The College Hill Independent — Vol. 45 Issue 5

This Issue

BABYDOLL (SIDE B)”

NEPHÉW

Breeze & Nora Mathews

STAKES AND “EMPTY” SPACE

Changkakoti

ON INFRASTRUCTURE

Delea, Eric Guo, Makieda Mckenzie, Ryan Silverman, & Katherine Xiong

FARMER’S DAUGHTER

Simon

Faith Griffiths, Dana Herrnstadt, Lily Lustig, Sierra Martin, Alex Schupak, Tierra Sherlock, & Kolton Zeng

HAMMER

ME” AND “LOOK MOM!

TO KNIT”

Masthead*

MANAGING

EDITORS

Corinne Leong Sacha Sloan Jane Wang

WEEK IN REVIEW Masha Breeze Nora Mathews

ARTS

Cecilia Barron Anabelle Johnston Lola Simon

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Ayça Ülgen

FEATURES

Zachary Braner Ryan Chuang Jenna Cooley

LITERARY Madeline Canfield Tierra Sherlock

METRO Jack Doughty Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Nicholas Miller

SCIENCE + TECH Justin Scheer Ella Spungen Katherine Xiong

WORLD Priyanka Mahat Alissa Simon

X Lucia Kan-Sperling Seoyoung Kim Maxime Pitchon

DEAR INDY Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD Sofia Barnett Kayla Morrison

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

STAFF WRITERS

Hanna Aboueid Madeleine Adriance Maru Attwood Graciela Batista Mark Buckley Swetabh Changkakoti Laura David Emma Eaton Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber Keelin Gaughan Sarah Goldman Jonathan Green Faith Griffiths Eric Guo Charlotte Haq Anushka Kataruka Roza Kavak Nicole Konecke Cameron Leo Kara McAndrew Morgan McCordick Sarah McGrath Charlie Medeiros Alex Purdy Callie Rabinovitz Kolya Shields Alex Valenti Julia Vaz Kathy/Siqi Wang Justin Woo

COPY CHIEF Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS Ava Bradley Qiaoying Chen Dun Jian Chin Klara Davidson-Schmich Eleanor Dushin Mack Ford Zoey Grant Aidan Harbison Doren Hsiao-Wecksler Rahmla Jones Jasmine Li Rebecca Martin-Welp Everest Maya-Tudor Angelina Rios-Galindo Shravya Sompalli Eleanor Peters Grace Samaha Jean Wanlass

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Klara Davidson-Schmich Britney De Leon Ayça Ülgen

*Our Beloved Staff

COVER COORDINATOR Soeun Bae

DESIGN EDITORS

Anna Brinkhuis Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS Brianna Cheng Ri Choi Addie Clark Amy/Youjin Lim Ash Ma Jaesun Myung Enya Pan Tanya Qu Jeffrey Tao Floria Tsui Anna Wang

ILLUSTRATION

EDITORS

Sage Jennings Jo Ouyang

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek Noah Bassman Ashley Castañeda Claire Chasse Julia Cheng Nicholas Edwards Lillyanne Fisher Sophie Foulkes Haimeng Ge Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Sarosh Nadeem Hannah Park Sophia Patti Izzy Roth-Dishy Livia Weiner Iris Wright Jane Zhou Kelly Zhou Elisa Kim

DEVELOPMENT COORDINATORS

Anabelle Johnston Bilal Memon

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Alara Kalfazade Rini Singhi Jean Wanlass

MVP Justin Scheer

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

LASIK works by using a high-precision laser to chisel mint condition corneas. While my aunt dribbled antibiotic juices into her eyes, I told her why I could never do what she did. I didn’t like the idea of angry beams lacerating my eyeballs. Besides, I’d been told you could only do it once.

This morning I stood by the Providence River hurling handfuls of granola at the mallards, downy jewels in the water. I watched them gulp and dive at their refracted feet. All this until they drifted close enough for me to realize they were not ducks but seagulls, which made the scene some how less charming. I reached back into the Ziploc to procure the feath ered gremlins another morsel of food, my fingers dancing among hulled pumpkin seeds. But I didn’t like the idea of rewarding the birds that had wrested so much from me—sandwich halves, baseball caps, segments of fruit. And besides, my aunt told me, smugly blinking artificial tears from her eyes, you can only see things once. -CL

Mission Statement

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

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

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

Week in Nephéw*

Hey all you week-pilled reviewheads, we’ve been wanting to open up our section to a guest writer for a while now, so this week we let our shared-custody nephew, Henri, write the Week in Review. Henri likes aliens, slime, drinking a cup of water without coming up for air, and queering the phenomenological canon. Here are Henri’s top eight news stories of the week!

1. My Dad Got a Vasectomy on Wednesday Which Begs the Question, What’s a Vasecto my?

Let me know if you find out! Also my Uncle Bwian babysat me while my dad was at the doc tor and I found a robin’s nest on the ground and I said it was cool. But now Uncle Bwian thinks I really like birds for some reason and he keeps emailing me pictures of birds and I don’t know how to tell him I’m not interested that much actually because I really like creative writing mostly.

2. Did Anyone Else Think Jason’s Mom Was Being Kind of Weird This Week?

Jason is my best fwiend in the whole world be cause we basically both love claymation because it’s basically epic and we even went on vacation together to Portugal last year with both our families (except not Jason’s brother because he got in trouble for getting wadicalized). Anyway on Monday I went over to Jason’s house after school to play Minecraft and his mom was there but she was actually being so weird. Basically she kept talking about her root canal and how we shouldn’t eat any candy so we don’t have to get a root canal like her and how her root canal changed the shape of her face and she feels like she’ll never be beautiful again and how we should enjoy youth while we have it and I was like…

3. Above Gwound Pool

Brett Garber got an above-ground pool and he says his mom’s gonna let him invite over every one in our class after his brother’s Bar Mitzvah and we can all swim in it.

4. Economics: Kaylee Being Home Sick Driv ing Up the Price of Duct Tape Wallets

Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that Kaylee M. was home sick with the flu on Monday AND Tuesday. Kaylee makes the best duct tape wallets in the whole school, because her mom lets her buy five types of duct tape at Michaels (batman, checkers, donut, lightning, and the most valuable, mustache), and she only charges one Gogurt for them. Her only com petition is Kaylee P., who makes boring purple wallets and also gave everyone lice two years ago. Plus her mom ruined the Third Grade Halloween Bash by bweaking up with her dad in front of everyone during “Monster Mash.” So no one ever buys her wallets. But when Kaylee M. didn’t show up to school on Monday, Kaylee P. had the market cornered and literally charged thwee Gogurts for a wallet and everyone had to cough it up. Just goes to show that a feared tyrant always triumphs over a benevolent ruler *eye roll.*

5. My Pediatrician Died Last Month, and the New One’s Name is Dr. Grito Which Sounds Like Cheeto So I Call Him Dr. Cheeto This one kind of speaks for itself. Write in if you come up with a better nickname!

6. My Mom Bought a Vacuum and the Dust Has a Party Inside

really really fast and then slow and then fast again and then he gets to skip the part of gym class when we jump a lot. I wonder if my mud and dirt and dust and the dried Play-Doh speck that looks like a bunny with eyelashes still get to have birthday parties in there after they get sucked up?

7. There Was a Big Bird Outside Today

I got banned from the part of recess where Chloe and Elise do Ice Cream Store with wood chips because I refuse to be a team player and I don’t have a twin. So I have to sit with Brandon and throw rocks in the big drain to help him “feed the dead.” Once I tried to tell Brandon he couldn’t come to my trampoline party if he keeps talking about creepy stuff, but he looked at me in a way that gave me a big headache and I had to lie down in the nurse’s office with the lights off and I missed independent reading time. Today, a big bird landed on the ground near the woodchip pile and Brandon talked to it and he said it was his uncle. Ok fine!

8. My Cousin Has a Type of XBox That No One Else Has, and Stores Don’t Sell It

My cousin Gord wears hats with the flat part and he has an XBox that looks like the regular ones except it has a secret type of Fortnite. And also he says it has a camera on it that shows him all the times I called my teacher “Mom” by accident so he’s good at making fun of me.

whaaaa?? Then she made us help her take the com post out. It was super random.

We get to wear shoes inside at my house, be cause if I have to take my Keens off for even five seconds the smell is so bad that it makes my fish dead (one time I wore my purple sandals in the pond at nature camp and when I got home my goldfish Mr. Sixtydollars bit my sister’s fish Swimmy to death)! And also I like to hide pres ents in the rug because they always make my dad surprised (Lego swords and real-life nee dles). My family goes through vacuums almost as fast as Jake eats a lunch tray full of ketchup—

*to be pronounced like “review”

ILLUSTRATION JANE ZHOU

DESIGN TANYA QU

TEXT MASHA BREEZE & NORA MATTHEWS

COLLECTIVE STAKES AND “EMPTY”SPACE

On the colonization of places without people

Antarctica is often framed as the only truly pristine place on Earth. A land with no Indigenous peoples that captures, in its melting arms, histories of a global climate stretching back thousands of years.

In 1959, the 12 nations with stakes in Antarctic exploration at the time (including the U.S., U.K., USSR, Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand) signed the Antarctic Treaty. On the surface, this treaty declared the continent a demilitarized zone preserved for scientific research, hoping to conserve its unique envi ronment for universal good. This display of immense international collaboration—a historic first for collective conservation—was preceded by decades of ‘heroic’ expeditions into the Ant arctic, aiming to explore and, in both a figura tive and material sense, ‘conquer’ previously uncharted natural territory.

This is what the British Naval Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempted to do in 1912, when he took an all-white, all-male team of explorers into “The Great White South,” only to have them succumb to its harsh conditions. Of course, the impacts of this expedition rang louder than just a few men, their egos, and— as a description of their deaths from a crew member’s biography read—the “greatness of England” they represented. This expedition, like several others at the time, was designed as a “pole hunt”—a race to the South Pole meant to capture the public imagination and secure fund ing for the colonial scientific efforts that would follow. While Britain and other imperial states framed the objectives of this research as univer sal, they wielded the very act of research as a political tool. Indeed, states that didn’t already have some extent of control over the Antarctic or large sources of funding for exploration—like these pole hunts—didn’t spend resources on research in the Antarctic, and were, as a result, excluded from the aforementioned Antarctic trea ty. These efforts were also distinctly racialized, both in their repeated allusions to whiteness and in how British officials privately dismissed a Japanese expedition in the same year as inter loping in a white man’s continent.

Further, the treaty didn’t outright reject the claims to sovereignty any of its signees could make over the region; according to Article IV of the treaty, it merely froze the existing claims for its duration. Seven of these 12 countries still continue to claim parts of the continent as ‘their own.’

Ten years after the Antarctic Treaty, the U.S. left its first footsteps on the Moon. Those im prints were the product of nearly two decades of militaristic and scientific competition with the USSR, another party in the treaty, in what was essentially an extraterrestrial pole hunt. It is both troubling and unsurprising, therefore, that much of the same rhetoric and political action has translated from Antarctica to outer space. Academic Deondre Smiles, in The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space, discusses how Donald Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address makes this rhetoric explicit. After asserting the need for the U.S. to “embrace the next frontier, America’s Manifest Destiny in the stars,” Trump went on to say:

Our ancestors braved the unknown, tamed the wilderness, settled the Wild West …

This is our glorious and magnificent inher itance. We are Americans. We are pioneers. We are the pathfinders. We settled the New World. We built the modern world.

The language around the “unknown,” and around “settling” and “taming” reflects the strategies that states like the U.S. have long used for their settler-colonial projects, but it also highlights the motives of the Robert Scott expedition and the nationalist pride surround ing his death. In “Appropriating Space: Ant arctic Imperialism and the Mentality of Settler Colonialism,” environmental historian Adrian Howkins highlights this by showing how the in tense competition that preceded the treaty was unique in being a settler-colonial power struggle over ‘empty’ space

While Mars or the Moon may not have their own Indigenous populations, our experience with Antarctica shows that domination over territorial space is just as central to the set tler-colonial mindset as domination over people. We may think of space travel or exploration as a universal push for the expansion of human knowledge, but the subtext of Elon Musk’s tweets about terraforming Mars or Donald Trump’s speeches about colonizing space con tains a colonial motivation that has long con tributed to the brutal subjugation of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands.

In the case of Antarctica, the U.S., the U.K., and France were cementing their role as active colonizers at the time, and their narratives surrounding their expeditions strongly resem bled those they used to rationalize colonialism elsewhere. These states were exploring a “new frontier,” using the region’s “marine wealth” for economic progress, and establishing themselves in an “untamed wilderness” to further the knowledge of all humanity. Decades ago, their actions mirrored the plans they now lay out for the future of space exploration.

This rhetoric of universal human progress, in the context of space travel, isn’t just super ficial; it has repeatedly had tangible impacts on Indigenous peoples all over the world. Smiles points out the example of Mauna Kea, where a 30-foot space telescope is being constructed largely against the will of the Native Hawaiians living there. Subsequently, they saw increased policing, ecological degradation, and physical violence in the process of clearing human block ades that prevented the telescope’s construc tion. This construction is directly in line with the idea of “Terra Nullius”—already common in our parlance of space exploration—where Indig enous lands are declared “empty” as moral and legal justification for settler projects and dispos session. The same can be said for the dispos session and displacement of formerly enslaved people of quilombos in Alcântara, Brazil, and the Kokatha and Pitjantjatjara peoples in Woomera, Australia to build more launch sites.

Clearly, giving paramount importance to the singular ‘common good’ of knowledge produc tion in our approach to outer space is harmful, as is marching forward listening only to a colo nial construction of science. The question then arises: what might a more humane, even decolo nial approach to space exploration look like?

Beyond militarism: alternative histories of space exploration

A core reason why research in Antarctica con tinues to this day is climate change. Despite the region’s lack of large oil reserves, its glacial ice can capture dust, soot, volcanic ash, and sea salts—airborne relics of the Earth’s past. This ability makes it useful for studying climate histories, while the state of its ice caps serves as a powerful indicator of the effects of global warming. The importance of this research lies not in an abstract notion of human progress, but rather in the collective stakes people have in how we treat the Antarctic environment.

The idea of collective stakes can stretch far beyond a singular characterization in the con text of space travel. Instead of thinking about universal goals, or goals that all of humanity share in their relationship with outer space, we can give more weight to the idea that there are several states, institutions, and communities of people across the planet that have distinctly different relationships with space. The former notion is one of dominance: There is a set of goals, presumably decided by entities that already hold a lot of power, that take precedence over the needs of individual communities. The latter, instead, is one of inclusion: People have their own associations with outer space, and our treatment of space and the processes we use to get to it should respect others’ relationships with this environment.

The hegemonic history of space and hu manity is located in the U.S.-USSR space race, where the two states’ goals for interacting with space were centered on military development and acquiring power on an international scale. China’s space program had similar military roots in the late 1950s, when China began a bal listic missile program in response to perceived U.S. and Soviet threats.

In contrast to this military posturing by existing or to-be global superpowers, several histories of space in the Global South come from post-colonial countries aiming for rapid economic development on Earth. For example, the precursor to India’s current space pro gram, the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), was founded with the goal of using networks of satellites for broader agricultural data, communication and media broadcasting, remote sensing, and meteorology. Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa all started space programs with similar aims.

In addition to human development goals, however, state ambitions around space did often carry an underlying motive of gaining interna tional recognition and power, in both a figura tive and military sense. India’s space program, for example, soon moved beyond commercial space activities like navigation, pouring resourc es into 13 satellites now in orbit that are used by India’s armed forces as an early warning sys tem for external military actions. By developing an additional intercontinental ballistic mis sile, the Indian space program entered a more explicitly combative realm too. Over the last four years especially, India and Pakistan have been engaged in a space race of their own, with both countries aiming to send manned missions into space in the near future. The potential for

leveraging space travel and military power to attract international investment hasn’t been lost on states, but such military intent, even when wielded by post-colonial countries, seems anti thetical to the goal of decolonizing space.

The largest state-level subversion of these ideals came from Zambia. Almost immedi ately after Zambia gained independence from the British in 1964, Edward Mukuka Nkolo so—a grade-school science teacher, former freedom-fighter, and the director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy—declared his ambitions for the nation’s space program. This program, by all means, was a serious science project—Nkoloso’s own son, Mukuka Nkoloso Jr., went through its astronaut training regime in his childhood. However, at each step, the program’s publicity carried a distinctly satirical edge, subtextually hinting at goals that differed from the norm for space programs of that era. In an op-ed that a New Yorker profile called “a parody of British co lonialism in Africa, refracted through a paranoid Cold War sensibility,” Nkoloso wrote:

We have been studying the planet through telescopes at our headquarters and are now certain Mars is populated by primitive natives ...

and:

Our rocket crew is ready. Specially trained spacegirl Matha Mwamba, two cats (also specially trained) and a missionary will be launched in our first rocket. But I have warned the missionary he must not force Christianity on the people if they do not want it.

In addition to 17-year-old Mwamba and the cats, the space program included 11 other as tronauts, who were known to train by spinning around a tree in an oil drum (to simulate low gravity), and walking on their hands, “the only way humans can walk on the moon.” Zambia’s space program, for all its effort and humor, failed to receive the funding it needed to take off. Nkoloso blamed this on “those imperial neocolonialists,” who were “scared of Zambia’s space knowledge.”

Namwali Serpell, the author of this profile, detailed Nkoloso’s revolutionary history and the sheer extent of his education and experiences. During Nkoloso’s time in Ndola, a town in one of the most contested parts of the British colo nial territory in present-day Zambia, he joined the town’s Urban Advisory Council, and spent his days vocally attacking the colonial structures imposed upon the town’s people. He defended “equal pay for equal rights” and fiercely criti cized the colonial federation for raising their Native Tax, i.e. a tax levied in order to force the people of Ndola to seek different forms of work as a part of the British colonial project. He soon gained a reputation as a powerful political agitator in the region, which aligns with his son’s suggestion that the space program was simultaneously a real science project and a cover for revolutionary organizing. Indeed, Nkoloso apparently gave military training to freedom fighters in other still-colonized African nations in the Chunga Valley, the erstwhile headquarters of the National Academy he was in charge of.

Another one of Nkoloso’s colleagues confirmed this, and even claimed that Nko loso drew many of his as tronauts from the

national independence party’s Youth Brigade.

The Zambian space program’s association with space wasn’t commercial or military; it was nearly absurd in its complete detachment from the hegemonic views of space at the time, and revolutionary for the same reason. In a strange way, Nkoloso’s approach hints at what a de colonial relationship with space can look like. The crux of such a relationship lies not only in whose relationship it is, but also what processes they employ to materialize it.

Art, astronomy, and collective visions: the cultural landscape of space

In his conversations with reporters, Nkoloso often highlighted the subtextual role race plays in hegemonic views of space: “Our posterity, the Black scientists, will continue to explore the celestial infinity until we control the whole of outer space.” Since then, several Black artists, musicians, and scholars, in different Afrofutur ist traditions, have posited associations with outer space that see it as a realm for reimagin ing power structures on Earth, instead of just reproducing them.

Eclectic jazz musician Sun Ra, Nkoloso’s American contemporary, built a mythology for himself as an alien abductee, who was taken to Saturn and told by aliens to “transport Black people away from the violence and racism of planet Earth.” Sun Ra’s music used technology to create ethereal textures, notably helping start the subgenre of “space jazz.” Later in the 1960s and ‘70s, artist and educator Alma Thomas took on the Space Race directly with her vibrant, abstract paintings about space. Floating among the black and blue shades of her painting Starry Night and the Astronauts is a warm-colored vessel, presumably for the astronauts she imagined. Art critic Elizabeth Hamilton called this “a state ment of possibility,” leaving the segregation and oppression she and her students inhabited “in hopes of a liberated future.” More recently, Zambian artist Stary Mwaba drew from Nko loso’s original visions to create DKALO-1, a sculpture reflecting Nkoloso’s model of a type of space capsule. Mwaba’s large-scale balloon, encased in bright-patterned local materials, was meant to treat Nkoloso’s space efforts with awe and respect as a Zambia-centric counter-narra tive to the mockery it received in most main stream coverage.

Art is but one way people have expressed their relationships with the cultural landscape of space. Many of the Indigenous peoples dis placed by space research and launch projects, for example, have engaged with outer space via astronomy and spiritual practices for a long time. Anthropologist M. Jane Young noted, for example, that when asked about the moon land ings, the Inuit people she interviewed said:

We didn’t know this was the first time you white people had been to the moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time ... We do go to visit the moon and moon people all the time. The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go.

In The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space, Smiles mentions how his own people, the Ojibwe, “have long standing cultural connections to the stars that influence storytelling, gover nance, and religious tenets.” Our present colonial treatment of outer space often disrupts these Indigenous practices. There is documented concern, for exam ple, that the reckless deploy ment of satellites can obscure parts of the observable night sky, threatening Indigenous astrono my, cosmologies, and knowledge systems.

means recognizing that “empty” space, even when truly uninhabited, is not devoid of the relationships people have with it.

The scope of this recognition cannot only be rhetorical, though it goes without saying that our vocabulary around space “colonization” and “development,” our “Manifest Destiny,” and “Terra Nullius” needs to change. We must also shift the legal and environmental frameworks within which states and companies operate, both in outer space and on Earth.

Such a central shift in operative frameworks might seem far-fetched, but it does have prece dent. In a response to the Canadian Space Agen cy’s 2021 call for consultations from Canadian citizens, Hilding Neilson and Elena E. Ćirković highlighted the legal shortcomings in NASA’s Artemis Accords, which NASA calls a shared vision to “create a safe and transparent envi ronment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy.” Neilson and Ćirković noted how the settler government in New Zealand accepted In digenous perspectives to declare the Whanganui River as a living entity that belonged to no one, thus allowing a committee of humans—includ ing local Maori representatives—to act as a guardian for the river. In contrast, they pointed out that the Artemis Accords allow nation-states on Earth to exploit the Moon and Mars for in dustrial purposes like mining while claiming to act in humanity’s collective interest. The Moon and Mars, they said, play an important relation al role in the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples from around the world, and while these relations could conceivably be respected in coexistence with mining, this would require a serious reconsideration of “what constitutes a human right to interact with the Moon and Mars.”

As for what we do on Earth: we can ques tion the very premise of building an observa tional tool on Mauna Kea—colonized Native Hawaiian land. This questioning should come even before the same institutions consult the communities indigenous to Mauna Kea about where they should build, how this construction could occur without disrupting local routines and practices, what economic roles both parties play in this construction, and how the knowl edge produced by the telescope could be used and disseminated. At its core, a project like the one at Mauna Kea needs to be reflexive. The production of knowledge cannot be a goal in and of itself, and more importantly, it cannot overlook the tangible ways it affects people in the process.

When a state ignores these effects, like the U.S. in Mauna Kea, it perpetuates the same form of science the colonizers of Antarctica did: one that relies on a singular notion of universal progress as a means of domination. By drawing from the multiplicity of relationships we have with outer space—and our collective stakes in it—we must instead hold the drivers of this colonial model of science to account, and look to the generative, critical, and deeply personal ways in which people conceive of, study, and use space.

SWETABH CHANGKAKOTI B’24 is blasting off again.

TWO PROVIDENCES

A Conversation with Incoming State Representative Enrique Sanchez

Last month, 26-year-old Enrique Sanchez won the Democratic primary for Rhode Island House District 9, beating out longtime state represen tative Anastasia Williams, who had held the seat since 1993—before Sanchez was born. His victory, which is all but assured in the November general election, would vault another self-described leftist into the State House. An educator in the Providence public school system and an outspoken activist, Sanchez represents a new generation of young, progressive politicians formed in the summer of 2020, amid resurging anti-racism protests, a charged election season, and a worsening pandemic.

On Monday, before heading off to City Hall for a public hearing, Sanchez spoke with the College Hill Independent about his past, his politics, and his plans for the future.

Note: this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Indy: Could you start by talking about how you got interested in electoral politics? You started in activist groups—how did you make that transition?

Enrique Sanchez: I’ve always had an interest in politics and government. I was big into history, geography, government during my youth, and I realized, well, this is my calling. The environments surrounding me have led me to a specific political reasoning: I lean toward the left, toward progressive values. I’ve seen a lot of poverty, in places like Providence and New York; and when I spent time in the Midwest, in Iowa; during my time traveling in Mexico, Central America, Guatemala; and even when I was visiting Europe, in urban cities like London and in Paris. I’ve been intrigued with learning about past revolutions, past movements that have shaken up politics around the world.

When I graduated from Rhode Island College in 2019, I was already involved in local campaigns, volunteering. I was canvassing for folks, I started to learn the political atmosphere here—who was who, who was where, state legislation, city council stuff, all that. And when I began teaching four years ago, as a substitute, I started seeing firsthand the issues within our school system. We always knew that the schools in Providence were not producing the results they needed to be. But once I was in the school system, I was like, I gotta do more than this. I gotta try to do my part to uplift our kids, all 22,000 students in the Providence school district.

Fast forward to two years ago. I started becoming more involved in local activism during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. A lot of folks on the left were all fired up. I got involved with groups such as the Black Lives Matter RI PAC, Reclaim RI, Providence Democratic Socialists of America, Sunrise PVD—most of the progressive left-leaning organiza tions across our city and state.

Then, last year, I decided to ramp it up: I thought I’d see if I could win this position. I got to know my district that I now represent. I started connecting with folks, checking in with people. A lot of people were pushing back against me running for the position, because I was taking on a 30-year incumbent, an Afro-Latina woman. But she just wasn’t delivering for constituents. She was a moderate, a conservative Democrat politician. She wasn’t voting correctly on the issues. In the state house she was voting yes to give public subsidies and tax breaks to private developers; she voted against Act On Climate, which was passed last year; she criticized the governor’s decision to let Afghanistan refugees into the state. How can you be an immigrant, a woman of color, and then critique the governor’s decision to let refugees from the Middle East come to Rhode Island?

Her votes on these policies weren’t aligned with what she was saying were her core values and convictions. So, you know, it was time for her to go. She was there for 30 years. It was time. I announced in October, and then I started fundraising, making moves. I started checking in with folks. In January, I began knocking on doors. From January to September 13, I was knocking on doors consistently, five or six days a week after work,

from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. most of the days. On weekends, I started at 11am. I ran the district a good six, seven times—over 10,000 doors.

The Indy: Rhode Island is ostensibly a very blue state. But as you’ve talked about, there’s a lot of ideological diversity in the state’s Democratic Party. Could you talk about how you see the party’s different divi sions, and also where Republicans stand—especially as it looks like a Republican, former mayor of Cranston Allan Fung, could potentially win in Rhode Island’s 2nd Congressional District?

ES: I think people are realizing that both parties can be corrupt. Both parties, whether you’re Republican or Democrat—especially now, during this pandemic—people have realized, oh, the Democrats have been running things around here. They’ve allowed increases in the tax rate and electricity rates; they’ve allowed for our housing crisis to get out of control; they’ve allowed for flooding across our city to get out of hand. The Republicans have been slowly gaining traction, gaining momentum. They are on the Trump Train. But they’re not really beating the drum of the MAGA movement.

Allan Fung would be a disaster for Rhode Island; there’s no doubt in my mind. But has Seth Magaziner [the Democratic candidate for the seat] been delivering on his campaigning? He’s not firing up young people. That’s why he’s second in the polls right now. The left want someone who is going to get them fired up, who’s going to get them excited for this race. Fung is campaigning with an economic populist approach. He’s hustling, he’s showing up everywhere. He’s building a coalition of Republicans, Democrats who have been let down by the party, and then a large pool of independents, who he could pick up as well. He is building a coalition of folks on all sides of the political sphere here in Rhode Island.

That’s how we got here. The party has not been delivering for the state. I would like to do my part, but the party needs to understand that it can’t give in to corporate interest, to fossil fuel companies, to private developers, to the elites. We just can’t, or else our base, the working class, is going to be let down. We’re seeing the results of what’s been happening right now.

The Indy: I’m interested in hearing your take on the school system, espe cially given that you work in it. What’s your view on the state’s takeover of the Providence Public School District? And what do you think of how education has been infused into Rhode Island politics over the past few years?

ES: Education is the basis of who we are in Rhode Island. I’m a supporter of improving our public schools. I’m not really for charter schools, private schools, even though I know that they’ve been delivering for a lot of our youth, especially Black and brown youth.

The leadership has been doing okay, but it could be better. There could be more diversity. There could be more openness to progressive values, progressive approaches. We could do better outreach to parents, community members, and local groups. The Providence Teachers Union could be more involved in afterschool activities. A lot of the teachers don’t have kids in Providence, or come from other parts of the state— there’s a disconnect.

What do I think of the state takeover? It hasn’t been delivering for our kids. Everyone voted for a state takeover [of the Providence Public School District] three years ago after that Johns Hopkins report that came out. But it’s been three years. The commissioner has stated that delays in reaching the goals are due to the pandemic. And now the plan is that the takeover will last until 2027. What can I say? Things have accelerated so badly that there is no good relationship between the union and RIDE [The Rhode Island Department of Education]. Teachers have been leaving across our district. Absenteeism has been huge. Remote learning has been bad for our kids. We don’t have an elected school board. Right now we have an appointed school board. I think we need an elected school board for the whole city. And test results are still not seeing improvements in RICAS testing, ACCESS testing, the PSAT, and the SAT. Administrators have been dealing with the burden of hiring

new teachers—especially young teachers of color—and retaining them. It’s been a mess. Over 250 teachers have retired or were displaced or quit their jobs since the beginning of the pandemic. That number keeps growing.

I want to address major issues with the funding formula for Providence kids. Right now, Providence students receive 13.5% less in school funding per pupil compared to other school districts. We need to amend the right to education in our constitution, to make it more student friendly. We need to make sure that private institutions, not just Brown but all these other private colleges, and LaSalle Academy and Bishop Hendricken High School, are, you know, having to pay their fair share— not granting them tax credits. Charter schools and private schools should not be receiving public money. They’re private and charter schools for a specific reason.

The Indy: You utilize Twitter a lot—how do you see social media fitting into this movement? Are other types of politicians using it as much?

ES: The old-guard establishment folks, older folks, don’t really use social media. They have social media, but they don’t really utilize it to talk about policies and issues. I’m pretty active on Twitter and Instagram; I have a Facebook, too, but I mostly use Twitter and Instagram because that’s where I draw a lot of the younger folks who are curious about politics and government. I’m still building my way up—Sam Bell [a state senator] has been on Twitter forever. He has like 6,000 followers. David [Morales, a state representative] has almost 4,000 followers.

Social media shouldn’t be everything. But it is helpful. Otherwise, for

us to actually get the word out about these things, we have to invest our money into mailers. And these mailers cost thousands of dollars, which is money we don’t have.

Money is something that us progressives have an issue with here, compared to the establishment. They take money from corporate lobby ists, fossil fuel companies, police unions, you know—we refuse to accept that money because we’re the ones advocating against their policies and their special interest. I mean, I understand the worker unions—they’re fighting for their wages and jobs. But what about folks getting priced out? The Superman building deal is going to bankrupt our city; the finances don’t add up. It’s a tax break of $29 million over 30 years for the private developer. All they want to do is ‘clean up’ downtown—meaning they want to kick out homeless folks, kick out working class folks, break public transportation. They want to get rid of RIPTA [Rhode Island Public Transport Authority] eventually. They want to push all the homeless folks out to places in my district and Upper South Side, on Westminster, to other working class communities.

There’s two Providences: one in which young professionals, lawyers, have their careers, and then there’s the other Providence, where working class families—especially Black and brown families—are marginalized.

After our interview, Sanchez and I walked toward City Hall, where a long line of green-shirted trade union workers had already formed. They were waiting for the imminent public hearing on a proposed $29 million tax break for the developers of the so-called Superman building—the one Sanchez talked about in our conversation—after which the Providence City Council would decide the deal’s fate.

“I’m not even sure I’ll make it in,” Sanchez said. We walked to the front of the line, where we met up with several of his fellow progressive leaders—Sam Bell and Jackie Goldman among them—as well as some potential future candidates. He introduced me to each one, cracking jokes and catching up before what was sure to be a tense forum. Then he turned, smiled, and waved goodbye, before disappearing into the govern ment building.

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 encourages you to check out the Rhode Island political twittersphere, where you can find Enrique Sanchez @EnriqueForRI!

MEDITATIONS ON INFRASTRUCTURE

For this issue we asked writers for a short take on “infrastructure,” interpreted in the broadest sense and on any scale. These mini pieces seek out unconventional notions of infrastructure—of living space, computer chips, subterranean city-scapes, and knowledge production—offering new perspectives on the constructed worlds around us.

Lingering in the Subway

A look at the New York City subway’s tiling

I distinctly remember when I descended into Astor Place station. As the skyscrapers of Manhattan gave way to that musty, yellow glow of the subway, I began to see something new—a beaver plaque that adorned the walls of the platform. It was nothing impressive, but I could not help marveling at the way the beaver stood on its legs with its little claws wrapped around a tree branch, surrounded by a cornice with a decorative flower pattern, a style I had seen so often yet never had the words to describe. There was something touching about the ability of such architecture to submerge itself beneath the conscious gaze of the typical subway rider and reveal itself only when explicitly looked for.

Earlier that day, I had stumbled across a book at the Strand that described the work of Philip Ashforth Coppola, who made it his lifetime goal to draw the New York City Sub way. What does it mean to draw the subway? To draw, to record, and to immortalize the decora tive tiles that filled the stations of the subway system. This deliberate choice to draw rather than photograph, to replicate by hand rather than by camera, forces the observer to see all the details. But as the reader, I was struck not only by Coppola’s drawings but also by the sheer amount of detail around me I had never thought to observe. Flipping through the book, I realized that a new world—one of history, ru ins, design, and art—was revealing itself to me. When one actively looks for these subway tiles, they are everywhere, and yet they were never hidden from us in the first place. The hidden is revealed to us, and we begin to closely read and listen to the language of the underground.

The beginnings of the New York subway system in the late 1890s coincided with a larger philosophy in urban planning known as the City Beautiful movement, which held that beauti fication of the city would inspire virtue in its inhabitants. As part of the city’s infrastructure, the subway was intended to be not only a feat of public transportation but also an exhibit of the city’s grandeur. Such grandeur was reflected in the decor of stations—most stations had a banal uniformity to them, but the various mosaic til ing and plaques gave each station its individual beauty.

The city is full of signs and symbols for us to read. From the obvious and everyday Helveti ca black and white signs that signal the stations and directions we wish to go (34 Street-Penn Station, Downtown & Brooklyn A/C) to the more concealed yet visible (the colorful tiling of Canal Street, the intricate ornamentation

of Bleecker Street). We look toward the black and white signs to guide ourselves through the subway, and in our haste to find our way, we overlook the more detailed decoration of the stations: we do not observe the detailed orna mentation, we are not aware of the history that surrounds the tiling, and we do not fully appre ciate the decorative individuality of each station.

What is revealed in such observations is not simply an aesthetic appreciation of the city, but an understanding and awareness of its various layers. The subway is like the city’s respirato ry system: people flutter in and out, dashing through turnstiles and rushing up and down stairs. As people move about the city, it chang es. Layers are added, removed, filled in, erased as time passes, and the subway system sheds and grows along with the rest of the city. The system of tiling, as a part of the city’s infrastruc ture, extends beyond a visual representation of the city’s material surface. Some tiles provide a direct indication of what lies above ground—the Alma Mater plaque at 116th Street—Columbia University station, the boat mosaics at the old South Ferry station—but the vast majority bear little resemblance to what exists above ground. And yet, could we not say that they serve as another form of infrastructure, a self-contained system that exists, guides, and signifies some thing separate from the larger system around it? They create a visual world underground, connected to, but not strictly reflective, of the world above. The tiles may provide some sort of aesthetic function in the subway system, but they contain so much more—a collection of images that speaks its own language.

ERIC GUO B’23 is still wandering beneath the city.

Beakers and Bushes

The culture of inquiry

My third-grade science fair is seared in my memory—the dehydrated potatoes and the white tri-fold board covered in bright sharp ie detailing the scientific method. I recall the desire to win. Some of that desire came from my mother, a science teacher, who had sown a love of science in me. The scientific method, as taught to children, can be described in four steps: forming a hypothesis, experimentally testing it, recording observations, and draw ing conclusions from the results. My mother, eager to help me understand a complex topic in the way a third-grader could, suggested that I conduct a biology lab she had done with her

students. The experiment examined the effect of immersing a potato in salt water—observing os mosis. I was baffled—how could an eight-yearold carry out such a complicated experiment? As she explained the experiment further, I dropped my head to the dining table, struggling to even understand the words she was saying.

As scary as the project seemed, I did not want to pass up the opportunity to spend time working on it with my mom. I initially pictured the potato as a water balloon, hypothesizing that it would grow in salt water. After planning and conducting the exper iment, my hypothesis was wrong! The potato shrunk. Despite that, my project was successful because I followed the four steps: I made my hypothesis and tested it, placing the potatoes in covered beakers for varying amounts of time and measuring their sizes to answer how they changed in salt water. I came to understand that science isn’t about proving oneself right, but having appropriate methods to understand the experimental ques tion and result.

As my mom taught me to approach the world through conventional science experi ments, I spent my summers and holidays with my family in Jamaica’s mountains, learning about nature through direct encounters. I re member going on walks with my mother where the air smelled of fallen mangoes, mint leaves, and rain. She would point out certain leaves and bushes and explain that they were made into teas because they had healing and protective properties for fevers, stomach aches, and even heart health. I questioned how she could know that without research or evidence. She looked at me and sighed, joking that I needed to spend more time in Jamaica. Despite her scientific background and love of research, she had been taught and sought to teach me many things that were known through our familial or cultural knowledge.

My mother enjoyed learning; there were things she had learned through textbooks, but there were also things she had learned from her grandmother, who had learned from hers. She explained that my family had used these natural remedies for generations and that, while they had not tested it scientifically, their knowledge was shown correct through experience. She reminded me of the time I caught a fever. She rushed to the bushes in the back of our home and picked cerasee leaves, the key ingredient in a tea my family had used to cure colds, fevers, and aches for as long as she could remember.

“Here,” she said, handing me a cup of bitter tea masked by honey, “this will make you feel better.” The next morning, my fever felt consid

erably better, just as it had the other times my mother had treated my ailments with cerasee tea. With this reminder, my mother had once again left me dumbfounded, wondering how to learn and know things, this time not through a science experiment. Growing up in two cultures with dichotomous approaches to explo ration forced me to face the fact that there is no one correct way to know.

Forging Swords

The human side of chip manufacturing and pro duction as statecraft

In July 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS Act, a $50 billion effort to support domestic computer chip research and manufacturing. Hailed as the federal government’s largest direct investment into a strategic industry in recent memory, the act aims to decrease reliance on East Asian countries, which produce 75% of global chip supply and host four of the top five chip manu facturing sites. Though many major design firms are U.S.-based, almost two-thirds of the world’s advanced computer chips are made in Taiwan.

This position in the trade ecosystem gives Taiwan significant power as an export nation, but places it at the center of war games between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. Per Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, this expansion thus represents a chance to not only expand American manufacturing and R&D, but also shore up “national security.”

But “national security” evokes weaponry, military budgets. What does it mean here?

A Three Kingdoms period (220-280 C.E.) legend, recounted by Emperor Cao Pi, tells of a bronzesmith commissioned to forge a sword from celestial metal birthed by the empress, a sword meant to save the empire from invasion. On the sword’s delivery, the emperor, fearing the skilled smith might make weapons for other rulers, has him executed.

What are the weapons in this story? The sword—itself a ‘son’ of the emperor. The knowl edge of forging—how to hone newborn material into something dangerous. The argument that ‘invaders’ are coming—a claim that makes any injustice, even murder, imperial defense.

ating temperatures.

The production process also requires sig nificant human attention, and each step is so delicate that any dust in the environment could permanently damage chips’ capacity. Workers at 24/7 fabrication sites first refine raw silicon into a pure crystal and cut it into thin round wa fers to be made into tens or hundreds of chips. Then, workers operating extra-UV lithography machines etch design features as small as three nanometers into the wafers. Due to the number of times this etching process must be repeat ed, a batch of chips takes months to complete. Even after intense environmental regulation, humans have so little control over chip quality that the chips’ final processing speed still varies immensely.

Thus, though we might imagine computers as fungible, each computer’s chips are unique. And though we might overlook the awe-in spiring work that goes into them, it is work— human work. Beyond the harping on supply chains, inflation, U.S./PRC conflict—conflicts over chips are conflicts over knowledge, with thousands of skilled workers caught in their wake.

If we read into the internalizing of a “strate gic industry” as “national defense,” as Raimon do says, the CHIPS Act’s reshuffling of workers’ livelihoods thus becomes a soft deployment, each worker part of a never-ending war.

Cao Pi’s legendary bronzesmith left behind two other weapons after death: a twin sword made from the excess celestial metal and a newborn son to wield it. As a man, the son does just that: claims the twin sword, unseats the emperor, and avenges his father.

A 1926 rewrite of this story by Lu Xun, the ‘father’ of modern Chinese literature, plays up this manpower/weaponry meld. His descrip tions of the son—who “burn[s] red-hot” and runs “cold as ice”—and the stranger who helps him—cold and thin as an “iron rake”—evoke swords in a forge, ‘swords’ who ultimately sacri fice themselves to complete the mission.

This retelling could be a nationalist call to arms, in which two men battle a system that makes weapons of us all. But published a year before the escalation of Kuomintang/CCP ten sions in a China still hamstrung by decades of unequal trade with Western nations, this story might also take aim at any state’s weaponization of its people—the people who fuel its industries and fight its wars—as the father weaponizes his son. After all, in Lu Xun’s version, succeeding in the father’s mission means both individual heroes must die.

RYAN SILVERMAN B’23 is semi-conductive.

KATHERINE XIONG B’23’s laptops—and their makers—deserve more respect.

of Peter Green into a study nook. In granting new tactile access to this historical architecture, the renovations (designed by KITE Architects) indicate a reverence for historical infrastructure, a desire to innovate by illuminating and recon textualizing the past without erasing it.

Unfortunately, I grew uncomfortable sitting against shingles and relocated to the more traditional sofa situated on the bridge’s most sunlit section, where I was met with a grim sight that revealed the primary motives of the build ings’ unification. As I looked out through the window, my field of view was filled entirely by a single, windowless plane of grayish aluminum: I was staring at the north wall of the soon-to-be Lindemann Performing Arts Center (LPAC), conveniently placed on the former grounds of the Sharpe House.

Faced with an “extruded aluminum rain screen” and a rectilinear structure, the Center appears much like an Apple storefront—or an Apple product. The new building will go on to accommodate a 625-seat auditorium, along with a handful of studio spaces. Brown claims the LPAC “is designed to inspire innovative new art-making” in the performing arts. The language of “new art-making” seems pointed quite precisely at digital creation, despite the build ing’s foundation in bodily art forms. Though the university has released few specifics of the building’s facilities, it seems fair to assume that a post-COVID building would come equipped with digital capture equipment to compress live experiences into electromagnetic currents on a circuit board and transmit them far beyond the walls of the auditorium.

Since my initial encounter with the LPAC, I’ve considered how the building’s visual footprint signifies the oft-ignored material limits of infor mation computation and transmission. Many felt the impending virtual world overtaking at the fastest rate during lockdowns, when firms swiftly relocated their operations from grand, high-resource office towers into humble laptops that could simulate a working environment from anywhere. This shift engendered a sense that our lives had almost wholly abstracted, the physical moved into the ethereal plane of the internet. In reality, the material operations, once palpably accessible, did not vanish out of thin air but were instead relocated to an AWS datacenter tucked far away in the woods of Washington.

Though our cognitive maps of digital econ omies, relationships, and art-making resemble immaterial webs stretched across the atmo sphere, the LPAC faces us with the material antithesis. Perhaps the contradiction between the building’s futuristic look and its function for live, bodily performing arts, which we might call dated in the streaming age, is a move by KITE to confront the bodies of data transmission machines.

What, in computing, is worth killing for? With chips as the basis of nations’ digital infrastruc tures—powering the smart phones and com puters that run economies and controlling the drones and server rooms that run military oper ations—their sites of production hold significant geopolitical value.

“Site of production” suggests mastery over material, a place where identical products pop out of a perfectly controlled assembly line and exist only for use. With computer chips, none of these connotations may hold. For one, the material limitations of chip manufacturing mean craftsmen navigate uncertainty through the design process. Designers make the ‘brains,’ considering different architectures that trade off power consumption, speed, and chip size. Verification engineers simulate the chip in all possible scenarios—mistakes in hardware are permanent and costly. Engineers translate the design into transistors, finding layouts that are physically possible and fast enough to work at all potential manufacturing variations and oper

On Aluminum Buildings

Displacement, transmission, and contemporary architecture

Recently, I ventured for the first time into Sharpe House, a charming repurposed residence named after machinist and business leader Lucian Sharpe, who led the invention of the American Wire Gauge. This system now serves as the stan dard for determining the diameters of electrical wire.

Since Brown acquired Sharpe’s residence in 1920, the building and the neighboring Peter Green House have quartered Brown’s history department. The two buildings, the former dug up and relocated to adjoin the latter in 2018, are joined by two glass bridges attached to the exte riors of each, transforming the dormer windows

The question remains, however, of just how severely these bodies will transform the urban landscape, and how gracefully this new land scape will integrate the historical infrastructure that institutions like Brown hope to preserve. What historical traces will be washed away by this new landscape? Will infrastructure of transmission take precedence over the local experience?

Sharpe’s legacy feels bitter sweet. Today we can admire his home and its history with a proximity like never before. From his windows we can look out at the realiza tion of his invention.

Unfortunately it’s a pretty shitty view.

JACKSON DELEA B’23 is moving his desk to his window.

MAKIEDA MCKENZIE B’25 is crying over midterms.

TEXT JACKSON DELEA, ERIC GUO, MAKIEDA MCKENZIE, RYAN SILVERMAN, & KATHERINE XIONG

DESIGN ADELLE CLARK

NOAH BASSMAN

Content warning: gendered violence

Two years ago this October, I left my home in Brooklyn and drove to Maine to volunteer on a farm for two months. Being from the city, I had always romanticized farms as a form of escape, a way to get out of the city into some thing peaceful, quiet, and beautiful. I hoped it would be a reprieve from the stress of urban life and a way to connect with the natural world. I imagined spending time with the farm animals, cooking with produce I helped grow myself, going for walks in the countryside.

As I passed through the White Mountains in early October, it seemed like the country would be everything I had convinced myself it would be. Fall had arrived and the trees were emblazoned with vibrant shades of autumnal oranges and reds. But when I finally got to the farm, something felt off. It was eerily remote, and the nearest town was miles away. Most of the crops had died, replaced by curled-up brown leaves in hardened soil. A row of sunflowers had started to wilt and turn black. Sheep peered at me from a distance behind an electric fence, eyes glinting. As much as I wanted the farm to be the idealized version I had in my head, I was gripped with unease. Instead of the tranquil escape I had expected, it felt like I had just entered the set of a horror film.

Last month, A24 released its latest slasher, Pearl Directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth, Pearl tells the story of a farm girl growing up in 1918 with the hopes of making it big. Pearl’s husband Howard is away at war, leaving Pearl to work on her family’s farm. To her, the farm is a prison she is desperate to escape. She is forced to take care of her father who has become paralyzed from a past illness. Her mother, an immigrant from Germany, is intensely religious and controlling. Pearl’s only reprieve from the farm is when she is sent into town to do errands. There, she sneaks off to the movies, watching films of dancing girls, legs kicked high.

“I want to be special, dancing up on the

screen like the pretty girls in the pictures!” Pearl exclaims. She practices her dancing in secret anytime she can. When a big opportunity arises—open auditions to be a dancer in a trav eling troupe—she is willing to go to any means necessary to be cast, which she envisions as her only chance to become a star and leave the farm. She performs her dances to the cows, sheep, and geese, playing the role of a charming little farm girl with big dreams. The illusion is quickly broken when a goose looks at her funny at the end of one of her performances, as if questioning her talent. In revenge, she stabs it with a pitch fork and feeds it to the local alligator in the lake. Pearl quickly moves on from animals to humans, killing anyone in her path that prevents her from achieving her goals.

Pearl’s world is a technicolor dreamscape. She exists in a universe similar to Dorothy’s in the Wizard of Oz, filled with vibrant reds, blues, and yellows. The choice to situate Pearl within a technicolor Old Hollywood setting furthers the revulsion and horror of Pearl’s actions by implic itly comparing her to the innocent farm girl of these films. At one point, Pearl chases her sisterin-law Misty, a blonde girl from a wealthy family, with an ax. We see Misty running down the road in front of their house, while Pearl follows her in the background in a bright red dress. This scene is more aesthetically reminiscent of Dorothy and her entourage skipping down the yellow brick road than of a murderer going after their next victim.

XXX

Pearl was created as a prequel to the movie X, also directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth. A Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired slasher, X follows a group of aspiring porn stars and amateur filmmakers who set off from Houston into the countryside with plans to make an X-rated film called “The Farmer’s Daughter.” Mia Goth plays Maxine, the film’s protagonist who, much like Pearl, is determined to become famous. The group rents a cabin on the farm of an elderly couple, Howard (Stephen Ure), and Pearl, who is also played by Mia Goth in pros thetic makeup. The farm is the same farm that Pearl grew up on, with its yellow farmhouse, red barn, and alliga tor-infested pond. She never escaped, and now she is an old woman, her hair mostly fallen out, her face unrecognizable from age.

In X, when Howard realizes that the group is not just renting out his cabin for a short vacation, he warns them that his wife better not find out what they are up to. The assumption is that he wants to protect his elderly Christian wife from the sinful horrors they are committing. In reality,

Pearl is not so innocent. She becomes intensely jealous of Maxine, whom she sees as a younger version of herself. She is angry that she is an old woman and no longer sexually desirable, that she holds no chance to escape this life she hates. Pearl’s murderous streak continues. Supported this time by her husband, they kill off each member of “The Farmer’s Daughter” cast one by one, in true slasher fashion.

XXX

Looking back, it is not surprising that the farm I worked on felt like a horror film. After all, American horror films have been increasingly drawn to the countryside for key reasons. Rural settings have all of the perfect conditions needed to terrify: isolation, darkness, death. This is particularly effective in the classical rural horror film; that is, one in which big city folks travel into the countryside for a pleasant trip and are instead confronted by rural America’s terrifying reality. In the city/countryside horror film— which X falls into more explicitly than Pearl—the countryside exists as an escape for those who live in urban areas, similar to how I had imagined the farm in Maine before I experienced its reality. This divide between the “romanticized” coun tryside and the “terrifying” countryside more often than not relates to class. The countryside of horror is desolate and impoverished, regions of America that are framed as forgotten by popular media. In this countryside, the horror itself is almost always perpetrated by the rural poor.

Increasingly since the 1970s, rural figures in horror films have become embodiments of the stereotypes that those from cities project onto the rural—that is, southern backwoods men. This is mostly attributed to the release of the slasher film Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974.

The film follows a group of young friends who accidentally encounter and fall victim to a family of canni bals in rural Texas. Supposedly based on true events, the film was shot on 16mm film, adding to its gritty, realist effect. The family in Chainsaw is depicted as a bunch of “hillbillies”: poor, uneducated, and dirty, in direct contrast to the youth, who appear initially as conventionally attractive and clean. The main killer is Leatherface, a nameless, silent man wearing a grotesque mask made of human skin who runs after the kids with a chainsaw.

The film marked a new era for horror, as films increasingly adopted its trope of redneck killers chasing after helpless urban youth (The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Cabin in the Woods (2012)).

As Carol Clover, author of the horror theory book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, argues, the assumption for city/country horror films is: “People from the city are people like us. People from the country are people not like us.” This dissonance between people like us (civilized,

“Please lord, make me the biggest star the world has ever known so that I can get far, far away from this place.”

Horror on the farm in Ti West’s X and Pearl

moral) and people not (barbaric) is physically marked on the body, as these killers are often depicted as ugly—toothless, surly, unshaven. Their appearance is symptomatic of a larger incivility, one which can justify unspeakable violence. As Clover frames it: “In horror, the man who does not take care of his teeth is obviously a man who can, and by the end of the movie will, plunder, rape, murder, beat his wife and children, kill within his kin, commit incest, and/or eat human flesh.” Rural people are transformed into revolting figures, devoid of humanity. There’s a sense of fascination for the viewer, to see the extent to which these humans, isolated from civilization, have transformed into monstrous beings.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the greatest sources of inspiration for West in X. This is clear from one of the first scenes—the crew of “The Farmer’s Daughter,” piled up in a van, driving into the Texas countryside, is taken almost exactly from the opening shot of Chainsaw. Drawing heavily from Chainsaw, West reinforces the trope of the rural as a horrifying “other” in X from the moment Howard and Pearl are introduced. When the group pulls up to the farm, Howard, hidden within the house, points a shotgun at them through the door, accusing them of trespassing. He has seemingly forgotten that he rented out his cabin. When he finally steps into view, it’s shocking. His skin sags and is covered in discoloration, cuts, and bruises. Looking at Howard, Jackson (played by Kid Cudi), the male porn star of “The Farmer’s Daughter,” says, “that’s one ugly son of a bitch.”

XXX

Film critic Robin Wood notes in his essay, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” that rural horror is inherently connected to gender. The killers are men, usually related, such as in Chainsaw. Wood explains how “the absence of woman (conceived of as a civilizing, humanizing influence) deprives the family of its social sense and social meaning while leaving its strength of primitive loyalties largely untouched.” The lack of women within the killers’ lives enables their rugged masculinity, breeding incivility and cravings for violence against women. What makes X and Pearl so compelling is that the killer is not the typical ‘redneck’ man: instead, in Pearl’s character, we find a developed female antagonist who at some points—

with unattainable desire—for sex, fame, escape, youth, and violence.

In rural horror films like Chainsaw, the sexu ality of rural men is not explored; instead, it is replaced by their desire for murder and canni balism. In other cases, sexuality is directly linked to male violence against women. Most typically, depictions of female characters center around their innocence.

However, feminine sexual desire is an integral part of Pearl’s character. Her desire for sex and murder both develop from her longing for freedom and escape from the horror of the farm. In Pearl, we see the extent of Pearl’s sexual desire in her youth; one scene even graphically simulates her having sex with a scarecrow. In X, her violence is motivated by her spurned sexual desire, rejected by both her husband Howard, who claims his heart is too weak, and the young visitors, who cringe at her aging body.

X’s Maxine is also far from the usual “final girl”—the term used in horror to describe the last girl in a slasher film, the only one who usually makes it out alive.

First coined by Clover in 1992, final girls are usually defined by their moral superiority compared to other char acters—they refuse sex, drugs, alcohol, are ‘good girls’—which justifies them being spared by the killer. But Maxine is not in any way innocent. The daughter of a southern preacher, Maxine has turned her back on god and is now a porn star with a cocaine habit, high on ambition for fame and success. “I’m a fucking star! The whole world is gonna know my name. I will not accept a life I do not deserve,” Maxine yells out to Pearl before attempting to shoot her.

By the end of the film, Maxine and Pearl are the last ones alive—Pearl and Howard have killed Maxine’s friends, and Howard has suffered a heart attack. In a final face-off, Pearl picks up a shotgun and tries to shoot Maxine. She misses, but the recoil from the gun blasts Pearl backwards, onto the driveway outside, breaking her hip. Finally free, Maxine escapes the house and gets into Howard’s truck. Instead of simply driving away, she runs the truck over Pearl’s head, splattering her blood and brains onto the

for escape, for fame, is directly connected to her desire to be loved.

Pearl is willing to do anything to accomplish this dream, including killing both her parents in order to attend her dance audition. However, in the end, she is rejected. She does not have the “X-factor” the judges are looking for. Pearl breaks down. Her sister-in-law Misty takes her home. Sitting in her now empty house, Pearl begins a chilling monologue, her cheeks streaked with mascara.

“I want to be loved by as many people as possible. But truth is, I’m not really a good person,” she tells Misty.

Despite knowing what Pearl has done, and what one expects she is about to do to Misty, it is hard not to sympathize with her. Pearl is horri fied of her sexual and violent tendencies. She exhibits a self-awareness that is rare to see in horror movie killers.

XXX

X and Pearl are not revolu tionary. They reinforce stereotypes about the rural, continuing the pattern in horror media of the rural as a horri fying ‘other.’ But both films mark a new period in horror, one that both pays tribute to the genre’s past but also expands it into something new, more complex; X and Pearl’s explorations of female-driven horror are far more compelling than the usual slasher. They answer what it would mean for rural horror to shift away from the typical male lens and instead focus on female violence, desire, and sexuality.

Much like the urban victim at the start of a rural slasher, I went to the countryside as a way to escape. The truth was, I knew nothing about what it meant to be a farmer, to live in rural America. Those months on the farm were some of the loneliest I’ve felt. There is a certain isola tion that existed there, a lack of distractions, that forced me to confront a deeper self, someone I may not have known existed.

In Pearl, Pearl is given agency that is not afforded to other killers in rural films. She has intimate desires, longings, dreams. In yearning to escape the countryside, she subverts the stagnant killer and escapist victim binary of horror. Pearl not only faces physical isolation, but also contends with a sense that she is not quite normal, and is thus further isolated from everyone around her. Perhaps she thinks that escaping the farm might let her escape herself.

In the closing shot of Pearl, she attempts to clean up the murder spree she has committed. She disposes of her sister-in-law’s body in the lake and arranges the bodies of her murdered parents around the kitchen table, as if she is pretending the events of the movie never occured. Her mother, in an attempt to suppress her daughter’s ambitions, always told her to make the best of what she already had. Pearl’s dreams were bigger than that.

Like Maxine, she was not willing to accept a life she felt she did not deserve.

Howard, finally home from war, walks into the kitchen. Pearl enters the room, holding a rotten roasted pig covered in maggots. She is smiling and she can’t stop, a big Hollywood smile, shaking and weeping, as the camera closes in on her face.

LOLA SIMON B’24 is looking for someone with X-factor.

In this issue, we asked our writers to contribute to a compilation of short works attuned to transformation. All good writing seeks to move from one place to another. We hope that as you move through these pieces, you pay attention to how they evolve sonically, syntactically, or semantically through form and content.

Botany

Lesson

We want matching tattoos. We feel not that we will grow old together, but that we already have. We seek the arboreal fate of Baucis and Philemon, whose intertwining branches fossilize their fondness for the life they shared.

The name “Tamar” translates from its original Hebrew to “date palm,” Phoenix dactylifera, yielder of that saccharine Middle Eastern fruit. My own Tamar exudes that same sweetness, and though her fore bears fled two generations prior, her roots (however literal) remain firmly in Armenia. The remnants of this past linger in the scent of rose: in the rose water her mother measures out to make paklava, in the tabletop bouquet that Tamar so neatly arranges, and in her own mid dle name, which blends regrettably with her first to sound like “tomorrows.” Perhaps my tattoo will be her namesake flower; perhaps hers will be mine.

LILY LUSTIG B’23 loves her therapist, who is also Tamar’s therapist.

Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

The body in the mirror is closer than it appears.

A body faces the mirror—look closer.

A body’s face in the mirror, Somebody’s face (not mine).

The face in the mirror, eyes closed.

Appear to me again in the mirror.

Our faces, close within the mirror.

Our bodies poised like still-life objects in the mirror as if waiting for someone’s brushstrokes to capture our reflection into more than just appearance.

Appearance does not define the object.

The mirror does not create an object.

A body in a mirror is not an object.

A hand appears on an object (closer).

A hand appears on a body, closing.

Am I an object in the mirror?

Objects are mirrors / bodies are mirrors /

The mirror molds the appearance molds the object molds the body molds me.

Was I only an object in the mirror?

The appearance dissolves the object, Only reflections left.

FAITH GRIFFITHS B’24 is bad at adjusting her car’s side-view mirrors.

Edgethe stupor became you your blood became me the dust in the kitchen wallpaper thrashed kicked clawed bled into plaster’s crumbled palm which gasped for mold grasped for stone where she sealed a processed sugar cookie in bubble wrap to protect its rind from peeling rain the difference between drywall and violets heaps of unraveled paint took your fingerprint stole your fingerprints along with your pots and pans which were rusted shut anyway and veiled them in the faintest pantry where my irises can’t reach

DANA HERRNSTADT B’24 made bread once, but she’s not someone who makes bread all the time or anything.

Deposition

Tropical storm Isaias moved into town as I drove to my interview. It took me twice as long to get there as it should have, the wind toppling a couple of telephone poles along the way. I turned the windshield wipers to high power and eased up on the gas.

2020

an anachronism: a girl tells me she loves me before I hang up.

Mullet

pretty, like pins in disobedient hair, is temporary guise

The S u n

He was raised on the surface of the sun. It was hot—not too hot to instill a deep disdain for childhood in him, but hot enough for the boy to wonder what life might be like on the freezing craters of the moon. They probably didn’t have to wear sunglasses! The sun was too bright to be able to sleep in past dawn. That was an noying, especially on the weekends. But being a morning person, as all people who live on the sun are, worked in his favor. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d missed breakfast— he loved breakfast. Eggs sunny side up were his favorite.

Early mornings came with the promise of a full day, which he appreciated since he enjoyed feeling productive. Most importantly, early mornings meant that he could get to school on time. More accurately, he had time to get to school on time—though sometimes he got

distracted along the way. On one occa sion he thought he found a diamond on his way to school. It was so bright! He read once that diamonds formed under enormous heat and pressure, so it was plausible that one recently stopped cooking and, through some geological migratory process, had made its way to the surface right in front of him. But when he walked over, it was just sun. An extra shimmery spot of sun. The boy would call it a sun dia mond; after all, he discovered it, shouldn’t he get to name it too? It’s probably rare, he thought to himself. Probably the rarest thing on the sun. The boy examined it for a while, convincing himself of the monumental importance of his finding. Needless to say, he was late for school that day.

At a separate, but not too distant, point in his life, the boy came down with a terrible sickness. There was the stuffy nose that worried his mother, the hoarse cough that frightened his father, and the terrible fever, which shocked the boy most of all. He was so hot! Heat melted his body from the inside out, and the sun melted him from the outside in. He questioned why it was he who had to feel this awful heat. Realisti cally, this is the only thing holding me back in life, he thought.

He suddenly had an urge to make a paint ing. Of course he couldn’t make it now, since he

Erosion

Tuck me into the hurricane, cling tight to coloring books and mashed potatoes.

I trip over church pews potholes breadcrumbs, skipping stones in the basement when the wet vac falls asleep.

South of worry it always rains.

TIERRA SHERLOCK B’24 hates driving in the rain.

Rhetorical Dreams

You never think about words until they be come you, but I might, but one day I will, but I’m thinking of maybe—we don’t get but and we don’t get maybe We get will and won’t and the endless, gap ing hole of never in between.

SIERRA MARTIN B’24 wishes she could be more decisive.

was hot, but once he got better he would make it. That is what he decided on when he was hot. And what did he think of everyone else—those people that were not hot, and not painting? Getting sick would do them a favor, he thought, just as it has done me. But the boy knew better than to curse his condition. It was by chance, a roll of the dice, that he had a fever on the sun. And it was once he understood this that he got better. And it was once he got better that he under stood he didn’t want to paint anymore.

Painting is so common—there are too many painters in this universe. I want something beyond the sun. Beyond mornings and morning routines. Beyond knowledge that others have already acquired. Beyond the light and the heat. Beyond the darkness of the moon. Beyond objects which are all made of the same thing. Beyond people that I have seen before, and people I haven’t seen yet. What I want, what I live for, is to hold the rarest moment of all in the palm of my hand, paralyzed by its importance.

ALEX SCHUPAK B’26 loves green. And orange.

KOLTON ZENG B’24 doesn’t know how to end phone calls.

TEXT SIERRA MARTIN, ALEX SCHUPAK, TIERRA SHERLOCK, & KOLTON ZENG DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS ILLUSTRATION NICHOLAS EDWARDS

IfHammer I Had a

A folk song

P

ete Seeger picks up his banjo. “One of my favorite songs these days,” he says. “I sing it all the time.” Plucking the rhythm he’s plucked so many times, one two-three-and-four, one two-three-andfour, he closes his eyes and sings. “We are… climbin’…Jacob’s…ladder…” His voice is worn and wearied, sanded down by the sojourns of years. He repeats the phrase, jumping higher when his voice permits, and moves to the refrain: “Brothers…sisters…all.” In silence he puts down the banjo. “Revolutionists as well as religionists often forget that heaven doesn’t come in one big bang. It comes in many little steps.”

“Turn! Turn! Turn!”

It’s fall. Turning, turning, turning, the air grows bitter; the wind begins to bite; things once green turn red, then gray. There’s a deep, ineluctable melancholy to it. For all its sweet resplendence, the season is, in a way, a death. It’s almost embarrassingly earnest. Walking past the reddening trees, layered against the looming cold, I find myself with a familiar, equally earnest craving. A soft voice and an acoustic guitar, singing of wind and rain, of lovers far from home, of fare-thee-wells and traveling on—down the highway, down the road, down the tracks. What we might call folk music.

But what, precisely, folk music is, what makes a song a folk song, is not so easy to pin down. American folk music has many permu tations, and ideas of what it means have varied over the decades. In modern popular conscious ness, it’s not much more than a vibe. Anything soft and acoustic is considered ‘folky.’ Browsing through Spotify, you can find playlists of folk rock, indie folk, folk pop, and “folk arc,” and within them, everything from Bob Dylan to Big Thief. Spotify’s “Essential Folk” spans from Pete Seeger’s bare vocals-and-banjo, to ’70s-soft rock, to Leonard Cohen’s synth-infused ’80s records. Not exactly a cohesive portrait of a musical form.

But folk, pure folk, the theme from which these variations arise—what is that? Every person I ask gives a slightly different answer. It’s music you might hear around a campfire, songs that seem like they’ve just always been there, and all you need to sing them is a voice and a guitar. It’s a vague sketch of a time and place, a composite of sonic attributes, a softly sung murmur from an era dead and gone, a hazy evocation of a deep-rooted but ineffable sentiment. Soothing, but somehow sad. The summation of it all, I think, is sincerity. Folk music is nothing if not sincere. When you hear a folk song, you know that the ideas, emotions, and attitudes it’s expressing are genuine. That what’s being sung is being felt, and whoever’s singing, they mean it.

“Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues”

The academic definition of folk music is quite literal: it’s music of the folk! Songs from a country’s traditional popular culture, sung by and about ‘real’ people, passed down orally and re-sung through generations. It is the sonic embodiment of a people or a nation’s folklore, the searing but simple music that comes from and gets to the heart of the whole thing. But within the question of what constitutes folk music lies the question of who constitutes the folk. Whose music gets to embody a nation? And who decides?

American folk emerged as a distinct genre in the late 1930s. Of course, various folk music traditions had existed and thrived on the conti nent for centuries. There were Black spirituals and sea shanties, railroad songs and cowboy songs, Cajun ballads and Appalachian bluegrass, hillbilly music, and eventually, the blues. But it wasn’t cohesive. How could it be? America was and remains utterly incohesive.

As the Great Depression raged and the Dust Bowl covered the heartland in dusty darkness, they spurred an upswell of left-wing sentiment across the country. On the ascendant organized left, there was a yearning for a music that could voice the struggles of working people and unite them into action. Communist intellectuals in New York sought to construct a legitimate folk music tradition that would tie American national identity to progressive, proletarian causes. They sorted through various folk heritages across the country and chose the songs and musicians they thought best represented the aims and audience of their movement.

Pete Seeger was one of them. He was born in New York City into an upper-middle-class family of liberal New England Puritans who arrived on the East Coast before the American Revolution. His father worked at Harvard (studying folk music), and he went to Harvard himself before dropping out in 1938 to perform. He was passionate about music and social justice alike, hoping to use the former to fight for the latter. The musicians at the vanguard of the ’30s folk revival, Seeger included, had a repertoire of songs pulled from disparate existing folk tradi tions. They were

not the ones who had originally sung these songs, and were sometimes whiter and often wealthier than those they drew from.

Then in rolled Woody Guthrie. The godfa ther of American folk music. A genuine rugged rural radical whose image would come to define the folk movement. The lone weary troubadour, who came from god knows where and god knows where he’s going: his clothes frayed, his voice rough and sandy, singing of working people and hardships and a land for all to share. Guthrie hailed from Oklahoma, and like many thou sands, he “blew out on the winds of the Dust Bowl,” trudging west to California, searching for work. He roved about the American West, writing songs about the toils and struggles of the migrant workers he met and lived among. Guthrie wrote thousands of his own songs, and performed hundreds more that he picked up on the road. He not only meant what he sang—he lived it. Not just sincere, but authentic. “I get my words and tunes off the hungry folks and they get the credit for all I pause to scribble down,” he explained. “Music is some kind of electricity that makes a radio out of a man and his dial is in his head and he just sings according to how he’s feeling. The best stuff you can sing about is what you saw, and if you look hard enough you can see plenty to sing about.”

Guthrie became a mentor to Pete Seeger, who, to a certain extent, molded his career in Guthrie’s image. “Woody showed me how to hitchhike and how to ride freight trains,” he later recalled. “You wait in the outskirts of town and when the train is picking up speed, it’s still not going too fast, you can grab a hold of it and swing on. Getting off the first time, I didn’t know how to do it, and I fell down and skinned my knees and elbow and broke my banjo.”

Seeger and Guthrie traversed the country, performing at protests, picket lines, and union halls. They wrote many new songs, including “This Land is Your

Land” and “If I Had a Hammer,” and performed old standards, adapting some to the credo of their politics. To one old folk song that he heard from Guthrie, “Talkin’ Blues,” Seeger added another verse. He called the song “Talking Union.” He talk-sings it, leaning into a country cadence, picking his banjo bluegrass-style:

You want higher wages, let me tell ya what to do, Got to talk to the workers in the shop with you.

Got to build you a union, got to make it strong,

But if you all stick together, boys, it won’t be long.

You get shorter hours…

Better working conditions…

Vacations with pay…

Take your kids to the seashore.

This was the tenor of what became the popular idea of American folk music. It was about binding people to a cause and binding them together. Folk singers performed to point out injustice, and to inspire their listeners to join together in righteous, joyous song to combat it. The genre’s politics was its purpose. The lyrics didn’t need to rhyme and the voices didn’t need to sound pretty.

And they often didn’t. Woody Guthrie’s music, for all its searing lyricism and power, is not very fun to listen to. When I shuffle a folk playlist and one of his songs comes on, I appre ciate it as a cultural artifact, but I’m unable to connect with it emotionally—or musically. When the next song plays, and I hear Joan Baez’s sweet soprano, or the swooning harmonies of Ian & Sylvia, I’m flooded with a wave of relief, melted into familiar comfort. With Guthrie, it seems that the roughness and gruffness is part of the point. His perceived authenticity, and thus the potency and message of his music appear bound up with his voice’s lack of prettiness. There are no frivolities or distractions, just a plain-talkin’ man from the plains, who’s seen and known poverty and injustice, imploring you to join him in the fight against it.

Despite their aversion to commercialism, Guthrie convinced Seeger to abandon his purist commitment to performing only at union halls and picket lines. By playing nightclubs and bars, he could extend his reach, bringing ever more people into the fold. Any loss in ideological rigor would be offset by the expansion of their audience, furthering the cause. In 1950, Seeger’s group The Weavers—to his and his record company’s surprise—scored a hit. Folk music proved to be not only commercially viable, but a potentially lucrative new sector of the music industry.

Seeger and his ilk were not given much of a chance to grapple with this moral quan dary. The folk movement, whose acolytes were near-unanimous in their communist sympathy (if they were not card-carrying Party members), was caught in the crosshairs of McCarthyism as anti-communist panic enveloped the nation

in a second red scare. Pete Seeger was called to testify before the Committee on Un-American Activities. He refused to answer any questions he deemed improper and refused to testify against his comrades. Seeger was blacklisted. Guthrie too. The Weavers lost their recording contract. No venue, not even union halls, would let Seeger perform. He couldn’t appear on television; he couldn’t be played on the radio. The folk move ment, for the moment, was laid low.

for a love gone-by, flying overhead to where the morning rain don’t fall—it’s not the specifics of the lyrics that resonate. It’s something outside of words, that dwells inside the sound itself. You relate to the feeling in the music, the feeling that it somehow, in those sonic waves, transfers to you. Something far more innate, far less tangible. The baritone once more, alone.

So I’d best be on my way… In the early mornin’ rain.

The second folk revival was born not of poverty but prosperity. Gone were the days of the Depression and the Dust Bowl; the boom of the 1950s brought into existence a burgeoning middle class that, for the first time, had the means to send their children to college. And when they grew tired of the sunny, all-American cultural hegemony that defined the decade, it was to folk music that they could turn their rest less ears. For this young, white, educated genera tion, folk was an outlet of cultural rebellion.

“Early Mornin’ Rain”

From nothing, sound. A shower of plucked acoustic notes—light, nimble, each tumbling rapidly into the next. Soft raindrops falling, quick and quiet. A gentle baritone enters, descending with the bright metallic rain, washing over all.

In the early mornin’ rain, with a dollar in my hand And an achin’ in my heart, and my pockets full of sand.

A tenor jumps in, soaring over the melody. Harmonious downpour.

I’m a long way from home, and I miss my loved ones so Then the alto. She sings the melody, but an octave higher. Three voices, flowing down together.

In the early mornin’ rain, With no place to go.

Their singing’s oh-so-warm, but you can tell it’s cold outside. The morning rain is falling, the sky outside is gray, but here, within the voices, shelter from the storm.

So I’d best be on my way… In the early mornin’ rain.

I have listened to Peter, Paul, and Mary’s cover of “Early Mornin’ Rain” hundreds of times. During dreary weather, on a long journey, in the mire of a spell of sadness, it compels me to return. When they sing, you yearn with them. Not necessarily

The movement once again found its geographic home in New York City, this time in Greenwich Village. Folkies would gather in a network of cafés and clubs, hanging around MacDougal Street and Washington Square. Folk was no longer just an outlet for political action. It was a discrete musical genre with stylistic conventions, and a social niche. It offered people community, and musicians an avenue to commercial success and even stardom.

As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, politics once again reasserted itself as the central value of the folk movement. Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary emerged as stars of the new revival. Like so many folk revivalists, they were middle-class children of the first folk movement. The songs Guthrie wrote on the run from the Dust Bowl were the songs they sang in summer camp, and the songs they now emulated. But they didn’t sound like Woody Guthrie. Their voices were sweet and melodious. You could ignore the lyrics and still enjoy their songs for the music alone. I often do. And that is not a consequence of happenstance. This genera tion’s folk music was a kind of pop; its stars were chosen and elevated by managers who stood to profit. Regardless of the virtue of their message, they were meant to sell.

Like Pete Seeger, and often with him, these artists performed at civil rights protests, singing songs decrying racism and injustice, hoping to unite people. They were just as earnest, and just as sincere in their idealism as the folk pioneers. But they feel less authentic. When Peter, Paul, and Mary sing, “You can’t jump a jet plane, like you can a freight train,” in “Early Mornin’ Rain,” you know that they have never actually hopped a freight train. We see their polish. But it doesn’t

mean we doubt the feeling in their voices, or that it doesn’t resonate.

Bob Dylan killed folk music. He vaulted onto the scene in 1961 and exploded into stardom two years later. Unlike most of his contemporaries, his protest songs were blistering, his voice harsh and nasally. This seriousness and roughness, this lack of prettiness, lent him an air of authen ticity that seemed missing from the folk revival. Dylan appeared the heir apparent to the tradition of Woody Guthrie. But he grew tired of folk, feeling artistically boxed in by its conventions. He picked up an electric guitar and left folk in the dust, pushing beyond established boundaries of genre and form, creating new ones. Many other artists followed suit. When greater fame, success, and artistic freedom could be found in other forms, it was there they flocked.

I’m not sure where Bob Dylan’s heart is, but it’s certainly not worn on his sleeve. He was not an idealist. His commitment was not to any cause or conventions but to his own artistic whims, and he followed where they took him. The genre he pioneered, folk-rock, was primarily concerned with individual expression and explo ration. He was enigmatic and sometimes cruel, and his irony abounded. I don’t fault him for it; it’s the reason why I find his music and mythos so fascinating. But folk is defined by its idealism. Any music that believes it can change material conditions is incompatible with irony. And all it took was one betrayal of sincerity to sideline an entire movement.

“If I Had a Hammer”

Pete Seeger wrote “The Hammer Song” in 1949. Peter, Paul, and Mary covered it 13 years later. It’s one of those indelible songs, somehow embedded in our collective consciousness. Its message is clear and universal, its lyricism simple but vivid. You can sing it with ease. And you can mean it.

Perhaps more than any other, “The Hammer Song” is emblematic of folk: the genre, the revivals, the entire history of the movement.

If I had a hammer

I’d hammer in the morning

I’d hammer in the evening

All over this land

I’d hammer out danger

I’d hammer out a warning

I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters All over this land.

It’s all there, within the opening, titular line. The operative word. If. The singer doesn’t actually have a hammer. It’s all hypothetical. And therein lies the problem. Folk is a genre that genuinely believes that the power of its music can change the world. But it is, overwhelmingly, a genre whose performers and consumers come from privilege, over time increasingly removed from the issues and places about which they sang. It is a genre that seems predicated on saccharine naivete.

But Seeger’s song and Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version don’t feel the same. Pete Seeger, though born into privilege, spent his whole life

putting it all on the line. He sang on the picket lines and he sang at the protests. He sang when the political climate was behind him and he sang when it wasn’t. When he cries, “I’d sing out danger,” I know he means it. He sang with Black performers in the ’40s under threat of violence from the Klan, and he didn’t stop singing when the bricks were thrown. When McCarthy came, he kept singing, even when it meant the black list. He kept singing wherever and whenever he could, undeterred, unrelenting. At the height of the Vietnam War, when he was finally allowed back on television, he sang a blistering protest song to a national audience of 13 million, one so piercing that Lyndon B. Johnson called the network in a fury and demanded the show’s cancellation. When Seeger sings the final verse, “I got a hammer,” I’m inclined to believe him. I look at Peter Seeger’s life and I wonder if maybe folk music isn’t so naive. Maybe it could work.

When Peter, Paul, and Mary sing, the “if” feels heavier. I do not for a moment doubt their sincerity, but there is something in the bright, calculated precision of their harmonies that feels contrived. I know that if I chose to, I could tune out the words and get lost in their voices. But does that make their version less noble than Seeger’s? Is their music, the dulcet tones of the folk revival, less virtuous than the rougher croaks for justice of their forebears? Does its designed prettiness detract from its value?

The problem of that question is exacerbated by the fact that, setting all political, moral, and philosophical considerations aside, I like the Peter, Paul, and Mary version more. I am warmed and pacified by their perfectly executed harmo nies, and when I go to listen to a song, that feels more important than how much I believe what they’re saying. When Joan Didion writes about Joan Baez in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her verbiage oozes with acerbic scorn. Of Baez’s idyllic California residence, she writes: “So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little longer.” To Didion, Baez knows nothing of what she speaks, singing from one of Guthrie’s proverbial skyscrapers, preaching the changing of a world she does not understand. Yet it is her music that I, and so many others, reach for time and time again. It is the sweet, swooning, commercial, folk-pop of the 1960s that, six decades later, makes its way into the Spotify playlists of college students on an autumn day.

As I look at which folk songs I listen to on repeat, my uncertainty compounds as I realize that very few of them are political. “Early Mornin’ Rain,” “500 Miles,” “Dink’s Song”— none of them are about the unity of working people. They are individual declarations of yearning, divorced from the political struggles of bygone eras, that offer the spirit of the form without the baggage of direct political action. Songs about hopping freight trains sung by those who never did. Utterly sincere, but inauthentic.

So now I wonder if I’ve fallen into the trap of commerciality, if I’m simply a selfish, passive consumer of music, anathema to the original values of the genre I claim to cherish, and the values I purport to hold. But I’m not convinced that music, or art for that matter, needs to exist for a cause. That political art is inherently more

valuable than art that moves you on an individual level. Maybe that’s a consequence of my own privilege, that I don’t need music to sing of my own liberation. Or maybe the fighting words of those who don’t need to fight will always ring hollow.

I don’t know what gives music value, or what makes one kind ‘better’ than another. But when the vibrations of alloyed strings and vocal tissue, fused 60 years ago, emanate out of history and into my ears and soul, all earthly and analytical considerations seem to fade. I’m touched again by something beyond the reach of language. Something I can’t quite explain, that I don’t fully understand. And I think that’s why we listen to folk. It allows us for a moment, if we meet it on its terms, to put aside irony and nihilism. To experience something that feels honest and true and maybe even sappy. Something sincere, that only comes from music.

Recently, I came across another Pete Seeger recording of “If I Had a Hammer.” It’s a live version, from the mid-1960s. As he winds up to sing, strumming his banjo, he speaks to the audience. “The interesting thing is, there’s not only two ways of singing this song, there’s about five or six different ways. But I’ve found that they nearly all harmonize with each other.” He pauses, and you can hear, as his cadence slightly shifts, a little smile appear on his face.

“Now there’s a moral here somewhere,” he says, strumming louder. “It means that you can sing the way I wrote it or the way that somebody else changed it or the way that somebody else changed it. And they all harmonize together.”

He jumps into the song, immediately joined by the audience—from a crowd of voices, one chorus. His voice soars, unworn and unbur dened, lifted ever higher by the people unified in front of him, unified by his song. When I hear it, I think I understand what Pete Seeger means when he speaks of heaven. And also, that there’s no one way to get there. Music can get you there in many ways. And they all harmonize together. For nine decades, with a banjo in hand, hopping freight trains, one song, one step at a time, Pete Seeger got a little closer. And when I close my eyes and let a folk song seep in, I think I do too. Not in one big bang, but many little steps.

JONATHAN GREEN B’25 is blowin’ in the wind.

Sam

inches, acrylic on canvas

“Sit On Me”

Found objects, spray insulation foam, fabric, polyester stuffing Sit on me. I mean it. With this stool, which is molded from a plaster cast of my own body, I wanted to explore the impact of engaging with a body that has no agency. A stool has no choice in how it’s going to be handled. How does it feel to sit? How does it feel to witness? Would you still sit on me if I were there watching?

“Look Mom! I just learned how to knit”

Yarn, buttons, fabric, polyester stuffing

Knits are fluid, they almost seem to breathe. Knits lie limply until bodies give them life. They expand to those that wear them, adapting to each person’s unique landscape. Knits accept the bodies they receive. They embrace.

EPHEMERA

Nora

Presents:

OH NO!

VictoriousLove,(Or Not)

Sometimes things go unbelievably wrong. Not just mildly wrong, or feasibly fixably wrong, but irreversibly, hor ribly, heinously wrong. Record-scratch, freeze-frame, Hi-I’m-Indie-and-I-bet-you’re-wondering-how-I-got-intothis-situation wrong. “I’m not sure what you are going for here”in-red-pen-on-your-essay wrong. The-way-I-used-to-pronouncethe-word-“coxswain” wrong. The kind of wrong that leaves you utterly powerless to do anything other than stare blankly into the wreckage and say, softly, almost inaudibly, “Oh no.”

Fear not, dear readers. I hear your soft, near-inaudible whis per, and I’m here to pull you up from the ruins, to be your deus ex machina descending from on high, to retrieve you from the Belly of the Whale, the Abyss, or any other differently-named-yet-equiv alent stage of the hero’s journey. This week’s column is not for the faint of heart. You will read these questions, feel a visceral tug of horror, and think, “I am so glad that is not me.” Unless you submitted the ques tion, in which case you’ll just feel the vis ceral tug of horror. Don’t worry, though! I’m going to com pletely fix everything. More or less.

Dear Victorious (Or Not),

There comes a time in all of our lives where we must make a choice. Love or hate. Vengeance or mercy. Action or inaction. Ratty or V-Dub. The time has come for you to make a choice: best friend or brother.

I could foresee a few possible exceptions, scenarios in which you could maybe get away with both, like a Hailee-Steinfeld-in-Edge of Seven teen forgiveness situation. Is your best friend more angry about the fact that you're banging her brother or about the fact that you're banging her brother when she explicitly asked you not to? If you apologize enough, she might forgive you for the betrayal. But there's a chance she might not be able to get around the weirdness of, you know, the fact that you're banging her brother.

If the apologizing doesn't work, it's time to make a decision. Best friend or brother? You can only have one, and I recommend going with best friend. Unless, of course, the brother is really really hot. Then go brother.

Dear Bad Vibes,

Do you know how many women in the United States own a vibrator? I'm seriously asking—I just tried to Google it, but I could only find statistics on what percentage of sex toy owners own vibrators, and then it took me to a big chart about all different kinds of sex toys and their popularity, like strap-ons and dildos and stuff, and then I got a little nervous that someone was going to see all of this over my shoulder, so I closed the tab really fast. The first point I was going to try to make is that your mom probably owns a vibrator, too, but now I'm going in a different direction.

Why did I close that tab? Owning a sex toy, according to the statis tics that I glimpsed for about five seconds, is a pretty common phenom enon. I mean, you know the drill! Break the stigma, be sex-positive, say the word "vagina" in conversation, etc.! As a very cool and sexy col umnist, I'm a massive proponent of all of that…but in the heat of the moment, I still got skittish and closed that tab. What I'm trying to say is that for all of our progress and our slogans, sex stuff can still be really hard to address head-on! Especially with your mom!

I'm ashamed of myself for closing that tab, but now I feel better knowing that I've written about my vibrator-Googling experience for all of Providence to read. On a similar note, you'll definitely feel better the more open you are with your mom (who probably has a vibrator too, though I don't have statistical evidence to back up this claim). Maybe you can break the ice by watch ing some kind of sex-related Netflix docuseries together.

Or Bridgerton! Then, you don't have to start the con versation yourself, or even talk about things directly quite yet. Regency-era people going down on each other is a kind of universal language, anyway.

Dear Indie,

Down The Literal Toilet

This week I got lunch with one of my friends from freshman year who I hadn't spoken to in a long time. Unfortunately, it was really weird and awkward. After we hung out, I proceeded to text my best friend about how weird and awkward it was—but instead of sending the text to my best friend, I sent it to the person I was talking about. How can I salvage the situation? Love, Flushing My Phone

Dear Flushing My Phone Down The Literal Toilet,

Don't flush your phone down the literal toilet! All is not lost. As Rob ert Frost once wrote in a poem that I didn't entirely finish reading, the best way out is through. Unless you can somehow find a way…around? How vague was your message? If, perchance, you sent a text that said, "That was weird and awkward," you could try to tell them you meant to text someone else about an experimental student theater production. That would be believable, and the whole situation would be resolved.

If, however, your message said "That was a really weird and awkward lunch with my friend from freshman year," then Robert Frost is right, and there's no way to avoid addressing this one. Though I've occasionally been known to endorse cute and harmless instances of lying, I think honesty is the best policy here. Put all of your cards on the table: Oops, I didn't mean to send that to you; yes, it was a little awkward to see you be cause it's been so long; no, there are no hard feelings, and let's catch up again soon; either way, I'm sure I'll run into you every time I leave my dorm because such is the curse of this campus! Maybe not that last part.

Dear Indie,My best friend made me swear I wouldn't start hooking up with her brother. I started hooking up with her brother. She just foundout. Help.

TEXT ANNIE STEIN

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION SAM STEWART

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Every Wednesday & Saturday this Month @ 9AM-2PM: What Cheer Farm Volunteer Day!

What Cheer Flower Farm is a nonprofit that “grows, rescues and donates 100,000+ flowers per year to Rhode Islanders in stressful situations.”

Register for these open volunteer days to help out with everyday farming and floristry tasks on the farm. You may register for a shift on the Eventbrite website.

Location: What Cheer Flower Farm, 63 Magnolia Street, Providence, RI 02909

Tuesday 10/24 @ 5PM: Providence City Council Meeting

Interested in the Providence government? Attend their public city council meeting. You can also visit the City of Providence’s Open Meetings Portal to see all upcoming public meetings.

Location: 3rd Floor City Hall, 25 Dorrance Street, Providence, RI 02903

Tuesday 10/25 @ 8PM: Providence Drag Gauntlet: Cycle 3

Drag Gauntlet is an elimination competition where a theme is set for each round of the challenge, and contestants are required to design a ‘look’ and perform to several numbers in accordance to the theme. The remaining contestants in this competition are Ivanna B, Lexi Prozac, Oma Fobe, Rage Ramzee, and Shania Taint. Tickets start at $15 and can be purchased on Eventbrite.

Location: Mirabar, 15 Elbow Street, Providence, RI 02903

Wednesday 10/26 @ 6-8PM: Clothing Swap

Come bring your unwanted clothes and accessories to this clothing swap and leave with a whole new wardrobe! All the leftover clothing will be donated to a nearby organization. Tickets start at $8 and can be bought on Eventbrite.

Location: The Nest, 1155 Westminster Street Unit #220, Providence, RI 02909

Sunday 10/28 @ 3:30PM: My Culture is Not a Costume!

As October 31st approaches, join in this conversation led by youth leaders from the Providence Student Union on cultural appropriation’s relation ship to Halloween. Visit @PVDstudentunion on Instagram to sign up to attend!

Location: 769 Westminster Street, Providence, RI 02903

Wednesday 11/2 @ 4:30PM: Counselors Not Cops

Hosted by the Providence Alliance for Student Safety, attend this kickoff event to learn more about how to help high school students fight for educational justice and for the support they deserve.

Location: 769 Westminster Street, Providence, RI 02903

Thursday 11/3 @ 4PM: Community Rally! Save Morely Field

The Pawtucket City Council and Mayor Donald R. Grebien have moved to destroy the single green space in an environmental justice community. Attend this rally to denounce the action.

Location: Pawtucket City Hall, 137 Roosevelt Avenue, Pawtucket, RI 02860

Arts

All Day until December 22nd: Art Exhibition: Perceptions of Organizational Change, through a Kaleidoscopic Lexicon of Color Jazzmen Lee-Johnson and Deborah Spears Moorehead, two Rhode Islandbased artists, have created site-specific artworks that respond to the Center for Public Humanities’ historic wallpaper, “Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord,” which features false depictions of Indigenous people.

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

Saturday 10/22 @ 5PM: The Pink Portal Presents The Pink Portal Experience II

The Pink Portal, a Black-owned company promoting body positivity and self-love through lingerie, is hosting their annual show to showcase their brand as well as additional local brands and businesses. This event will include vending, a dance performance, and a fashion show. General admission tickets cost $40 and can be bought through Eventbrite.

Location: RISD, 20 Washington Place, Providence, RI 02903

Tuesday 10/25 @ 7PM: Brown Jazz Combos Concert

Brown’s Jazz Combos will be hosting a concert which is free and open to the public.

Location: Grant Recital Hall

Thursday 10/27 @ 8-9PM: Free Online Paint Nite For Adults

Unwind and participate in this nature paint night. This free painting class is open for all ages and levels. Register for free on Eventbrite.

Location: Online

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

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

+ Black and Pink Providence’s Fundraiser for Tunji Donate at tinyurl.com/help-tunji Black and Pink Providence, a non-profit organization working toward prison abolition, is raising money through a GoFundMe for Tunji. Tunji is formerly incarcerated and recently lost his job. You can help him get back on his feet by going to the Black and Pink Providence’s website to donate.

+ Amenity Aid Rhode Island

Donate at amenityaid.org/donate-money

Amenity Aid works to provide hygiene resources to marginalized communities and low-income people in need. On top of serving individuals, Amenity Aid part ners with local shelters, food pantries, anti-domestic violence organizations, and other community groups who support underserved communities to distribute hygiene resources.

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

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

+ Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund

Donate at tinyurl.com/oceanstateass Support sex workers statewide. Priority given to BIPOC sex workers, trans sex workers, and sex workers who have been impacted by the pandemic.

+ Queer & Trans Mutual Aid Providence

Venmo: @qtmapvd; Paypal: qtma.pvd@gmail.com / Info: tinyurl. com/qtma-pvd

QTMA PVD is a small, volunteer-run mutual aid fund for queer and trans folks in the Providence, RI area. They do payouts once per week and have distributed over $80,000 since their founding in June 2020. They currently have over 30 outstanding requests for aid and would appreciate any donations!

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