Tufts Observer
VOLUME CXXXIV, ISSUE 4
March 13, 2017
The Literary Issue
Tufts Observer The Tufts Observer has been Tufts’ student publication of record since 1895. Our dedication to indepth reporting, journalistic innovation, and honest dialogue has remained intact for over a century. Today, we offer insightful news analysis, cogent and diverse opinion pieces, creative writing, and lively reviews of current arts, entertainment, and culture. Through poignant writing and artistic elegance, we aim to entertain, inform, and above all challenge the Tufts community to effect positive change.
@tuftsobserver www.tuftsobserver.org
March 13, 2017 Volume CXXXIV, Issue 4 Tufts Observer, Since 1895 Tufts’ Student Magazine
The Literary Issue Staff
Feature Ben Kesslen
Editor in Chief
News Alexandra Benjamin Misha Linnehan
Managing Editor
Opinion Liza Leonard Jamie Moore
Creative Director
Arts & Culture Susan Kaufman Will Norris
Art Directors
Campus Dana Guth Emma Pinsky
Claire Selvin
Sahar Roodehchi Chase Conley
Rachel Cunningham Annie Roome
Multimedia Director Greta Jochem
Voices Julia Doyle Poetry & Prose Carissa Fleury
Photo Director
Web Julia Press MT Snyder
Lead Copy Editor
Columns Henry Jani
Lily Herzan
Eve Feldberg
Lead Artist Jake Rochford
Photo Kyle Scott Conrad Young
Design Abigail Barton Matt Beckshaw Benson Cheng Josh Goodman Kira Lauring Lily Pisano Hannah Vigran Interactive Deanna Baris Cathy Cowell Hannah Freedman Sibonay Koo Kayden Mimmack Justin Sullivan Video Anastasia Antonova Evie Bellew Aaron Watts Publicity Alyssa Bourne-Peters Yumi Casagrande Michael Dunkelman Alexis Walker
Staff Writers Sam Crozier Yaa Kankam-Nantwi Lena Novins-Montague Layla Rao Katie Saviano Grace Segers Alexis Tatore Wilson Wong Copy Editors Nicole Cohen Owen Cheung Nasrin Lin Christopher Paulino Alexandra Strong Fact Checkers Erin Berja Sivi Satchithanadan Columnists Chris Dowd Kate Hirsch Sasha Hulkower Georgia Oldham
Editor Emeritus Carly Olson
Contributors Asia Acevedo, Aishvarya Arora, Tiara Bhatacharya, Gabby Bonfiglio, Cayla Brown, Judy Chen, Sarah Chin, Saba Kohli Davé, Kriska Desir, Jacqueline Enderle, Morgan Freeman, Michael Fogg, Nina HofkoshHulbert, Melanie Horton, Cecily Lo, Ana-Maria Murphy-Texidor, Emily Ng, Leticia Rocha, Ben Rutberg, Jaanvi Sant, Nazifa Noor Sarawat, Josie Watson, Kayla Williams
COVER BY EVE FELDBERG
Contents
14
19
Fault Line Swell
My Curly Hair Routine Mother’s Glass
Aishvarya Arora
Morgan Freeman
2
Letter From The Editor Carissa Fleury
3
The Spectacle of Black Life Kriska Desir
6
Rain Jaanvi Sant
7
All Grown Up But Still Sifting Through Pebbles Liza Leonard
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Etsi Udiditlv // Our Lost Mother Josie Watson
10
Big Chop Melanie Horton
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i don’t feel trapped anymore Anonymous
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Limbo Tiara Bhatacharya
18
A Slow Brunch Katie Saviano
20 You Can Keep Your Love Cayla Brown
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For Colored Women Anonymous
22 A Guide to Helping
Depressed Parents
Michael Fogg
23 Unmasked Friend
Blackberries & Brown Sugar
24 mother
Kayla Williams
13
Asia Acevedo
Mira Que Si Te Quise, Fue Por Tu Pelo...
Leticia Rocha
12
26
Mary’s Grandbaby Carissa Fleury
// Star Ferry
15 Emily Ng
Saba Kohli Davé Sarah Chin
25 I’m allowed to have dreams Nazifa Noor Sarawat
28 a future, maybe Gabby Bonfiglio
Letter From The Editor For as long as I can remember, I’ve seen things in color. Songs, feelings, foods, moments; each holds its individually wrapped shade that invades my head when they pass me by. Holding the hand of someone I love is deep midnight blue like the sky in Somerville after a rainstorm. My best friend’s laughter is swirled with rich mahogany and chestnut. Getting in bed after a particularly arduous day is the dark, metallic orange of pennies. Fear is gray. The world we live in continues to be flat and colorless, filled with violence, terror, and brutal imaginations. I spend each of my days striving to collect colors, to break open and split apart the fear that clouds my life as a Black woman, and the lives of marginalized people everywhere. Often this collection comes from the words I read. Words, for me, give off the brightest, most brilliant colors. They are an antidote for the powerlessness that I feel in the face of structures that demand my demise. They remind me that while this world may not have been built for many of us to survive it, the people before us and those who will come after have used their hands (and their pens) to see through the hopelessness and imagine a new world—one throbbing with hues that reach into each splintered corner and start the process of transforming and mending—and call upon us to do the same. Inside the pages of this Literary Issue are an abundance of these colors. They are the words of people whose voices are normally silenced, cast aside, forgotten, and erased. They are the words of people of color, queer and trans people, poor people, Disabled people, the words of people who are often overlooked on this campus and in the world. Their words are words of fear, of hurt, of melancholy, of questions without clear answers. But they are also the words of warmth, of strength, of hope, of resistance. They are words that demand to be read and heard. They are the stories that need to be told. So, I hope you, Reader, open these pages with tender care and let them flood you with color.
Carissa Fleury
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ART BY ANNIE ROOME
My least favorite icebreaker is the one where you go around in a circle and share what superpower you would choose to develop if you could, what superhuman ability you would will into your existence if given the chance. I nearly always choose mindreading because, admittedly, never knowing what other people are thinking is the Anthony Davis in the NBA All-Star game of sources of my anxiety. Yet, I’ve always found myself in icebreaker situations with people whose superpower of choice is invisibility. It’s funny—invisibility is the superpower I never got to choose. To be in my skin—to be a fat, mentally-ill, poor, Black woman—is to be both hypervisible and invisible, to be seen but never truly seen, never quite human, heard but never quite understood. It’s not that I think all White people see me and see the demon that Darren Wilson saw when he murdered Michael Brown; it’s more so that Black people in the liberal White imagination are still more enigma than human. Black people in the liberal White imagination are still the code that needs to be cracked, objects lost in translation. After the murder of Walter Scott, Brittany Cooper wrote about what she calls “the spectacle of Black death,” the cultural phenomenon of Black people nationwide scrolling through their Facebook friends’ vacation photos in the same breath as videos of Black people being slain in the street. Yet, I’ve come to know that not only is Black death a spectacle to White people, but so also is Black life. On my best days in the predominantly White spaces I inhabit—whether it is the New England boarding school I left my home community to attend or the New England university I attend now—I feel like an exhibit in an exclusive, expensive museum. Except, I am missing the little white label that gives me context, that makes me comprehensible. On my worst days, I feel like a beast trapped in a zoo, a beast to be gawked at, a beast that somehow managed to learn how to perform humanity well enough to attend a university among White people who, no matter what the circumstances may be, are afforded humanity. I don’t remember the exact moment I realized that my New England private school had given me training rather than education—training to assimilate into a White corporate world that will never truly accept me. The romance of sending a Black girl to New England so she can chase opportunity fades when you realize the cost of that opportunity. The romance of Beauty & the Beast quickly fades when you realize that Beauty could not have loved Beast without first training him, without teaching him how to hold a spoon, without teaching him how to ice skate, without teaching him to be more like her. The romance of Beauty & the Beast fades when you realize that Disney slimly averts tragedy
The Spectacle of By Kriska Desir Black Life through Beast’s transformation into a handsome, European prince, Adam, just in the nick of time. The movie in which Beast does not remain Beast aborts his realization that he will never be like Belle. I wonder what happens in happily ever after one morning when Beast wakes up next to Belle and the realization that she will only ever see him as unhuman sinks in. On my worst days, I struggle to reconcile my pride in being the first person in my family to attend college with the shame that comes from being a symbol for my high school and university to use. It’s a very particular shame to know that an institution can parade me around as if to say, Look how well we trained it. Look how generous we are to have given it the opportunity to attend our school. Isn’t it darling how it’s learned to act just like us? It’s a very particular shame to know that the Black scholarship kid is symbol rather than human. To know that I serve to allude to diversity, to the changing times, to some hackneyed form of inclusion. To know that, on some level, I serve as a placeholder. Some of you will read this and twist your way out of complicity just as you maneuvered your way out of the complicity of Trump’s election— just like you shifted the blame onto poor, rural, White America. Yet the relentless and ghoulish fingers of the spectacle-making of my Black life extend beyond the institutional and into the personal every day. Yet my experience as a Black woman among a community that claims liberalism is surreal at best and at worst, traumatic. When I listened to my American Literature class discuss a text on Black womanhood, I, the only Black woman in the room, wondered if anyone else felt like they were watching a scene in an absurdist film. If a room of forty White people discussing Black womanhood as symbol, as an object of curiosity, all while protected by the red brick walls of Eaton Hall, reads to anyone else like a scene in a dark comedy. When my peers shyly admit to me that they at first found me intimidating, I have to wonder if they would find me intimidating if I were a White, chubby girl from New Jersey rather than a Black one. Why White girls get to be soft, get to be vulnerable, and I am forever the angry, scary, sassy one. Why a boy read an article I wrote on women in rap, looked me in the eye, and reported to me that I sounded “so angry.” He said it and he smiled as if a childish grin would excuse the racist and sexist implications of dismissing my critique of misogynoir in (White) criticism of rap as mere anger. As if his not-too-subtle “angry Black woman” comment was just a joke.
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When my peers ask me to explain “slang” to them so they can co-opt it and scream it to each other across the academic quad, I have to wonder why they feel entitled to African-American Vernacular English at all, why they feel the need to insert themselves into a culture that was not at all created for their consumption. I wonder if they think that “dead ass” came out of thin air, if “bae” came out of thin air, if “shook” came out of thin air. I wonder if they ever think about the Black people who created those terms to communicate with other Black people. I wonder if they will ever stop inserting themselves in spaces where they have no right to be. When White social justice fanatics perform monologues on the Black plight to me, when they recite their readings from The New Jim Crow to me, when they apologize to me “on behalf of White people everywhere,” I have to wonder if they have ever for a second considered that I am not a vestibule for White guilt. That I am a human being. That I am never going to hand them the Woke White of the Year Award because that award doesn’t exist. That they’re not doing me a favor by being “woke.” We like to call these exchanges microagressions, but the term minimizes what is truly at play here: the denial of my humanity. There’s nothing micro about ignoring the humanity of another person. That’s just racism. I saw Noname at The Middle East this weekend and was struck by the moment during her set where she briefly left the stage. Noname had been building to a moment with “Casket Pretty” after a few of her more upbeat songs, weaving the opening bars of the delicate and powerful discussion of Black death in and out of her set. However, when she finally got to the song, she stopped after the first verse. She said, “This shit so awkward to perform in front of all these White people. You don’t even understand. My niggas is casket pretty.” She continued, “Y’all obviously ain’t feeling this so let’s just move on.” I was struck by the gravity of a Black woman sharing her art with an audience who only enjoys her so long as she doesn’t remind them of their role in her oppression. I was struck by her refusal to move on without first acknowledging the implications of performing Black music in front of a mostly White crowd, a White crowd that likes a good beat, a good sing-the-nigga-long, but not a frank discussion of what being a nigga actually entails. I was struck when I realized that none of my friends were thinking about the denial of humanity inherent in a crowd of White people singing along to a song about Black death as if it were a campfire song that everyone there could relate to. This is the surrealism of my Black life, this is the spectacle—a mob of White people singing a mourning song as they tie a noose around a Black woman’s neck, and I, a Black woman too, must watch the lynching helplessly. And I, a Black woman, am dying too. I am trying to imagine a Beauty & the Beast where Beast rejects Belle’s lessons in civility. The Disney movie where Beast points out that Europe is the true savage, not he. The Disney movie where Beast does not want Belle’s love. I have been thinking a lot about what it means to seek recognition of your humanity from institutions built on your unhumaning, institutions that continue to thrive from the fuel of your unhumaning. I like to think that my joy when Moonlight won Best Picture at the Oscars was in the turning over of the awards from White and, in my view, undeserving hands to Black, deserving ones. Yet, if I take a critical look at myself, a small part of me still believes that White recognition holds some stock. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been upset at all at the thought of Moonlight losing Best Picture. I wouldn’t have been upset when Beyoncé lost Album of the Year for Lemonade either. And still, I am trying to imagine a world where White recognition means nothing. Where I don’t even think about it. At the end of it all, I’m not sure that I need White recognition of my humanity anymore. I’m not sure that White recognition of the validity of my life, White recognition that my life “matters,” is the answer. I have been fascinated by the thought of destruction as a form of creation—how a jazz artist like Coltrane might create through the systematic destruction of a framework of chord-patterns or how a poet like Baraka might create through a systematic violation of a lingual structure. Dissonance, disruption, and destruction are so unholy to Western ears, yet so inherent to Black art. Dissonance, disruption, and destruction are so unholy to Western consciousness yet so inherent to my liberation. A conversation with my friend Jonathan took this train of thought a step further. We discussed the conceptualization of Black as unhuman as woven into the fabric of the White understanding of its own humanity. It is only human because it exists in juxtaposition to Black unhumanity—one cannot exist without the other. White supremacy can function without Black unhumaning no more than a car can function without fuel. Yet, so many people who would call themselves my allies reach over destruction for platitudes and niceties, and at times, I don’t blame them—the former calls for their own undoing. In “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization,” João Costa Vargas and Joy James write, “A genocidal logic cannot be altered or remedied without the erasure of both parties, the colonizer and the colonized. Without the disappearance of blackness as ‘evil’ or ‘sin’ and whiteness as ‘value’ or ‘virtue’ there is no fundamental change.” For years, I wondered what my non-Black friends saw when they looked at me, wondering if they saw a full human being or if they saw their loud Black friend, their funny Black friend, their sassy Black friend. Sometimes I still do. And still I look at my non-Black friends knowing that the choice between my liberation and their undoing is not a hard one. It is barely a choice at all. The only choice is whether or not to look them in the eyes when I say, “I love you, but you’re killing me.” And still, I am here. I am human whether or not you believe it. 4
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PHOTO BY ANNIE ROOME
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FEATURE
rain
a language bloomed beneath my tongue long before i learned to speak
By Jaanvi Sant
// lotus-eyes: i will meet you where the sky spills
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ART BY CECILY LO
The heel of another afternoon melts into another dusk. Dregs of a sunshine warming from distant shore. Everything wanes, glows, erupts catches in hands, in divets, in shallow valleys changes in a breath, sighs. Bloodlines grip and swell, siblings gather round, holding pinkies, holding telephones across oceans. Froth and churn. Hurling grit up to the surface into the speckled day. Silence is a specialty of those with whom we first learned to speak.
All Grown Up But Still Sifting Through Pebbles
By Liza Leonard
ART BY LIZA LEONARD
March 13, 2017
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FEATURE
Etsi Udiditlv // Our Lost Mother (ah-chee ouh-dee-deet-lun)
I wonder, was she invited to the table? In this country of plenty, the Fatherland, where wedding feasts abound, Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, Jews, Hindus often compromise with their spouses, on how their children will worship, be taught to transcend their minds, and connect their spirits to the world.
By Josie Watson
Was she consulted? Asked, while holding each new pale, ash-headed infant, what language they would speak, how they would know the world? Did she come to understand how her new world would pull her babies from her breast, and make them strangers to her? And her Mother, did she become a stranger to her? How did she live, severed from her roots? She who built my fathers, my grandmothers, great-grandfathers noses like the Sentinel rock, gave them skin that browns like clay in the sun, she who blessed them with storyteller tongues, she whose soul breathed into their spirit a temperament, “a gentle manner,� a peace-loving disposition that often awakens with reverence for harmony and connection with nature, with all children of the earth, with life itself. The ancient Cherokee status quo.
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ART BY LIZA LEONARD
FEATURE
Did they handle her spirit gently, or swing their fists, beat it down? Did she live like a ghost, haunting, not inhabiting, their Whitewashed land, as she now haunts our family bloodline; quiet, unknown? While during the day she wandered, through Georgia pines and magnolias, was her soul swept into the buzzing universe of souls that surrounds us– even us, our information hungry, spiritually blind generation– into that world which is not caged within wood, stone and stained glass, not stringed to the hand of an omnipotent Father, but is in and around us? The sun, water, snow, air, rocks all as filled with life as any human did she converse with them, feast at their table, was she that free? I often dream of her with silver hair, in a stiff English gown, her tongue having lost touch with her nation’s words imbued with the power to open ears and eyes to earth’s symphony, not alone, but dejected, not depressed, but lost, as my mind stretches and aches to inherit her wisdom, in dreams, day and night, but always wakes to find this country has left it behind. Why is it that my family should forget this mother, even as her blood courses through our veins, her voice whispers in its mother tongue through the depths of our consciousness? Her energy is so remarkably hers that I feel it as it passes me in the wind, through the trees, or enters my dreams at night rustling the feathers of my dreamcatcher. Don’t you, your feet grounded in American soil, feel her seeping between the fingers of the Father’s closed fists? I wander, through magnolias and pines, seeking a seat at her table, ears straining, spirit thirsty
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Feature
I was told it was too nappy too unprofessional too wild
Big Chop By Melanie Horton
I had grown accustomed to people laughing at its dead ends and unwillingness to lie down No one told me that my hair was learning how to sing and that every time it faced the scalding relaxers and red-hot flat irons, I was erasing the tone of my hair’s voice its unrelenting texture its powerful volume Those scissors freed me as I watched the straight pieces fall away I began to love myself for everything I am for my afro that rises towards the sun for the strength to break combs for the power to revert back after being abused I am no longer drowning in the sea of white wishes, feeling weighed down by my Black gifts wrapped in gold
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Feature
Mira Que Te Quise, Fue Por Tu Pelo... By Leticia Rocha (Look, if I loved you, it was for your hair...) these lyrics spin around my head each note like a dagger to the ear as I sit in this barren room, sickly-sweet melody echoing your absence. cold silver scissors find their way into my hand, destined for the coarse, dark strands of hair you once ran your fingers through. snip, snip, like a surgical blade across the umbilical cord, clumps of black pouring heavily, each curl burdened with stories of you. my fingers clasp the last lock, an emblem of sacrifice. I am obliterating this carcass you betrayed and ravaged, ready to rise as a newborn babe out of the black tendrils I slayed. ...ahora que estås pelona ya no te quiero. (...now that you are bald, I don’t love you anymore.)
ART BY LILY PISANO
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The amber skin you swim in Sits atop a magic dark and pure A night sky eternal Body tangled in the shackles of a supremacy that will forever remain Jaundiced and pasty Sugar cane cracks in palms The cash crop slices the life line the fate line the heart line This is what you’re destined to be Bloody broken and loveless Men don’t like brown girls unless they have fat asses And corporations won’t hire you without the white assets and even then Money doesn’t buy freedom Even then You will be exiled from the kingdom I promise you There will never be a seat for you beside the almighty whitey No, that just ain’t something you can be Not unless it’s for you to feed the monster your own insides marinated in the blood of your most mutilated ancestor Baby you just gon’ have to build your own throne There is nothing wrong with being a self-proclaimed queen Plant seeds and when they are nourished by enough spilled Black blood Watch a revolution sprout at the foot of your throne Call it your own because it’s for you Call her your sister Every root carries water back to the same tree Nude thick Black skin that smells of cinnamon and shea butter You are a colored girl shaded by a soil so fertile it birthed the first black brown porcelain woman with lips like rose petals and hips that curve like the Nile
Blackberries & Brown Sugar By Kayla Williams
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ART BY ANNIE ROOME
my nana is backyard peach trees dripping in california sunshine but her heart was always in nashville when she was forced from that home because of fear of strange fruit & trees & picnic postcards, she breathed a sigh into a bottle and buried it in the hot tennessee soil my nana just gave her last sigh and all I can think of is charcoal women and how she couldn’t remember me but when she lay dying my auntie told me across miles of land, over crackling telephone lines and in cracking voices that my nana’s eyelids fluttered when she heard my voice when I was a Black baby (born with dusty dark skin that lightened over the years and a full head of hair) she pressed her grammy kisses into my cheeks and called me “little peach” for the first time as I grew up, I got gangly, then melancholy and every summer I ran around picking peaches off of her trees as she played jazz on the radio and told me that my laugh sounded like a miracle, taught me to love the color yellow and long for her Black fingers oiling my scalp when I left at the end of each summer my nana was the first one who showed me Billie Holiday on her back porch with sticky fingers from homemade pies and as she lay dying, I sang her Billie Holiday— for years, I was dreading this day becoming a marked-on-the-calendar day this same day as her daughter’s birthday she passed away and my papa was an oak tree but my nana was a warm breeze
ART BY ANNIE ROOME
my nana taught me that this Black body is holy, wholly she taught me to love each inch of my skin, to oil it up because nobody else would love it like I did to braid my hair each night with my fingers (the same as hers) to stand with a straight spine (when I could) to speak in a red brick voice and to never let no white men tell me I wasn’t worth nothin’ because I was Mary’s grandbaby and ain’t nobody gon’ tell me I’m not worthy papa went first and now my nana, my two Black strongholds & now they’re ghosts or maybe spirits or maybe they’re nowhere or maybe they’re everywhere and maybe this black queer body of mine will always tingle when I eat peaches or hear Billie and when I braid my Black girl students’ hair and my fingers twist as second nature, and they ask me where I learned this, I will say with a warm breeze smile “my nana taught me.”
Mary’s Grandbaby (something like a goodbye for my grandmother) By Carissa Fleury
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Fault Line Swell By Aishvarya Arora I’ve been gazing hard so my memory for it is better now than when I was a child, but still I blink and everyone seems to be better than me at remembering I’m not White. I thought I managed to Be assimilated which means: (of information) to take in and understand fully; or (of an organism) absorb and digest. The organism assimilates nutrients from outside its body to make structures needed inside of it to survive. Would you believe me if I tell you, I am the organism swallowing, I am full of American structures inside but I wasn’t told they wouldn’t make my face any Whiter I’m the only one who knows they are there even though I put them there for everyone White. To know me better I don’t know how to answer)
friends ask questions (they’re the reason
David and I are becoming friends, we even get sort of drunk together some nights walking fast stumbling on a dark street he says, I have been wondering, so your nose ring—is it ‘cause you’re Indian? I assimilate Whiteness I thought I had learned to offer answers (a blackberry gushing with sweet juice and ruined, pressed for a secret I want to have) so well I can’t believe the first thing he sees. There have been no reasons to put up Indian structures inside (I gave up the chance to have the secrets I want to have). Or Look at my dot thing, announces the child I tutor in math. She can finally add fractions the best place to paste the Earned Gold Star is between her eyebrows. I tell her mother who says, Seems like a great teaching moment! What does that Indian dot mean? She wants to learn too, reminds me I am here to be an educator but I never learned about bindis never learned about India didn’t lose that part I never had it I lost my chance at it. Now I’ve been gazing hard Be assimilated (of information) to take in and understand fully I did only partone of that it was never meant for me to understand fully I’ll spend years trying to come back to India a country I don’t remember leaving. You teach me the organism America take me inside. 14
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never did
ART BY NICOLE COHEN
星 小 輪 FEATURE
Star Ferry tin sing siu leon
By Emily Ng
sometimes I forget about the blood that lurks under the blue liquor of the harbor. if I wait long enough I can hear the echoing sounds of machines, of hands on tilling hoes, of clicks on buttons, because all the hurt on people’s hands sheds a bit on everything they touch.
天星小輪
I hear the hurt everywhere it opens the world to me.
ART BY EMILY NG
but sometimes I forget, because the wind of the South China straits unfolds hair from the back of my ears whispering a sweet sound that tomorrow will come
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FEATURE
i don’t feel trapped anymore but i still don’t feel free By Anonymous
i see my doctor, ask her about top surgery, ask her about bloodwork, ask her to raise my dose. these are decisions i made a long time ago that i thought i’d take my time with. there is no time anymore. my doctor asks why i want my dose raised and i tell her i still get cramps. “for two years you’ve had cramps?” i nod. it’s not something i want to talk about. before i leave she remembers i’m almost 21, right? yes. well, soon i will have to decide between removing my uterus and getting pap smears. i do not want to remove my uterus. i do not want to get pap smears. i may not be a Woman but i am not ready to give up bearing a child. i know what the procedure entails but i look it up anyway when i get home. i cry.
no one has seen my body but me since i was very young. and it doesn’t feel right. i love it, but it doesn’t feel right. i love it, but there are things i want to change. i love it, but it took me a long time to love it and every day i worry that no one else has the time, or the patience. i finally believe i am beautiful.
only some days is that enough.
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FEATURE
Limbo By Tiara Bhatacharya
i. it bothers me sometimes that there’s no place to go back to. bodies, tension, string. snap, snap, flash, fuck, i never should have come here. you don’t know what it’s like to bathe in blood no one shares. to nurse my own diaspora. ma, forgive me for leaving you at home, my heart thinks of you and weeps, weeps, weeps. i am only a child, and i should have been a vessel. last week when i couldn’t sleep at night, sweat clouding my neck, i thought of you. you don’t know what it’s like to nurse my own diaspora. shoulder blades and dirty necks i had to nurse my own diaspora. i scrubbed the yellow out of my fingernails. shoulder blades and dirty necks i had to nurse my own diaspora. ashed a cigarette on fresh snow and called it home. ii. it bothers me sometimes that there’s no place to go back to. horizons in limbo. she looks at me and holds my heart in her eyes and she looks so gentle i feel my heart slow and then weep. shoulder blades and dirty necks and an expired time sheet. god saw me turn orange and i knelt in front of her. i couldn’t tell if it was sandpaper or her tongue but i bled anyway. he plunged his fingers into me and i wondered why i even bothered. he plunged his fingers into me and i felt her hand brush against mine. it was an accident but she looked at me and my hair grew heavy, fuck, fuck, there’s no going back.
ART BY NINA HOFKOSH-HULBERT
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FEATURE
A Slow Brunch By Katie Saviano
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My grandmother forgot my name when I saw her over winter break. She has been forgetting for years, a process which has dulled her. At brunch, I ask her questions about her life that I know she will not be able to answer. She sips her coffee slowly and compliments a meal that is objectively bad. The entire decade of the 80s appears to have vanished. In the fourth grade, I realized something was wrong when I was assigned a family tree project. My mom pursed her lips, a tightness forming, and sent me to school the next day with a white paper. This whiteness is my grandmother’s memory. In my family, we call violence forgetfulness. We call it old age. My grandmother has forgotten. But my mother remembers those years, and all the years that have followed. Sometimes she weeps openly at the kitchen table, late at night when she thinks we are asleep. In my family, we don’t use words like traumatic brain injury from domestic violence. In my family, we cultivate silence, practice roundabout ways of speaking. My mother prefers to engage in conversation when we are in the car so that we never make direct eye contact. The truth is, in my family, we rename violence absence. My grandmother has become this forgetting. I have never known her when this trauma was not a part of her. At brunch, her eyes are vacant. I want to ask her: how do you claim a history that you do not remember? I want to ask her about the reverberations of this trauma, how its roots trace through our family tree, and why my aunt died slowly, and then all at once. Instead, I ask her about the eggs she ordered. It’s okay that you don’t remember my name, I tell her. I’m Katie.
ART BY BEN RUTBERG
FEATURE
My Curly Hair Routine By Morgan Freeman wake up at 5 a.m. wash hair shampoo condition detangle detangle d e t a n g l e use whatever product you can find mom’s TRESemmé® mousse will do let air dry arrive at school at 7 a.m. sit at your desk let the stylists get to work! you may not always recognize them don’t turn around pens and pencils and paper will do don’t worry if they use gum Orbit® has all day hold excuse yourself to the bathroom remove any excess debris tie hair back repeat daily
ART BY JACQUELINE ENDERLE
March 13, 2017
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FEATURE
You Can Keep Your Love By Cayla Brown
Does love trump hate? Does love keep us safe? Will Black boys hugging cops stop bullets From piercing their backs? Will my march keep the off-duty officer from drawing his gun on A “Trespasser?” Will my resistance exonerate the innocent, convince the “witness” to recant her lie? When will this “love” shine on melanin like the sun Remind them that life is birthed from generous Black women. Does love eat fear? gobble up the anxiety that shoots through your muscles like lightning when you are stopped by the police, border control any White person seeking to enact their makeshift justice; demanding English to be the only tongue you employ, says the hijab is unsettling, equates nationalism with destabilization of the other, calls you out of your name tells you you’d be safer if you didn’t resist didn’t burn shit didn’t make them notice the anger tell me when is the “love” supposed to kick in? We have been waiting in the street online on the phone on standby for this love to swoop in, massage our feet pour honey on the pain call us sacred thank the melanin for our struggle our service our time pluck out the thorns soothe the memories with aloe and reparations Yet love stays absent Does this kind of love exist? Has it ever?
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Tufts Observer
March 13, 2017
ART BY RACHEL CUNNIGHAM
FEATURE
For Colored Women I cannot escape my Blackness I cannot escape the body that identifies (targets) me I cannot escape the body that betrays me I cannot escape The color of my skin, The size of my hips, The curl of my hair Too much Too big Too hood Too sexy (I am 10 and you smell stale, like cigarettes and sweat) Too much of a tease (I am 17 and you reek of entitlement and your dirty uniform) Yet somehow not enough, I am not enough to be loved, I am not a human, I am a receptacle. I am trapped in my body Shattered I am the damaged goods That no amount of bubble wrap and cardboard box was ever strong enough to protect I don’t (can’t) dream, I cry I shove my face into my pillow and try to suffocate myself I want the darkness to swallow me I pray to God that I don’t wake up (can you hear me?) I can not love (have I ever been capable of love?) (are objects worthy of love?) I meet you now I am 19 and my skin smells like fear your skin tastes sweet like rain and a little salty because of the tears (are they yours or mine?) Together our bodies lay exhausted But your eyes are so bright We are a mess A tangle of limbs my fingers run through the waves of your hair While you trace the curve of my arm I have never been touched so gently This time I cry sweet tears while your sweeter name sits on my tongue We are damp, sticky and almost the same shade of brown I cannot tell where I end and you begin I have never been more in lust I have never been more in love For the colored women who hold a mind consuming love for other colored women For the colored woman who saved my life
By Anonymous
PHOTOS BY JUDY CHEN & ANA-MARIA MURPHY-TEIXIDOR
March 13, 2017
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A Guide to Helping Depressed Parents By Michael Fogg 1. Count how many parents you have that are depressed. This number should be somewhere between zero and two, not including any additional step or foster parents/guardians. If the number is greater than zero, continue with the rest of this poem. 2. Try to determine which of your parents are depressed. Now some have said to consult a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or WebMD, but I usually just look for the 50 million excuses why someone can’t get out of bed. 3. Attempt to approach your parents and talk about depression. If you have one or more depressed parents, do not be alarmed, this may be difficult. Asking them if they have depression will ricochet like arrows on steel-plate armor, telling them will get you a broadsword through the stomach. You have to pick apart the cloud that 50 years of fear has put around them water molecule by water molecule, you have to hold their parental pride in your hands like your own child and nurse it back to health, you have to drive an SUV through the walls of the dark, heavy box they are trapped in. 4. Ask them to get help. Ask them to put depression on their back like a cape and fly like the super hero you always knew they could be, ask them to accept society’s view that they have done something to make them this sad, ask them to look at themselves in the mirror and believe they have failed you. 5. When that conversation is over, walk out of the room. Keep your mind there but put your body elsewhere. 6. Watch for signs in the followings days, weeks, months. Look for the appointments on the floral kitchen calendar, look for which hand is dragging them through this mud, look for the empty chair they leave when they go on their stress walks. Pray to god every night that you see these things, and if you don’t, pray they haven’t spiraled so far you can’t catch them. 7. Find ways to put in gentle reminders. Ask them how their bodies felt today when they moved through molasses, ask them what the name of their therapist is and how many kids or dogs or cats he/she has, ask them if that hopeful silver star is in the sky again. 8. Be disappointed when they tell you it isn’t. Make your room a bunker, and accept that this is not a battle but a war, and wars are won in trenches. Watch the pill-shaped bullets fly in and out for years, as they change from blue to green to white and back again. Cry with them, cry without them, cry for them and about them, look down the cliff and hope they still see the ladder up to where you are standing. 9. Recognize they may not. Recognize that loving someone with depression is still not being someone with depression, and that you will never totally understand why they can’t seem to dance today. 10. Enjoy every moment you have with them, for the days full of freedom come in unexpected bursts. Eat french fries, walk your dogs together, laugh, love. Go on surprising road trips and bring home unexpected trinkets, write with them, make fun of them and hug them. Shake off whatever feels normal, and when it comes knocking, wait for one more moment before you open the door again. 22
Tufts Observer
March 13, 2017
PHOTO BY JUDY CHEN
When I see the spaces Between your masculinity, I know you Still Have a chance at being a person. When you feel, I see your person. When you hurt, I see your person. When you cry, I see your person. They are beautiful. And I have loved you despite knowing That the pain of Our bodies Is in your hands. Despite knowing that it is Because of masculinity That I have hated myself. And yet you cling on to it Like a lifeline. Why do you still persist In a jailed life With you and Him? He is not your friend. He is not your friend. Do barriers bring you joy? Because I am weeping At how much of yourself You cannot see.
By Saba Kohli DavĂŠ
Do barriers bring you joy? Because I am weeping at You yelling at my humanity. Trading it to your Friend. He cuts me. Do barriers bring you joy? Because I am weeping That I have lost you to a monster that doesn’t let you breathe. Your barriers are so hard. My tears cannot break them. I am trying to tell you That masculinity has ripped me apart, As it has torn my people, As it has hurt our voices, As it has taken over our minds. Our mistake was that we had no manhood To mask us. Yours was that you believed That it could mask you.
ART BY CECILY LO
March 13, 2017
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mother By Sarah Chin what I can glean from her body, is that I must give thanks for what I can. I see how it’s all been taken from her, feel her fear and do what I can, brush her hair as she lounges in the tub, puckered from her bath salts; lend her my skirt on the nights when what I can do is not enough and she is restless and she wants to go out and escape from her rutted skin. she doesn’t tell me that she is dying in the way that all women are, that what I can do is irrelevant because there is nothing any of us can do to make it stop because it comes from her. so the only thing left is to do what I can and take what I can from her.
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March 13, 2017
ART BY NICOLE COHEN
FEATURE
I’m allowed to have dreams By Nazifa Noor Sarawat
We talk about how I’m doing and our eyes avoid each other’s. I try to look at you more: your skin browned from years of baking under the American sun, valleys plowed into your forehead, grease etched into your knuckle creases. I’m not sure what it is that keeps me from you but I flinch whenever you touch me.
The tips of your fingers are wide and flat and calloused and carefully separate little white pills into plastic compartments marked for every day of the week. I take pills now too and when I hear their rattle I think of falling bottles and scattered dreams, stars against a night sky, small specks spilled against a dark kitchen carpet, and me, looking through the black expanses trying to find the pinpricks of white. They’re harder to find in Brooklyn. We sit at the kitchen table and you separate your pills and Ammu empties pots into containers to store for tomorrow. You hear metal scraping against metal and tell me the story of your brother who heard the same sound every night as they scraped out the blackened bottoms of pots to feed him. Here at the table the light is warm and yellow but you are in another place where tomorrow’s meal is not as certain. How many sounds take you back to stories of abuse? Abbu, you have a lot of stories. So now you laugh when you see death on the news. I don’t know what your laughter does for you but my teeth are like yours, and my smile is too. I couldn’t make you cry with me, so I stopped laughing with you instead and now we sit silent. Sometimes one of us laughs and one of us cries. In a dream I was afraid of you and I tried to escape the you that dream-you had become. When I woke up, I felt a cold pressing between my shoulder blades and I knew the fear had stayed with me. I’m allowed to have dreams, you say, when one of us runs from you. On the phone your voice sounds folded. Your words slip off my skin like sweat and I have to ask, when the dreams are gone, what is left of us? What is left of your daughter?
ART BY JACQUELINE ENDERLE
March 13, 2017
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FEATURE
Sweat on bodies on sheets in a house your mother worked so hard to build. Those plants in the living room are the manifestations of you. Your mother loves you and you are lucky. You are so goddamn lucky. Your mother loves you even though you’re sweet talking a trite young girl into falling out of her sundress beneath the roof your mother pays for by working six to six in that crowded downtown city you hate so much. Your mother loves you and you don’t know that the girl underneath your kelly green covers is not naked because you threw her underwear across the room, but because she hasn’t tasted her mother’s love since the day cancer chose to curl around her chest. She is naked and afraid, Do you see it? Do you see her shivering? Those easy eyes and promiscuous palms have been burned more times than the wood in your fireplace; she is cold because her heart is perspiring out of her pores and freezing upon contact with your breathy exhales. 26
Tufts Observer
March 13, 2017
FEATURE
You cannot melt her. While you cradled her like a broken arm to your chest, she said this was wrong but you retaliated that you don’t even believe in god, you don’t believe in him, you said as you latched your lips to hers and stole the breath she’d been saving in a mason jar at the pit of her stomach for the day she thought she’d drown. But you don’t realize that she is cold and she is dark and she is hardened because your mother loves you and hers cannot. Your mother loves you and here you are reopening the scars she painted on her body years ago when you first said she wasn’t worth it. But now she is worth it, because she is naked and she is an open invitation. But don’t forget, your mother too was once sweet talked into severing the dress from her skeleton by a boy she thought could thaw that glacier within; she realized too late that mingling bodies didn’t melt the ice, only solidified it. And despite being naked and cold and starving for two, she birthed you from the arctic, and loved you anyway.
PHOTO BY ABIGAIL BARTON
March 13, 2017
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a future, maybe By Gabby Bonfiglio
28 Tufts Observer March 13, 2017 PHOTO BY ABIGAIL BARTON
1. when someone asks who lives in your heart, you picture me in morning light, my hair (it is constantly growing in) splayed across the pillow. our bed is white, and fluffier than our paychecks allow. the light makes my hair gold among the brown, and you notice. 2. waffles are a routine. you take yours with powdered sugar and sometimes lemon juice, mine always with syrup. i rise to make them—you see that sometimes they are the only idea that gets me out of bed, and you turn over with a moan and it is their smell that pulls you out of your nighttime. you bought me a tray for them, for my birthday, and this is one of the few presents i can remember that have made me cry. 3. we share everything, of course. 4. in the summertime, we make tomato pies and tarts and bloody marys, and we care for the plants in the back gingerly, but we don’t wash them as well, and so our friends get used to dirt in their drinks. 5. some evenings, you burst through the door waving a book like its a flyswatter. “i found one” you repeat over and over. and then we race to the bed—you see that sometimes these are the only words that make me move quickly. we plop down and as we are, you open to a page in the middle of the book and begin reading, dramatically—i sometimes wonder if this is the only way you can. and after a few pages, one of us is in fits of tears or laughter (who can tell the difference) and i confirm “you found one” and we put the book on the shelf that takes up more space than we do.
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PHOTO BY KYLE SCOTT
March 13, 2017
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