the water falls into an unseen abyss, returning only upward plumes of gently dissipating mist and spray, transforming into a figurative and evocative portrait of loss—of love and its potentiality slipping away, returning only the immaterial, ephemeral mist, an unsteady, wavering image or screen that disappears as quickly as it appears. +++ Together, Happy Together and Your Name Engraved Herein seem to share a common understanding of the ambivalent and conflicted operation of queer cinema. On one hand, it is a means to beautifully and evocatively materialize that which is forbidden. In moving images, inexpressible desires, taboo fantasies, and suppressed queer romances are given beautiful, artful form. On the other hand, the impermanent nature of the cinematic image painfully acknowledges the difficulty of actualising such idealistic images of intimacy and love in societies in which non-normative relationships remain taboo and are subject to oppression by cis-heteronormative structures of power. But in its ending, Your Name Engraved Herein chooses to reject this pessimistic and bitter dissolution of the filmic image. It chooses to let A-Han and Birdy step back into that world of fantasy together once more. Film is not merely conceptualised as an escape, a brief distraction from reality, but rather something that does work to reality, that reckons and grapples with it while also imagining a better version of it: a space for healing, and for hope. At the end of the film, in Canada, A-Han unexpectedly bumps into Birdy—who has also come to Canada to pay his respects to Father Oliver—for the first time since high school. From the moment that

they meet, the last ten minutes of the film consist of two long shots that track A-Han and Birdy together as they walk through the empty streets in the hours before dawn, awkwardly talking and rediscovering one another, so many years distanced from that initial love, that initial pain. In those long, contemplative shots, they are not separated into different frames, different gazes, different images of one another—they share the space of the frame, share this image, in which they are bound together by mutual gazes, mutual understandings. They finally arrive at A-Han’s hotel, and part ways—but as Birdy turns to leave, alone, A-Han bounds back down the stairs and breathlessly meets him. 我再陪你走一段好了。 I’ll walk with you again, for a while more. The walk will end, the credits will roll, and the film will fade to darkness, but then again, films don’t have to obey the same kind of temporality that we do. In the filmic image, temporary moments that come and go, like a mist of water ascending to the sky, are immortalized in beauty, preserved in the mind’s eye forever, even as they have also passed from sight. In films, the inevitabilities of time can be reversed, and the past can be re-lived, again, for a while more. At this moment, Birdy and A-Han abruptly stop and turn, both hearing something, and the camera swivels, following their gaze, only to see, on the empty streets, their younger high school selves, sauntering together, singing the song that A-Han would sing to Birdy years later, only now singing it together, singing it to one another. It’s a moment of the past that could never have happened, an impossible, beautiful vision. But it’s an image that they are both creating together, sharing in the eye of their mind, within the space of the cinematic image. This final shot also transcends a different kind of time, stitching together a history of Birdy, Happy Together, and now, Your Name Engraved Herein. It

calls on us to re-examine those films, to challenge the assumption that Birdy’s escape and the Iguazu Falls can only ever be escapist fantasies of impossible realities that are unchangeable parts of the past. Through the very artistic gesture that it enacts—building on these past films to create something new—Your Name Engraved Herein suggests that cinematic images can proffer resolutions toward the past in order to project, into the future, new possibilities. These images have yet to materialize into reality. But it is exactly this immaterial, ephemeral nature that fills these images with powerful potentiality, with the excitement and desire of a fantasy. As the two young lovers sing, laughing at one another, the unspoken hurt and pain of their past is replaced by declarations of love. Through song, they confess their deepest, unspoken feelings. From a history that didn’t allow this relationship to exist, the two boys draw together the pieces and rebuild a world of love together. And as the wounds of the past are healed, the future of Birdy and A-Han is opened up, built on this vision of what could have been, what still, now, could be. CHONG JING GAN B’23 wishes he could engrave all those names in his heart.

IN THE CONFESSIONAL

TEXT DRAKE REBMAN

DESIGN OWEN MCCALLUM-KEELER

ILLUSTRATION OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

LIT

Behind a wooden screen

I want to go back to the beginning to make a full account, to detail the scope of the sin, and when I finish speaking I hope to have explained myself in my entirety with the hope of self-clarity, if not forgiveness. I know full well that the question of forgiveness is dependent on my own repentance, a repentance which I suspect, if I do feel it, will only be at the very end of my confession, when I myself have confronted the full facts, the depth of my deepest sin, told to you, my peer, a fellow priest, a stranger behind a wooden screen, in a hushed tone so that whoever waiting to confess, not ten feet away, not compelled to keep my confession secret, cannot hear it—my quiet tale of pain. When I had just taken Holy Orders and begun as junior pastor at St. Therese of Lisieux, the senior pastor, Michael Donovan, received an invitation from Bishop Immot to attend a multi-faith conference in Chicago. It was April, and the conference was in early July. If you know Father Donovan, you will recall moments of restrained hostility toward the more ecumenical aspects of Vatican II, a comment or two about “that liberal, Paul VI.” It was because of this prejudice that I was surprised at his own enthusiasm for attending the conference. One day, after assisting in a Mass that Father Donovan gave, I approached him in the sacristy and asked, as he took off his chasuble, why he was so excited to attend. In a very polite manner, I expressed my surprise concerning the conflict between such a Nostra Aetate-style exercise and his own pre-Vatican II beliefs. Behind a pair of very thick glasses, Father Donovan’s watery eyes peered back at me. “Yes, I understand your confusion. At your age, the loneliness of the priest’s life was not totally clear to me either. I do have views that I cannot shake, though I certainly no longer include them in my homilies, and those views have not, do not, and will not bring me comfort as speaking to my peers does. Even you, John, though I enjoy your company, I must treat as a mentee. In short, I want to go to that conference so that I may speak to people not as a priest, but as myself.” Three days after my conversation with Father Donovan, the police named him as a person of interest in a sex trafficking case. Not allowed to leave town, he instructed me to take his place at the conference. He was eventually acquitted, but from then on I always saw a touch of remorse in those pale blue eyes. For the victims, for himself, for me—I do not know. So, in July of 2009 I drove with two Dominican friars and another parish priest up to Chicago and spent five days attending lectures, panels, and discussions with ministers, rabbis, imams, Hindu leaders, Buddhist monks, and Baha’i assembly members. I met Adam at a talk he gave on postcolonial views of Zionism in the United States. I approached him afterwards, told him I lived in St. Louis as well, and asked about his own experience, as a rabbi and professor at a state university nearby, of what college students think of the subject. Later that night, I ran into him again at a bar close to my hotel. My travel partners and I went as a group and saw him there with another rabbi, so we invited them over to our booth. I sometimes think, in odd moments, about how it looked, these clergymen all together in a booth, drinking and talking about our parishes and temples, their quirks and characters, money problems, personnel issues, and so on. We were conspicuous enough certainly; only the rabbis and Brother Rhinehardt, one of the Dominican friars, had remembered to bring casual clothes. Adam had brought a yarmulke in his backpack and put it on so we wouldn’t feel self-conscious. He was attractive: tall, thin, curly black hair, ocean blue eyes. Of course neither of us made any indication of that fact or the fact that he thought I was attractive. In any case, we all as a group made an agreement to meet at the same bar the next two nights. Those were my first encounters with Adam. As a group, there was nothing out of place. Special friendships are of course discouraged among clergy and seminarians, but a rabbi friend is a connection between faiths, something to be celebrated in our modern age. To have coffee then is not suspicious,

and in leisure hours we would meet and talk, always a fun sight to see in the coffeeshop, the priest and the rabbi talking and laughing. Our flirtations were always kept small. As clergy, we’re expected to keep ourselves to ourselves, so the smallest family anecdote or mention of an old hobby is amplified to the listener. Our love language consisted of banal personal details, every tidbit a brick in the tower of the other’s self. Perhaps not a love language, actually—perhaps a game. A game to avoid any impropriety, to fall in love without the other noticing. Together, at the coffee shop, or later at my parsonage, or his house, in public or in private, it didn’t matter, wearing our priest and rabbi costumes, we would act together—a beautiful improv show—that we were simply a priest and a rabbi discussing theological matters, two souls in pure intellectual congress. At one point we were walking in a park, five years after I’d become senior pastor at St. Therese of Lisieux, and I remarked that I was a synecdoche. Adam didn’t say anything until, stopping beside the park pathway, he asked, “How do you mean?” I said I meant that I, for my parishioners, was an extension of the Catholic Church, had transcended otherness, that when they speak to me they see only the Church and not the man, a duality even Jesus did not have. I said lately there were times when I myself couldn’t see the difference. It was a moment of total nakedness. Looking ahead out over the park’s small pond, Adam quietly responded, “I was thinking that what you and I are is representative of our sin.” I said I did not differentiate the two, my own self only as real as the sin was. And that was how the game ended. At that point the sin, our attraction, was acknowledged. What was left was commission, five years delayed, so we finished our turn around the park, got in Adam’s car, and drove to my parsonage. We had been there together before, so there was nothing to act suspicious about. It was daylight and the neighborhood knew us to be friends. Adam parked the car on the street, and we made love as an act of creation. Four more weekends we did this precisely. Two weeks ago was our sixth meeting; we met in the evening. I picked him up a few blocks from his house, and he lay down in the back seat, smelling of lavender, as we headed into my neighborhood. I parked in the garage. I’d bought a bottle of wine and the ingredients for pasta primavera and chocolate mousse, and we ate and talked. Our speech came more formally than usual, not quite able to get away from seriousness, and after dessert, having finished the bottle of wine, sitting across from each other at my plain wood table, my leg shaking despite being full and slightly intoxicated, through a tight mouth, my elbows on the table, my fists together almost as if praying, my chin on my fists, I told Adam that I loved him.

He said, “I love you, too.” At that moment the weight of the decision that had to be made, that I had to make, collapsed on me: to leave or to stay. To leave the church and stay with Adam or leave Adam and remain a priest, the only life I am trained for, the only life I’ve had for five years at St. Therese of Lisieux, a life I planned on living since I first entered seminary as an acne-ridden 18-year-old. The weight is still on me. I still have not decided, and to my knowledge neither has he. Our hand was almost forced that night, actually, when Adam and I went to sleep. At one thirty I was woken by footsteps downstairs. Adam wasn’t in bed, so I figured it was him and went down to check. He was in the living room, nude, shuffling slowly around the couch, mumbling, eyes half open, sleepwalking—the blinds up, in full view from the street, a new moon but harsh yellow streetlights. I hurried to close the blinds and waited for him to return to bed or stop sleepwalking, checking other blinds to make sure we were unseen then tailing behind him, he my sleeping human pantomime, he my lavender-smelling rabbi, he my beloved. I wish someone had seen. I wish I had been defrocked, just to get it over with. But now I am here in this confessional. Of course I have prayed about my sin. I have desired to be contrite and to be able to call Adam and tell him I would never see him again. I also desired to be blasphemous and leave the church. I have prayed for the former, and I have prayed for the latter. In return I received nothing, no guidance, not an echo. Largely I feel both contrite and blasphemous. Across town, in his own lonely apartment, Adam has done the same, the same endless moral caroming, having spoken to me with no other purpose than to know the other was doing the same, understanding that, with neither of us decided, there was no automatic decision. If Adam remains a rabbi then I, having no other option, remain a priest. The question was to remain a personal one. But now I am here, asking for forgiveness from a Church which has destroyed me, in this confessional, this confessional which has made me murmur my spiritual anguish in low tones to avoid being overheard, across from you, you who can through God absolve me of my sin, loving anyone but the Church, this sin which I may choose to become my life, my current life a life of lust and deception and love, a love which is two, two which are fighting, the fighting which will not stop until I have made a decision, this decision which I alone can make, this decision which I cannot possible hope to make, I being unreal, yet who still is now begging for forgiveness, because I am still the synecdoche, the Church, the corpse filled with sin, dogma, and loneliness! DRAKE REBMAN B’22 is not thinking about becoming a priest.

ARTWORK “APOSEMATISM” BY OLIVE HUANG

EPHEMERA

Francis Wayland, Economics Textbook

TEXT BILAL MEMON

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION JOYCE TULLIS

FEATS

Evangelicalism and political economy in the early nineteenth century

During the 1820s, increasingly unruly student behavior forced Brown University President Asa Messer to resign amidst controversy. Pranks on campus had escalated to the burning of privies and theft of chapel doors. Although Messer accused rival Brown Corporation members of encouraging students, he eventually made way for his successor, the disciplinarian Francis Wayland. A rising star among evangelical sermonizers, Wayland earned a reputation on Brown’s campus for his strict, no-nonsense attitude. He once attempted to subdue his “more than usually self willed” 15-month-old son by starving the infant until he succumbed to his father’s will. Brown alumnus Charles Congdon recalled, “He was disobeyed with fear and trembling, and the boldest did not care to encounter his frown.” Wayland’s legacy beyond the confines of College Hill rests on the remarkable success of his textbook, The Elements of Political Economy, published in 1837. Adapted from a mandatory course taught to Brown seniors, Elements was the most popular textbook on political economy up until the Civil War. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of students learned from Wayland, including Abraham Lincoln, who, according to his law partner, “ate up, digested, and assimilated” the text. The economic theories espoused in Elements were not especially innovative. The most prominent ideas in the text—division

of labor, comparative advantage, the labor theory of value—can all be traced to the writings of more prominent political economists. In some sections, Wayland copied almost verbatim from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Wayland’s distinct intervention lay in his ability to adapt the secular, and occasionally antireligious, discipline of political economy to a Christian worldview. During the early 19th century, America experienced a period of religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical movements, especially Methodist and Baptist, spread throughout the country, emphasizing the need for moral and spiritual renewal. Francis Wayland was a young medical student in Troy, New York when in 1815, he was touched by the revivals that swept across western and central New York (known as “burned-over districts” to represent the spiritual zeal that seemed to set the area on fire). Undergoing an evangelical rebirth, Wayland left medical school to enroll in seminary, eventually ministering at the First Baptist Church in Boston. Wayland embodied the convergence of capitalist thought and Christianity—unlikely bedfellows whose marriage has long confounded historians of modernity. How did a religion that preached humility, sacrifice, and a near disdain for wealth cohabitate with an economic system that justified self-interest

as a means to social cooperation and prosperity? Genuine religious sentiments were alive and well in 19th-century America; clearly capitalism did not flourish at the expense of religion. The sociologist Max Weber famously argued that Protestantism’s focus on a calling unintentionally made possible the development of the ‘spirit of capitalism.’ However, by the 19th century, the question was no longer how Christians unconsciously laid the groundwork for a future economic order, but rather how Christians responded when directly faced with the realities of the new market economy, where impersonal economic forces replaced traditional communitarian ethics. In this context, Francis Wayland posited that the newly discovered science of political economy was more than compatible with Christianity. The laws of discipline were nothing less than a reflection of God’s divine will. +++ The first half of the 19th century witnessed two pivotal movements in the history of capitalism. On the one hand, in the realm of economic activity, new transportation infrastructure created a nationally integrated marketplace. On the other hand, in the realm of thought, Americans imported and proliferated the European discipline of political economy.

FEATS

Separate but intertwined, these trends posed problems for American Christianity. Some historians point to the Atlantic trade and growth of a new mercantile class in the 17th and 18th centuries as ushering in the close of the previous feudal order, delineating the birthplace of capitalism as we know it. However, the American economy only remotely began to resemble our current market economy with the infrastructure projects of the early 19th century, which connected disparate geographies into a single economic unit. The construction of canals and advent of the steamboat, and later the construction of railroad networks, encouraged geographic specialization—shipping and manufacturing in the North, agriculture in the Midwest, and cotton in the slave economies of the South. Instead of locally producing necessities, communities could easily import goods from afar and concentrate on a single type of economic activity. Trade no longer took place among neighbors but between distant and nameless participants in the national market. Market integration marked a turning away from traditional moral norms. Whereas local customs and notions of fairness once mediated exchange between neighbors, participants of the national economy conducted business in a marketplace so big that no individual or local community could affect price or the flow of goods. Throughout the 18th century, local communities often regulated the price of bread and other essential commodities through food riots and intimidation of merchants when prices exceeded what they considered fair levels. Consumers could not as easily enforce notions of fairness in the 19th century when they did not know where their food came from in the first place. The profit motive went unchecked, becoming the sole determinant of economic activity. Regardless of the economic efficiencies created by greater transportation infrastructure, Americans at the time experienced a profound moral crisis as traditional values of fairness and obligation failed to apply in the new economy they found themselves in. Political economy offered both a normative and descriptive account of these changes. Political economists argued that prosperity could be achieved precisely through what traditional norms protected against: self-interest. Four months before Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. The treatise covered broad topics, including the division of labor, origins of money, and factors of productivity. Most famously, Smith introduced the concept of the “invisible hand.” He argued that individuals could best benefit society by pursuing their own self-interest. In modern parlance, we would say that price, as determined by equality of supply and demand, efficiently allocates scarce resources and maximizes welfare. However, Smith and his immediate successors wrote before the so-called marginal revolution of the 1860s and 70s when the modern discipline of economics came into being—before the use of calculus and advanced mathematical models and before supply and demand curves. Both Smith and Wayland wrote entirely in prose with limited use of quantitative analysis. Smith summarized his argument, elevating self-interest as the glue that held society together, in the infamous quotation, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.” Of course, political economy involved more than the invisible hand. After Smith, Thomas Malthus investigated the relationship between population and wages; and David Ricardo described the theory of comparative advantage and advocated for free trade. However, it was the basic endorsement of self-interest that prompted Christian skepticism of political economy—and for good reason. God was completely absent from The Wealth of Nations. Smith did not even dignify the invisible hand with a divine dimension. While Christians questioned Smith’s faith and his atheism, a more fundamental problem lingered: how was the pursuit of self-interest compatible with demands of charity and sacrifice so clearly commanded in the Gospels?

+++ Wayland’s success at resolving the paradoxes facing early 19th-century Christians derived precisely from his reluctance to face the paradox head on. Wayland rose above the question of ethical consistency, or lack thereof, by establishing the laws of political economy as scientific, and thus God-given. Popular history often suggests that since the days of Galileo, religion has opposed scientific progress. Complicating this narrative, Wayland drew from a lineage of natural theology, a school that attempted to prove the existence of God precisely through rational observation of the natural world. In the late 18th century, English clergyman William Paley crystalized the state of natural theology by describing God as a watchmaker—a metaphor used by previous thinkers, such as Newton and Descartes, but most fully formulated by Paley. He argued that the existence of intricate laws governing the natural world proved the existence of a lawgiver. As watchmaker, God created those rules by which the temporal realm (i.e. watch) operates. Wayland extended the conception of natural laws beyond the realms of physics and biology to include principles of political economy. In the preface to Elements, Wayland wrote, “It is obvious, upon the slightest reflection, that the Creator has subjected the accumulation of the blessings of this life to some determinate laws.” Following this thread, the rest of the textbook becomes an exploration of God’s divine will. Wayland does little to explain why the existence of a central bank or the elimination of trade tariffs, for instance, reflect manifestations of divine will and not simply the exigencies of strictly mortal concerns. He inserts terms like “obvious” and “self-evident” to substitute for analysis. In the most extended reflection on the topic, Wayland writes, “This science [political economy] has been, to say the least, most successfully cultivated by men who had no belief in the Christian religion. And yet, reasoning from unquestionable facts in the history of man, they have incontrovertibly proved that the precepts of Jesus Christ, in all their simplicity, point out the only rules of conduct, in obedience to which, either nations or individuals can become either rich or happy.” Wayland subtly identified the criteria to determine whether an economic theory came from God: “either nations or individuals can become either rich or happy.” In other words, God’s laws governing the economy, properly followed, are utility-maximizing. Following the logical conclusions of Wayland’s argument, religiously guided economic activity collapses into a roundabout utilitarianism. And as Smith had already demonstrated, the pursuit of self-interest coordinated in the free market ensures optimal wealth and happiness. Concurrent to the development of political economy, utilitarianism as a moral philosophy also emerged from the British Isles in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Crudely put, utilitarianism defines moral action in terms of the maximization of happiness and minimization of suffering. American evangelicals entirely opposed utilitarianism as heretical. As much as Adam Smith ignored God, Jeremy Bentham, regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism, actively denied the existence of God. Evangelicals asserted that utilitarianism failed to regard religious salvation as the highest moral good— Wayland himself argued as much in his writings on moral philosophy. And yet, the principle of utility maximization unconsciously underpinned Wayland’s support of economic self-interest. If Christian virtues of charity and sacrifice were strictly premised on human welfare, Wayland could be said to have successfully accomplished his goal of elevating political economy, as a means to maximize welfare, to divine significance. However, the mainstream evangelical community, of which Wayland was a leading member, considered good works not to be ends in themselves but as a consequence of salvation. It is on this crucial point, in many ways the lynchpin of the Protestant Reformation itself, where Wayland’s justification for self-interest faltered. At this juncture, Wayland’s writings provide no further clues to tease out an internal consistency. If we cannot explain away the conflict between Wayland’s evangelicalism and the utilitarian core of his polit-

ical economy, at best, we can explore what made Wayland’s cognitive dissonance possible—how he rationalized the contradictions to himself. +++ After Wayland retired from Brown in 1855, he returned to the clergy as pastor of Providence’s First Baptist Church. Francis Wayland the pastor discussed economic self-interest in markedly different language from Francis Wayland the political economist and textbook writer. Whereas the economist upheld a system undergirded by the pursuit of personal gain, the pastor preached forebodingly on the dangers of greed, especially in commercial life. These dual personalities reflect the bifurcation of economics and morality—a wholly constructed division between public and private life. In his sermon “The Perils of Riches,” Wayland discussed the spiritually corrupting influence of gratuitous accumulation. Wayland not only admonished greed in the abstract but situated the evil in the context of the emerging market economy. Wayland observed, “Our greatest moral dangers arise, not from direct but indirect temptations.” He went on to describe how modern modes of trade tempt our worst impulses more so than outright theft. “We would not pick his [our business partner’s] pocket of a shilling … We might, however, take great pains to accomplish an exchange with him, by which we should receive a full equivalent for all that we part with, and besides this a very large amount for which we have rendered no equivalent.” Although improper business dealings have occurred across history, Wayland’ concerns took on increased importance in the impersonal and large-scale trading environment of the early 19th century. By the end of the sermon, Wayland admonished businessmen to subsume their self-interest to their devotion to Christ, which required donating much of their wealth to missionaries, schools, and other charities. Wayland’s religious condemnation of greed does not necessarily undermine the economic theories he advanced in Elements. In his sermon “Moral Law of Accumulation,” Wayland remarked, “The desire of accumulation within these limits [determined by the Bible] is lawful; beyond them, it is sinful.” He continued, “It is not only fatal to our spiritual interests, but in the end, it is ruinous to even our temporal prosperity ... as necessary to our prosperity to limit our desires as to possess the desire itself.” Wayland rehabilitates self-interest as the sober counterpoint to passionate greed. The greedy man carelessly exhausts his resources, while the sober man invests and saves. The basis for political economy remains relatively unscathed so long as prudent self-interest runs counter to the exploitation and injustice associated with avarice—an assumption more difficult to hold after considering the basis of the Southern gentry’s vast wealth. Aside from Wayland’s generous impression of self-interest, the integrity of The Elements of Political Economy remains solid because potentially contradictory ethical pronouncements were confined to sermons, entirely removed from Wayland’s economic writing. In the preface of Elements, Wayland warned readers that he would not be “intermingling them [ethical and economic matters], but has argued economic questions on merely economic ground.” Herein lies the central explanation of Wayland’s dissonance for which we have been searching. Economics is a science, Wayland said, not to be limited by religious or moral concerns. Wayland himself remained unaware of the utilitarian foundation upon which his discipline rested. Although mathematical formalism remained decades away, Wayland laid the groundwork for the aloof posture of economics within the social sciences: the dismal science is the study of what is, not of what ought. And yet, early 19th-century economists transformed the moral and religious landscape of America for centuries to come. BILAL MEMON ’22.5 reps Wayland Arch dorm.

Is it love poems: reflective nostalgia

LIT

Characters: You: 55, Bahamian tradesman I: 21, United Statesian university student Setting: I met you whilst visiting family on the islands a few summers back. You would come around.

1 Leaning on the magenta side wall of the house where I stayed you pulled at my sleeve and sang

“My love, I’ll never find the words, my love, To tell you how I feel, my love, Mere words could not explain–”

You spun away to fill our car with the gas you’d brought. Singing

You and I took turns singing

“Precious love, you held my life within your hands Created everything I am Taught me how to live again–”

But the dogs interrupted you with their howling. So, you kicked at them. Yelled, “Agh! Don’t you know me by now!?”

ILLUSTRATION DOROTHY ZHANG

+++

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA

+++ When you drove us home, I sat shotgun.

TEXT MADELEINE AMAVILAH

Then we watched an entire “Bonanza” DVD on your television. Chatting and giggling. Trying to teach one another new words.

Our eyes locked then flinched.

It’s true, they were the best I’ve ever made.

Ma and sis made noise about the $10 we owed you. I just throbbed and watched. 2 The next day, you messaged about dinner at your place. Looking at our empty fridge, I had no better ideas. So I told Ma. She said, “Just bring ________, your sister!” I heard your tires crunch in the driveway while I finished drying off my hair. The sun had set, and the sky was pink and periwinkle. You yelled for us to hurry up. You had a blunt where your front teeth should have been. A tight white ribbed tank top and white painters’ pants. Bronze flipflops that matched your tanned & pretty feet.

“It’s not for me to say, you love me It’s not for me to say, you’ll always care Oh, but here for the moment, I can hold you fast And press your lips to mine, and dream that love will last

As far as I can see, this is heaven And speaking just for me, it’s ours to share Perhaps the glow of love will grow with every passing day Or we may never meet again, but then it’s not for me to say”

The car weaved occasionally on the dark single lane highway. 4 Two weeks later, I’m back in the States listening to your sweet nothings on WhatsApp. “suga/muffin/woman there’s a house waiting for you here.” “when are you coming back, butterfly?” I give myself ten minutes to slip into a dream of co-parenting some beautiful, loved baby with you. Tell you maybe I’ll be back in the winter, but I won’t stay. I’m committed to my education, and I’m starting to think you’re too old for me. Replace my phone in my pocket and listen to it humhumhum with your replies as I pedal down Main St.

+++ +++ We scooted through alleys in your car with no plates. Me in the back, listening to y’all cackle about that day on the rocks. Watching your thumb on the wheel and sis twist her locs. I felt my nerves bundle up in my chest. So, I stuck my finger onto your right triceps and traced down to your elbow. Before I leaned back and stared lazily out the window. When sis started flattering you about your generosity, picking us up and all, I reached through the headrest and pinched her neck. “OUCH!”

Two more days of voice memos before you moan in a group chat with me and sis about needing naked pictures! I don’t ask for an explanation because I think I understand: You’re bored. That night I stood in front of the mirror. Snapped a picture. And I left you on “Read.” +++

We stopped somewhere, and you stepped out of the car long enough for me to reiterate to sis that she was my wing-woman.

But I haven’t forgotten the way that you sang. Every once and a while I’ll still surrender a heart emoji

3 When we arrived at your house, I thought it looked like it’d make it through a hurricane. It was enchanting to walk through the rooms I thought you’d built. Even while some parts still needed drywall. There was a space in the kitchen where the oven might go. A raised table with one banana on it. A camping stove next to the sink.

5 Sometimes when I close my eyes I see my pink and orange lids. I feel the sun on my upper lip. Sometimes I see the past, floating in the bay Or beholding me, silently Sometimes I see the future. It could be a mirage. But I think it’s made from the same stuff we were spinning back then.

Sis said I made eggs good, so I fried three and flipped our banana pancakes. You said the eggs were “Dee-lec-table!”

MADELEINE AMAVILAH B’22 believes in do-overs.

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How crisis responses can and must center community

Focus on peer leadership is especially critical given that, within the United States and in RI specifically, clinical and often coercive psychiatric facilities almost exclusively define the existing healthcare landscape. For instance, only around 14 peer respite centers—which provide voluntary, community-based, and non-clinical overnight programs—exist nationwide. LETS’ model centers the support of peers with experience of mental illness, rather than that of mental health ‘experts,’ which places agency back in the hands of Disabled and neurodivergent community members.

+++ In addition to providing tangible skills, the trainings also underscore the urgent intersections between carceral ableism—which conflates safety for Disabled people with confinement—and mass incarceration, particularly in the context of proliferating discourse surrounding prison abolition and racial capitalism over the past year. Kaufman-Mthimkhulu insists, though, that “organizers have been drawing connections, talking about carceral ableism, talking about how it’s not just prisons and jails for years. It’s psych wards, group ‘homes,’ nursing facilities … all

these spaces that seek to confine, limit bodily autonomy and decision making,” they explained. Psychiatric facilities, LETS describes in its workshop, serve as sites of incarceration, whose key characteristics of control are akin to what we popularly conceive as prison. Citing L. Harris, an organizer with the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care, LETS emphasizes the following parallels: solitary confinement, seclusion, and physical restraint are commonplace, BIPOC are disproportionately represented, information from the outside world is heavily censored, and the overwhelming majority are survivors of traumatic experiences. The historical development of prisons is inextricably linked to the shuttering of asylums. While state narratives purport that the mid-twentieth century closure of asylums constituted deinstitutionalization, Disability justice organizers instead term the process “transcarceration,” underscoring the intentional and simultaneous ascendance of prison infrastructure. Notably, more than 70 former mental institutions were reconfigured into prisons. The jail system then emerged as the primary site to “contain and control Disabled and mentally ill people,” according to Dan Berger, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Washington. Emphasizing the present manifestations of this historical legacy, Kaufman-Mthimkhulu added that prisons also produce the very disabilities that they criminalize: “We know that prisons themselves cause and create disability,” they said. “If you did not go into prison with a mental illness or disability, you’re probably coming out with one, especially if you’ve been in solitary confinement.”

ILLUSTRATION RACHELLE SHAO

+++

The scarcity of such holistic, “wraparound systems of care,” as Kaufman-Mthimkhulu describes, reflects a societal inclination toward equating Disability with volatility, which makes communities fearful of those with mental illness, leading to their removal to carceral institutions. At the core of this treatment lie the same paternalistic, hierarchical systems of control and oversight that create and animate the prison-industrial complex. LETS thus targets its workshop interventions at the personal relationships through which fear-based decision-making ultimately funnels Disabled people into carceral apparatuses, whether psychiatric facilities or prisons. “A lot of the time, it’s not that people want the police involved; it’s that they don’t know what else to do,” Kaufman-Mthimkhulu explained, acknowledging that abolishing oppressive systems entails urgently building supportive and caring ones. “We can talk all day long about how we need to abolish police and abolish psych wards, but if we don’t actually have other resources and tools and systems in place for people to engage with when someone’s in crisis, that’s a big ask and a big expectation… It can feel like we’d be asking people to do it all by themselves.” As such, LETS’ abolitionist crisis response trainings—usually led by Kaufman-Mthimkhulu and other Disability justice facilitators—emerge as places to envision a different future. Here, LETS aims to provide attendees and partnered organizations, like AMOR, with the ability to construct and preserve care systems within their own communities. This skill-building incorporates Disability justice frameworks like peer deescalation, proactive safety planning, boundary setting in crisis situations, and mapping out individuals who can provide support. Though LETS primarily empowers communities to apply these skills as suits their needs, the group also actively acknowledges how taxing it can be to mitigate unpredictable or violent treatment by first-responders. Aligned with LETS’ principal commitment to fostering “cross-movement solidarity,” the organization thus seeks to install enduring relationships with the groups that receive their training. Follow-ups for workshops include a Google Drive resource folder, ‘skills labs’ to continue practicing and imagining alternatives, and Q&A sessions. Kaufman-Mthimkhulu detailed that LETS seeks to train around 30 people across different movements in Rhode Island to be emotionally and tactically equipped to organically spread the contents of these workshops across other communities. “That’s really important; facilitation skills are not something that everybody automatically has, being able to hold space, being able to acknowledge if you’ve harmed someone in a space, even as a facilitator—those are things that might come naturally to some folks, but also need to be practiced,” they said.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

n commonplace crisis responses enacted by those problematically coined ‘first responders,’ detainment, disrespect of autonomy, and removal from support networks of friends and family are embraced as standard practice. Community members—presented with few envisionable alternatives and made to believe that they are ensuring the safety of the person in crisis—often work within this underlyingly punitive conception of care and inadvertently cement its dominance over the mental health landscape. For the past decade, Project LETS (Let’s Erase the Stigma), a national movement led by and for people with lived experience of mental illness, Disability, and neurodivergence, has been committed to instead “building just, responsive, and transformative peer support collectives and community mental health care structures,” as described by the group’s mission statement. First formalized by the work of students at Brown University, LETS today undertakes initiatives like a Peer Mental Health Advocate program, which offers one-on-one, longterm relationship building opportunities between those with shared experiences of mental health both in campus communities and amongst the general public. Through these interpersonal relationships and virtual skills-based workshops, the group seeks to raise consciousness and disseminate the tools that would abolish practices removing persons from communities, instead building transformative, care-focused networks of peers. Amid the pandemic and movements for Black liberation, LETS has focused on expanding mutual aid networks and underscoring how abolition must center the complete dissolution of all carceral structures, including psychiatric ones. Combatting the intense isolation of the pandemic and its compoundment of fear-based responses to crises, LETS aims to aid community members in creating networks of care resistant to the controlling and neglectful options currently at hand. To supplant these punitive structures and their foundational power imbalances, LETS facilitates the unlearning of tendencies to police persons in crisis and to perceive their behaviors as threatening and them as disposable—in short, to “become these little cops to each other … who do the work of the carceral state for it,” Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, a 2017 Brown University graduate and LETS’ executive director, told the College Hill Independent. Much of the group’s work distills how a Disability justice framework, which recognizes how intersectional oppression compounds ableism, provides an avenue for transcending self-policing, the policing of one another, and punitive hierarchies generally. In Rhode Island specifically, LETS has collaborated with and offered abolitionist crisis response training to varied audiences, including social workers, crisis operators, student groups, and anti-state violence activists like the Alliance to Mobilize our Resistance (AMOR). Throughout these efforts, LETS grounds Disability justice and its implications for the broader abolitionist project in material support initiatives (such as their Trauma Healing Fund for Black Folks) and in ideological commitments to “what regular people can do in their community for each other,” Kaufman-Mthimkhulu said. “You don’t need a license; you don’t need a degree … We can do something else other than be tiny little arms of the carceral state.”

TEXT JACK DOUGHTY AND ROSE HOUGLET

Disability Justice and the Project of Abolition

+++ Seeking to solidify its presence in Providence and beyond the confines of elite institutions, LETS is undertaking a slew of influential initiatives: purchasing a home in Rhode Island to serve as a community peer respite center, buying and revamping a van for a pilot mobile crisis response program, and bolstering their Community Peer Mental Health Advocate (CPMHA) cohort. Throughout these building efforts and their existing care networks, LETS already enacts and continues to envision a world that understands genuine care and safety to come from the enlivening of vulnerable human relationships rather than clinical confinement. Down to its future-looking funding streams, LETS centers principles of community control and collective autonomy, intentionally circumventing state support that comes with binding stipulations and predatory earmarks. “Taking money from the state means that you are accountable to the state,” Kaufman-Mthimkhulu noted. “For us, with Project LETS, our goal is to create our own revenue streams and be financially sustained through our community members,” whose accountability to one another constitutes the transformative capacity for genuine safety that undergirds LETS’ work to begin with. JACK DOUGHTY B’23 AND ROSE HOUGLET B’23 encourage readers to donate to LETS’ Trauma Healing Fund for Black Folks (projectlets.org/ traumaheallingfund).

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QUIET FIRES

TEXT ALEX VALENTI

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

Memorializing COVID in Rhode Island

Last April, the arts organization WaterFire Providence set up the Beacon of Hope, a memorial for Rhode Islanders lost to COVID. At the organization’s Arts Center in Providence’s Valley neighborhood, the WaterFire team set up a faux-fire brazier— resembling those which light Providence’s rivers for WaterFire’s popular downtown festival—surrounded by a field of luminaria, one paper lantern for each COVID-related death in Rhode Island. During a lighting ceremony each night, new luminaria were added to the installation to account for the new deaths reported by the Rhode Island Department of Health that day. When the Beacon was taken down in July, it included slightly over 1,000 lanterns. One of many sites across the country created to memorialize the ongoing pandemic, the Beacon of Hope remains the most prominent public memorial to Covid deaths in Rhode Island. WaterFire’s installation also exists within the larger, historical tradition of memorial-building in response to tragedy, reflecting many of the methods and aims of its forebears. Memorials tend to operate with a double function. Their more immediate role is to serve as a centralized location for mourning and honoring the dead, and in doing so, they provide a sense of healing for a community or nation reckoning with trauma. The second, longer-term function is to mark the event with an enduring public fixture: to stave off future amnesia about the past by fostering a collective, shared memory of tragedy. Temporary memorials like WaterFire’s Beacon—assembled in the direct

aftermath of tragedy—prioritize the first function, yet they serve as markers too, calling on publics to contend more intimately with unfathomable loss than the news may allow. Memorials can shape a community’s narrative of events, framing them as tragedies by their very presence. Adapting traditional means of memorialization to the conditions of the pandemic, the Beacon of Hope was entangled both in the knots always following from the work of condensing a multifaceted tragedy into a single site and in the specific dilemmas that COVID presents for memorial projects. The sense of collective memory propagated by memorials often does not correspond to actual collective experience, and so memorializing the pandemic—the harms from which are unevenly distributed across lines of privilege and position— means encountering this tension. +++ Alongside signs voicing support for healthcare and other essential workers, individuals and communities have been setting up impromptu displays of mourning for the pandemic’s mounting casualties since the earliest months of lockdown. Additionally, though the virus continues to exact a devastating global toll each day, numerous governments and organizations have already built or are planning permanent Covid memorials. In Jersey City, a former toxic waste site is being converted into a public park in which trees will be planted for every Jersey City resident who

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has died of COVID, accompanied by a memorial wall with each person’s name. The architecture firm Gómez Platero has unveiled a design for a “World Memorial to the Pandemic” to be built on the coast of Uruguay, which would aim to be a universal site of mourning and reflection. WaterFire’s Beacon of Hope was a spontaneous solution to the question of how to mourn the growing number of virus-related deaths in Rhode Island. “We felt at the time that it was critically important that we created a way for people to grieve or celebrate life lost because you couldn’t go to funeral homes, you couldn’t go to memorial services,” Peter Mello, managing director and co-CEO of WaterFire, told the College Hill Independent. Initially, one could not visit the Beacon of Hope in person either. Footage of the installation was live streamed 24/7, allowing for home viewing. Only later, as state restrictions changed, did WaterFire open the physical site to visitors. Barnaby Evans, WaterFire’s founder and executive artistic director, led the nightly lighting ceremonies. Evans, sometimes accompanied by others, would bring out a new set of luminaria, light their internal candles, and place them amidst the other lanterns, which were already lit and arranged in neat rows on the floor of the Arts Center’s main hall. As expansive as the display became, its project of memorializing each life lost to COVID in Rhode Island remains forever incomplete: the number of virus-related deaths in the state has more than doubled since the installation’s removal. Watching recordings of the Beacon now is sobering not only because of the hundreds of deaths that it sought to represent, but also for the hundreds more that it never got to. +++ Memorials function visually, inviting specific comprehensions of tragedy through the particular visual experiences that they create for viewers. What the Beacon of Hope foregrounds about the pandemic is predicated on its visuality, which works primarily in two interlocking ways: there is the dense, vast spread of lanterns, which registers the profound scale of loss resulting from COVID in Rhode Island, coupled with the image of each lantern as a discrete symbol for each individual life. With this latter aspect of its design, the Beacon of Hope reflects a desire, accompanying many pandemic memorial projects, to counteract the perceived impersonality of daily death statistics. As America’s death toll from COVID neared 100,000 last May, the New York Times published a front page filled entirely with names and brief descriptions of victims, with a headline declaring the loss “incalculable.” Like WaterFire’s Beacon, this display attempted to clearly articulate that people lie at the heart of each newly reported number, people whose lives were cut needlessly short. Perhaps these reckonings with statistics in part represent an effort to compensate for the self-interestedness with which

we often read the numbers; the way we register COVID death counts in terms of what they mean for our own lives—are things going to get better for me? worse?—rather than for the dead and their survivors. With a candle for each Rhode Islander lost to the virus, the Beacon of Hope implies the grievability of every death and calls for mourning for each. As governments continue to make pandemic policy decisions that jeopardize lives—particularly lives that were already vulnerable—capacious grief for those who have died of COVID is vital. Memorials like the Beacon may help build grief into local and national narratives of the Coronavirus, guiding us toward responses to the pandemic that privilege the preservation of life. Still, like a statistic, a memorial places its own abstractions on tragedy. Seeking to encapsulate complex moments, memorials condense varying lived experiences into a single site or image, and so they can give the impression that they reflect a society’s shared memory of the memorialized event. Rarely does a large-scale event itself produce collective memory; it is memorials, along with other forms of history-making, that do so. Situated in and as common space, a memorial may seem as if it simply represents a common past rather than creates one, and in this way, it can obscure certain real memories that do not appear in its projected narrative. Attention must be given to this risk and to the question of which narratives are given power as we continue to memorialize the pandemic because there never has been one collective experience of COVID. Marginalized communities have suffered a disproportionate share of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, a product of both state mismanagement and existing structures of disadvantage. As is often the case with memorials, the Beacon of Hope represented one institution speaking for a broad range of experiences. While the Beacon was simple enough to avoid obscuring any particular experience of the pandemic, there are ways that memorials can attend to the specificity of the losses they represent. Like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, for example, in which each panel is woven by survivors of the dead, memorial projects can invite public participation. The closest that the Beacon came to such a feature was a transactional one: those who donated to WaterFire could write a message to be displayed on the Beacon’s webpage and get a star for a loved one hung above the installation. As the Beacon was an early response to the pandemic created under the constrictions of lockdown, generosity is due to it and other first attempts at reconciling with this disaster. A task for future COVID memorials—on the level of country, state, or town—will be acknowledging the pandemic as the fractured, disjointed tragedy that it is. As these memorials become part of public space, potentially informing the way we and our descendents will understand the pandemic, attention must be given to ensuring that these sites do not crystallize singular narratives suiting individuals in power under whose purview public memorialization often falls.

+++ WaterFire is currently planning to create a permanent memorial for COVID victims. Mello told the Indy that the organization is considering planting a tree on its grounds. This permanent marker for the pandemic would add to a geography of memorials spread across Providence, particularly concentrated around the downtown section of the Providence River. At the bottom of College Street, Memorial Park houses several monuments to 20th century tragedies—the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, the Korean War—and nearly just across the river are memorials for Rhode Islanders killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and for the victims of Ireland’s Great Famine. During the festival for which WaterFire is best known, Memorial Park becomes occupied by the nighttime revelries. When I first attended WaterFire, I stumbled among the monuments in the park without recognizing what they were, distracted as I was by costumed statue imitators and all the glitzy lights that the festival deposits upon Providence’s waters and streets. The hope embedded in permanent memorials like those of Memorial Park—the hope that, long after the people who knew the deceased have passed, these objects can help preserve the memory of tragedies—is a tenuous one. Even after we discover their meaning, memorials can settle into the scenery of our daily lives, becoming mute and forgettable. Naturally, memorials to the COVID pandemic have just as uncertain of a fate. Yet, this does not have to be a reason to abandon the project of memorialization altogether. In the wake of trauma, communities need places to gather and mourn. When designed thoughtfully with an eye toward stories most at risk of obfuscation, memorials can bear meaningfully upon the future. They can help make grief a precondition for confronting both tragedies of the past and those to come. ALEX VALENTI B’22.5 takes a moment of pause as he walks along the Providence River.

NEWS ILLUSTRATION JESSY MINKER DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER TEXT ANTONIA HUTH

E L B I S I V N I E H T N E D R BU ic m e d n a p e h t d n a y t i r a p r Gende

In December of 2020, the American economy lost a net number of 140,000 jobs. The National Women’s Law Center reports that American men gained a net amount of 16,000 jobs, but women lost 156,000. That means, in net, all of the jobs lost that month were women’s. The NWLC estimates that almost 40 percent of the 156,000 women who lost their jobs in December have been unemployed for at least six months. After such a long break, they will most likely re-enter the job market with decreased salaries. According to the New York Times, these blanket figures mask unsavory details, like higher unemployment rates for women of color while white women actually experienced a small net gain of jobs. Black women are also more than twice as likely as white women to be the breadwinners in their families, making their unemployment especially consequential. These numbers reveal the unequal nature of the country’s economic struggles in the pandemic, both in terms of gender and race, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. The past year has exposed catastrophic failures in the United States healthcare system and governance to prepare for and meet the challenges of coronavirus. Similarly, our economic system, which has always rested on the exploitation of women and all those who perform what is traditionally women’s work, has been fertile soil for the present crisis. Gender inequality on the labor market is inextricable from inequality in the home. The physical and mental labors performed there are the site of equally devastating gender inequity, and both employment and home life in the time of Covid expose pre-existing systems of oppression. Like the 550,000 lives lost, women’s vulnerability to lockdown-induced hardship is also a consequence of the society in which it takes place. +++ The vast gender disparities in the pandemic’s economic cost can be explained, in part, by women’s overrepresentation in the industries and jobs most affected by shutdowns. The Economic Policy Institute, a think tank advocating for low- and middle-income workers’ interests, calculates that women represent 53.3 percent of employees in leisure and hospitality but 56.9 percent of March 2020 job losses in that sector. More drastically, 77.4 percent of education and health service workers are women, but they account for 113.2 percent of the job losses that month. These numbers make sense when it’s understood that jobs held by men actually increased in March 2020, while those held by women fell by 86,000. Many women-held jobs, like food service and day care, just can’t go remote. Instead, they have simply disappeared. Recent unemployment statistics do not count the 2.3 million women, as reported by the New York Times, who have left the labor force entirely—either after being laid off or by quitting—and are no longer looking for employment. Women of color are

disproportionately represented: in December alone, 154,000 Black women (uncounted in the 156,000 who became unemployed) left the job market for good. This exodus has largely been attributed to increased house- and carework demands during the pandemic. With child care centers closing and education largely shifting to remote schooling, a huge part of the ways in which children were previously educated, supervised, and fed has suddenly become the responsibility of parents. Professional babysitters, cleaners, and other help in the home have become a Covid risk, contributing to a larger workload at home and fewer possibilities to outsource it. For those working remotely, especially single parents, straddling a full day of work and the care and digital schooling of young children is stressful at best and impossible at worst. For essential workers, many of whom are in low-income service professions and who have to leave home for the workday, this can become a caregiving crisis. Whether outsourced childcare has become too great of a health-risk or simply financially unsustainable, the alternative is often irreconcilable with full-time employment. In a New York Magazine piece detailing what this transition has looked like for her, author and journalist Angela Garbes emphasizes: “It’s not a choice to care for your children when schools are closed and child care costs as much as your take-home pay. Experts call that kind of rock-and-a-hard-place calculus ‘constrained choice’ even as they acknowledge that the term is inadequate.” According to the 2020 Census collected in the spring and summer during the pandemic, a third of unemployed women between the ages of 25 and 44 cited child care demands as the reason for their unemployment. Among men in the same age group, only 12 percent said the same. Economist Misty Heggeness of the Census Bureau writes that, while the likelihood that a mother takes unpaid leave from her job increases rapidly the longer her state stays in lockdown, fathers (and people without school age children) remain unaffected. As women become financially dependent on their working partners and families lose what is sometimes their only income, downward mobility and gender inequality at home and on the labor market increase. “I have essentially dropped out of the workforce and been absorbed into housework and caring for my children, where there are no wages, no protections, no upward path, just a repetitive circle,” writes Garbes. In the pandemic, American parents have been forced to take on the work of caring for their families largely without the formal and informal support systems—not all of which were ever adequate in the first place—they otherwise rely on. When public schools, soccer practice, and babysitting grandmothers are no longer available, full time employment becomes incompatible with raising young children, and mothers have been paying the price. In part, the gender-pay-gap explains why women are often the ones quitting their jobs in order to meet increased childcare and housework demands. If a family’s homelife requires one of two working parents to stay home, it makes sense to sacrifice the lower income.

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Yet, economic disparities only begin to cover the extent to which women’s work is undervalued. The home hides a second and third unpaid and gendered workload pushing women out of the waged labor market. When mothers stay home to meet the pandemic’s increased house- and carework demands, they are picking up work which they already perform more than men, even if they are also employed. According to the Harvard Kennedy School, while almost 60 percent of women in 2010 were in the workforce, they continued to be the primary caretakers of children, ill, and disabled family members. Close to two-thirds of family caregivers are also employed outside the home. On average, mothers spend just as much time with their children as they did in the 1960s, despite employment rates for mothers increasing from 45 to 78 percent in that time. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reports that, in every one of its member countries, including the US, “men have more leisure time each day while women spend more time doing unpaid housework.” In 1998, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “the second shift,” now commonly referred to in the context of gender inequality. Referring to the “first shift” of employment outside the home, the second shift articulates how the work of caring for a home and family awaits parents at the end of the paid workday. Though all workers experience the second shift, notes the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, women often take the brunt of this responsibility. Yet there might be something like a “third shift,” argues feminist cartoon artist EmmaClit, made up of what she calls “the mental load.” In her comic titled “You Should’ve Asked,” a young couple start to argue because the mother, simultaneously cooking and trying to feed her toddlers, accidentally spills dinner for her husband, herself, and their guests onto the kitchen floor. “You should’ve asked! I would’ve helped!” exclaims her partner. Emma explains: when men expect their partners to ask them to do things, they are positioning them as the managers of household chores. The problem is that planning and organizing is already a job in and of itself. Hence, she points out, the work place distinction between managers and people who execute work. Even when women share household and childcare duties equally with their partner, if they take on all of the management of this work, they end up doing far more than their fair share. In a paper titled “Mothers and Mental Labor,” four psychologists of Biola University write that this mental labor “is an under-researched and long-invisible component of family work.” They describe the mental load of “managing” a family and household as including a range of activities including time and finance management, learning and remembering information and skills, and self-regulating one’s own mental and emotional state. In practice, this translates to knowing when to pay the gardener, planning a child’s vaccinations, teaching another how to fold the laundry, thinking about what meals can be made with the food left in the fridge, and remembering when everyone last had their bed sheets changed. This work is vital, constant, and exhausting. As the

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psychologists’ findings show, it is also most often performed by mothers rather than fathers, regardless of employment status. The mental load partially explains why women perform more house- and carework than men. If a woman is already doing most of the physical and mental labor involved in running her family, then it makes more sense for her to start doing this work full-time than it would for her partner. The flip side of mothers taking on this work is that fathers often simply don’t know how to. It is easy to see why— faced with the stress of lockdown, financial strain, and virtual schooling—families would opt out of a stay-at-home caretaker who has yet to learn how to care-take. The mental load also exemplifies how women’s work in the home has been and continues to be made invisible. Even though a substantial and indispensable part of family care consists of the kind of multifaceted oversight, planning, and problem-solving work that any manager is necessarily devoted to, domestic work is often seen as menial, exclusively physical, and dispensable. Many occupations require taking responsibility over projects, tasks, or human welfare, and these jobs involve considerable mental labor. In contrast to the mental load at home, however, this labor is recognized, which is why managers hold more prestige and are paid better than lower-level employees, or, for that matter, stay-at-home mothers.

support they give, argues Federici, women enable their husbands to go to work every day. As mothers, women literally produce and raise the future labor force, ensuring their children grow up to be capable adult workers. Since a physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy workforce is essential to our economy and society as it exists today, Federici writes, “housework and the family are the pillars of capitalist production.” In a New York Times profile of Federici, author and essayist Jordan Kisner writes that “public-policy experts and economists have pointed out in the last several years, the folly of excluding domestic work from economic measures like G.D.P., given the data showing that unpaid women’s work constitutes a huge slice of economic activity.” For example, Oxfam research indicates that, if American women were paid minimum wage for their house- and carework, they would have earned $1.5 trillion in 2019. In spite of the economic indispensability of the regenerative work of caring for a home and family, however, it “appears to be a personal service outside of capital” because it is not paid, Federici writes. This means that housewives, homemakers, and even stay-athome dads do not have any of the rights and protections of workers in the waged workplace, not to mention the safety and freedom of a personal income. In her intimate essay about leaving the workforce in the pandemic, Angela Garbes asks: “Can we unionize mothers?” Her husband, a labor organizer, responds: “Who would you bring your demands to?”

+++ +++ The feminist and political thinker Silvia Federici has been contemplating the problem of women’s invisible work in the home since the 1970s. In her book Revolution at Point Zero, she writes that women “produce the most precious product to appear on the capitalist market: labor power.” As partners, women provide for wage earners physically, emotionally, and sexually. Through the meals they cook and the

Mainstream feminism has, despite its increased focus on sexual and gender-based violence, largely seen women’s presence and influence in the workplace as the indicator and battlefield of women’s empowerment. However, this empowerment comes at the cost of more exploitation. As women enter the workforce, the people who take over their domestic labor—

nurses, nannies, cleaners, even school teachers—are underpaid and often denied workplace protections or benefits. When families who can afford to do so outsource house- and carework to the less economically advantaged—most often women of color and immigrants—they are profiting from a system which does not value caring labor, precisely because it is traditionally performed by women, for free. “Since female has become synonymous with housewife,” writes Federici in 1975, “we carry this identity and the ‘homely skills’ we acquire from birth wherever we go. This is why female employment is so often an extension of housework” and also why the women who work in our kindergartens and hospitals return home at the end of the day to find a second and third shift waiting for them. Federici argues that domestic work represents a form of gendered exploitation that underpins all of capitalism. The disproportionate and unrecognized labor women perform in the home explains why, even in 2021, where demands for equal pay have become mainstream and female college students outnumber their male peers, women are so much more vulnerable to the consequences of the pandemic. Robbed of the crutch of outsourcing house- and carework for low pay, the pandemic year has forced millions of women to sacrifice the liberation and empowerment promised by full-time employment, showing that said liberation and empowerment were merely an economic mirage. When we assume that women’s liberation is achieved when women work for pay (even equal pay) outside the home, we make the labor they already and always perform invisible. Disregarding house- and carework’s indispensable function to society also means buying into a value system that deems all kinds of work—caring, regenerative work—and the humans who do it dispensable. The problem of undervalued and underpaid domestic work, whether it falls on mothers or on the people to whom it is outsourced, underpins American capitalism. The pandemic has merely brought to the forefront what has always been a system of exploitation. Everyone else suffers from this system, too; it is no accident that, while women are so strongly incentivized to stay home, if they can, until their kids go to college, paternal leave remains difficult to obtain. Including the work performed in the home in the image we hold of work is the necessary first step to adequately compensating domestic and care workers, and creating conditions in which full-time employees will be capable of fully, not just financially, supporting their families. ANTONIA HUTH B’21 thinks all moms are momagers.

ARTWORK “AT THE DROP OF A HEAD” (2019, PHOTOLITHOGRAPH) BY GALA PRUDENT

Y D N I DEAR TEXT GEMMA SACK, CAL TURNER & SARA VAN HORN DESIGN XINGXING SHOU

ILLUSTRATION CAMILLE GROS

APRIL FOOL’S

EDITION

The Lobster (2015)

There Will Be Blood (2007) Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009)

WHAT IS A GOOD MOVIE FOR A DATE?

The Human Centipede (2009) The Human Centipede 2 (2011)

The Human Centipede 3 (2015) Marriage Story (2019)

The Love Guru (2008) Antichrist (2009)

HOW DO I KEEP A RELATIONSHIP FUN AND LIVELY DURING QUARANTINE? MY PARTNER AND I DO THE SAME THING EVERYDAY AND I AM FEELING VERY STAGNANT IN THIS RELATIONSHIP.

Truman Show your par tner Move all of their furniture two inches to the right See if your par tner will help you launder money (as a test of the relationship) Cook your par tner special meals entirely inspired by 70s Dinner Party (@70s_party on Twitter), such as aspic Meddle in your friends’ love lives together Buy an NFT together Invest in the stock market together File a bunch of patents together As per the three above, fully immerse your relationship in market logics

WHAT MAKES A GOOD DATING PROFILE?

neither of Bring in a third to whom u feel you is attracted to make yo closer to each other is so hot that OR, bring in a third who t yourselves you both feel worse abou a modern Become TikTok famous as day scene kid couple

Foster a cat together Adopt a child together d elope Road trip to Las Vegas an your partner Subsequently divorce ation Sue your partner for defam together Write a Week in Review ether Write a children’s book tog

Fish pic with a minnow

A ver y specific list of impossible criteria that your potential match must fulfill Make it clear that you’re here to make cold acquaintances (NOT friends)

“Do you want to touch tongues?” Mirror selfie but you don’t have a mirror so you have to take it in a murky pond

EVENTS SHOWCASE CINEMAS’ EVENT CINEMA PRESENTS: ANIMATED SHORTS, 2021 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 1200 Quaker Lane, Warwick, RI 7:00–8:00 PM on Thursday, April 8 Price - $5–$25

DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT

If you love devouring the Oscar nominated movies in the week running up to the awards as much as the Indy, you will love this showcase. This collection of short films presented by Showcase Cinemas brings to the screen documentary, live-action, and animated shorts from this year. Films include: Burow, Yes-People, If Anything Happens I Love You, and Genius Loci. Details at: https://www.goprovidence.com/event/ showcase-cinemas%E2%80%99-event-cinema-presents%3a-animated-shorts%3a-2021-oscar-nominated-short-films/40552/ ART ON TAP AT THE WATERFIRE ARTS CENTER 475 Valley Street, Providence RI 5:00 PM on Thursdays (recurring weekly until August 26) Every Thursday evening, the WaterFire Arts Center opens up their Roof Deck and serves wine, beer and candy from Troop, a cocktail and street food bistro on Valley Street. Head there with a date, look at their exhibit, and then sip your booze as you experience a resplendent spring sunset in the heart of Providence. Details at https://www.goprovidence.com/ event/art-on-tap-at-the-waterfire-arts-center/40565/. PROVIDENCE FLEA AT THE FARM FRESH RI MARKET HALL 10 Sims Avenue, Farm Fresh RI Market Hall 11:00 AM–3:00 PM on Sunday, February 7 (recurring weekly) 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! @providenceflea SUNRISE PROVIDENCE ACTION: TELL SENATORS EUER AND COYNE, IT’S TIME TO RESCUE RHODE ISLAND! RI State House, Smith Street 5:30 PM–7 PM on Wednesday, April 7 Next Wednesday evening, Sunrise Providence will host an action to put pressure on state lawmakers to pass the Rescue Rhode Island Act, a series of three bills that would fund affordable housing, Green Justice Zones, and local food. Senators Euer and Coyne are the chairwomen of the committees responsible for bringing the legislation to the Senate floor for a vote. Join for a lineup of speakers who will lay out why we need the Rescue Rhode Island Act now! Details at: https://www.facebook.com/ events/848482562548805/.

MUTUAL AID AND 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 The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance’s fundraiser helps purchase basic necessities such as food, cleaning and sanitation supplies, and formula. They also provide 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. PROJECT LETS TRAUMA HEALING FUND FOR BLACK FOLKS A Disability Justice organization, Project LETS seeks to prioritize solidarity in action and redistrib-

ute 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.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics Rhode Island [Coyote RI]: A group of former and current sex workers, trafficking victims, and allies who promote and advocate for the welfare and safety of members of the sex industry, and resists Rhode Island’s criminalization of prostitution. Direct Action for Rights and Equality [DARE]: A Providence based community organization that advocates for social, political, and economic justice. DARE works to structurally challenge incarceration and funnel funds from policing and imprisonment to social welfare. DARE also advocates against housing insecurity and displacement. Providence Youth Student Movement [PrYSM]: A RI-based organization that is dedicated to providing support to Southeast Asians who are young, queer, trans, and survivors of police violence to become leaders and changemakers. Refugee Dream Center [RDC]: A RI-based refugee resettlement agency that promotes skill development and other initiatives for the self-sufficiency and integration of refugees in RI. The RDC conducts English as a Second Language classes for adults as well as health promotion and cultural orientation events, mentors refugee youth, provides social assistance to families, and advocates for refugee rights in the United States. +++ 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 theindy@gmail.com if you want to plug your event.

The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 8

Articles inside

April Fools Edition

The Invisible Burden

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EPHEMERA

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COVER WEEK IN REVIEW