THE YALE HERALD YALE’S MOST DARING PUBLICATION SINCE 1986 | VOL LXXXV ISSUE 5 | 30 Sept. 2019
FROM THE EDITORS Dearest Humans, It’s a confusing time of year. As summer begins its transition to fall, the weather shifts between either season. What you thought would be a cold, dry day becomes hot and muggy in an instant. You run to your room between classes, dropping and adding layers, fixing your hair in the mirror and sprinting back outside, only to return moments later for yet another wardrobe change. One layer on, two more off. Repeat. At one point in this seemingly endless routine, you’re confronted in the mirror with something unexpected: your naked, layerless body. Confusing, indeed.
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We’ve all been there, some more frequently than others. Using the mirror as our microscope, we begin to pick at parts of our bodies. We ask ourselves questions like “When did I get that bruise?” or “Is that eczema on my nipple?” or “Will that surgery scar ever heal?” and “Did I really just go to my seminar naked?” Yes, the seasonal vicissitudes are perplexing, but not nearly as much as our ever-changing, swelling, shrinking, rotting, dancing, sleeping, and breathing bodily vessels. This week’s issue of the Herald fleshes out some of these corporeal questions. Sarah Force, SY ’21, comically redefines what it’s like to grow up with allergies, Miki Cornwell, ES ’21, outlines the nuanced ontology of fatness, and Macrina Wang, ES ’22, casts a light on a man commemorating forgotten bodies in an abandoned Hamden cemetery. And at the center of this week’s issue, Kellyn Kusyk, SM ’20, traces the imbrications of queerness and whiteness in the context of their politically divisive hometown, Charlottesville, Va. So take a break from popping pimples and applying ointments to look through some of the ways your fellow students are dissecting their own anatomical existences in this special, somato-centric issue. Happy reading, Hamzah Jhaveri Voices Editor
EDITORIAL STAFF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITORS
Marina Albanese, Laurie Roark Kat Corfman, Eric Krebs
EXECUTIVE EDITORS Chalay Chalermkraivuth, Nurit Chinn, Fiona Drenttel, Jack Kyono FEATURES EDITORS Rachel Calcott, Elliot Lewis CULTURE EDITORS Ryan Benson, Bri Wu VOICES EDITORS Hamzah Jhaveri, Silver Liftin OPINION EDITOR Spencer Hagaman REVIEWS EDITOR Marc Boudreaux ARTS EDITORS Matt Reiner, Harrison Smith INSERTS EDITORS Sarah Force, Selena Martinez, Will Wegner
DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTORS Paige Davis, Rebecca Goldberg ILLUSTRATOR Marc Boudreaux
The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editors-in-Chief at laurie.roark@yale.edu and marina.albanese@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2020 academic year for 65 dollars.
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The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2019 The Yale Herald.
THE YALE HERALD
BUSINESS STAFF BUSINESS MANAGERS George Hua, Michelle Tong
IN THIS ISSUE
In an amusing and subversive introspection on her allergies, Sarah Force, SY ’21, discusses her life as a “wunderkind.” Meanwhile, Sophie Collins, BF ’22, lyrically overcomes a bodily burden and grapples with a lifelong change. Then, Kat Corfman, SM ’21, dissects what makes it so hard to be so radically soft.
Revisiting the formation of their identity in Charlottesville, Va., Kellyn Kusyk, SM ’20, considers the intersection of queerness and whiteness in the South.
INCOMING Sweaters
Adhya Beesam, MY ’22, contemplates the secrets our hands divulge. And Miki Cornwell, ES ’21, reclaims her relationship with the word “fat.”
Fresh from a summer in backwoods Oregon, Katie Handler, TC ’21, reflects on her weeks among the birds. In three blurbs, Will Wegner, MY ’22, Sebastian Baez, BF ’23, and Edie Abraham-Macht, BR ’22, meditate on their favorite moments with their bodies.
Macrina Wang, ES ’22, meets Bill MacMullen, an architect and historian who is restoring an abandoned Hamden cemetery.
Hero Magnus, SY ’22, discusses the various communicative powers of clothing, from lingerie to self-love.
OUTGOING
Sweat
18 Reflecting on the history of Western art, Melanie Heller, SM ’23, denudes “William Bailey: Looking through Time” at the YUAG. Next, Rasmus Schlutter, MC ’21, parses the many advantages of breath.
In conversation with the Herald, Peyton Peyton, ART ’20, considers the challenging physicality of her performance art piece.
Week Ahead WARREN LECTURE: SEX, SATIRE, AND SONG TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 4 - 5 PM STERLING LECTURE HALL JULIA PRESTON: TRUMP AND LOPEZ OBRADOR THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 6 - 7 PM LUCE HALL AUDITORIUM SWEAT BY LYNN NOTTAGE THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 - SATURDAY, OCT. 5 YALE REPERTORY THEATER
4 Excuse me, I am busy accepting my radical softness, my paper
to be soft when soft is what I am,
making homes from holes. I am soft like bird wing
lantern, crumpled hundred, sputtering radiator kind of
when under the rippled surface I am dark and churning. I am soft
and fish fin (and I come with all manner of dangerous beaks
feminism. It’s hard to be soft
like stone rubbed smooth with current and sediment.
and scales). And I am soft like paint is soft
when the road home is incompletely paved and I’m still
I am soft like the sun is soft, from a distance.
and garish and toxic and permanent.
tonguing gravel from my gums. It is hard
I am soft like soil, making a home for worms,
I
was six when I learned peanuts were out to get me. And soy. And wheat and corn and gluten and yeast and tree nuts and barley and cucumbers and melons. One day my allergist pricked my arms until they ballooned into dozens of pink patches, revealing a grand total of 27 allergies. All nuts count as one. Growing up, I was always encouraged by my school nurse to sit in the nut-free zone during lunch. This quarantined area in the corner was empty and smelled of Lysol and Lunchables. I decided to take my chances and sit with my friends and their peanut butter breath. If a cashew were to kill me in my school cafeteria, at least it would have been at the cool table. While I never took my allergies seriously enough, I’d always get frustrated when my dad didn’t either. When he didn’t know how to feed me, he’d try to tell me it was all in my head: “Nuts are good for you! Just give them a chance!” On a few occasions I’ve eaten watermelon just to prove a point to him, and then raspily explain that I didn’t invent a shoddy immune system as a quirky personality trait.
Although I can see why someone would. Being Allergy Girl can have its perks. For starters, I always have a way out of tough situations. If I’m getting destroyed by a midterm or bored of a conversation, I can keep one pecan in my pocket in case I need to anaphylaxis my way out. I can even stop a lecture early if I owe my friends a favor. My Epi-Pen also talks when you pull off its safety cap, which is pretty fucking cool. “If having an allergic emergency, pull off red safety guard,” she’ll banter with me and my friends. She’s always by my side and is much more portable than an Amazon Alexa. In a lot of ways, my allergies have also made me a bit of a prodigy. When I was little, I had allergic reactions to three different allergy medications (Zyrtec, Claritin, and Allegra), so when we got to the irony chapter of the literary device unit in sixth grade, I was way ahead of the curve. I learned a lot from cucumbers, too. “I call bullshit! They’re 99
Allergy Girl THE YALE HERALD
Like Stone, Like Soil
KAT CORFMAN, SM ’21 YH STAFF
percent water!” people used to say when I apologized that I couldn’t eat their salad. Cucumbers taught me to be suspicious of the one percent long before Bernie did. I am proud to say my allergies make me different from other white people, which is very brave. When I say I’m gluten-free, I mean that my body misidentifies gluten as a pathogen, not just that I’m upper-middle class and in a book club, probably. That’s intersectionality, babe! Despite being a wunderkind, I always stayed humble. I was never patronizing when my classmates weren’t familiar with a certain kind of oatmeal or beet chip, and would sometimes even offer them some of my stash from the teacher’s closet while they were enjoying the class pizza party. When I order my bunless bean burger at the select restaurants that sell them, I can get French fries as my side without guilt. If I were to choose the fruit cup, it would probably contain watermelon and honeydew and cantaloupe, and I would probably need two Benadryl. I guess I can see where my dad was coming from.
SARAH FORCE, SY ’21 YH STAFF
5
Burdens SOPHIE COLLINS, BF ’22
Morning of my surgery, I wake and remember. They loll back to my face for a kiss. They sting. I cross my legs and they ellipse and ring. I sit up and they brush against my stomach; They puff and swell. Shaped like bells. I have weight that can’t be lost altogether— I have a chest that aches and breaks. I don’t feel like I can run in fields, and I may well Strike down my arms forever, for holding my breasts in place. And so, I have made an appointment with markers and knives, and I am nervous. I encounter My mother in the hallway five a.m. gloom. We shock and smile! The car looks like a spaceship. She says, You don’t look that big this morning So I take out my breast in my hand (it lays flat after quivering and submits to me like a pet) And she says, Okay, maybe you do. But I’ve decided there are other things than bust: Mind. Poems. Voice. Touch. I fear for the way it feels to hug me. Mama says, done everything despite that burden, Hard to give up that burden? I say, be perfect and have no excuses? Be plastic? Not for the hate of my breasts but for the love of my running legs, ballooning lungs, and inspired profile with straight posture, I am going to do the least natural thing. Watch me stand up straight Look down, touch self, whisper, It’s going to change forever, please forgive me.
6 The word you’re looking for is Fat. MIKI CORNWELL, ES ’ 21
T
he third-grader playing Gretl in my Small Town Children’s Theater production of The Sound of Music (in which I had the esteemed role of Young Female Villager) declared in front of a devastating number of my peers that it was easy to tell me and my sister apart because “she’s the skinny one, and you are…” She trailed off there, when someone nudged her into silence. My mom and I have long torsos and carry our weight on our stomachs. There was a maternity outlet store she regularly frequented—in times of pregnancy and out—that my Barbie-shaped sister refused to enter. She said it wasn’t as weird for us to occupy that space because, “at least you’re…” But she refused to finish that thought. The right ventricle of my heart is enlarged, causing an above-average amount of premature atrial contractions, which is a fancy-pants way of saying it beats a lot. When the cardiologist I had just met was discussing this with me, he made a comment on my bloodwork after looking at my blood sugar levels: “Oh wow, it’s actually kind of low. That’s surprising.” His pointed look, as I sat exposed in my loose-fitting paper hospital gown, said the rest. I came into the LGBTQ community on the tail-end of the reclaiming of queer, so I’m able to use it as an identifier without much conflict. But fat isn’t there yet. My therapist cringes her forehead every time I say it. My girlfriend still calls it “being… heavy.” The only time I ever hear my peers talk about being fat is when one of my skinny friends eats a very normal-sized meal and feels the need to call attention to their temporarily rounded bellies or pinch at their non-existent muffin tops. But it’s the right word. It doesn’t pander, it’s nonchalant, it’s broad. I’m not curvy, because my fat doesn’t accumulate in places that men find sexually valuable. I’m not plus-sized, because that makes it sound like I’m beyond some reasonable spectrum of existence. I’m not heavy, because actual weight is relative; no one cares if a six-foot-nine basketball player weighs 250 pounds, but if Lady Gaga’s tummy pokes out, all online hell breaks loose. I’m not chubby because I’m not a toddler, and I’m not a person of size because I lost ten pounds just from saying that many words. I’m none of your polite-company euphemisms. I’m fat.
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But just because I have the right word doesn’t mean fat is something that I’m fully comfortable with. Every day, I find myself cringing at something that highlights my size. When I played on the Women’s Rugby team, there was only one jersey that I could physically get over my torso. Learning how to belay on the Climbing team, the harness they gave
I’m none of your politecompany euphemisms. I’m fat. , your me didn’t fit over my thighs. Every dance practice or theater rehearsal, I can’t help but catalogue the roomful of flat bellies peeking out of XS t-shirts and tiny shorts. I refuse to eat at Slifka because squeezing in between the tables makes me so self-conscious and anxious that my morning bagel experience is ruined. For months, I made my girlfriend be on top every time we made out because I thought somehow I’d crush her. Everytime I go into a depressive episode, I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror and tell it people would like me more if I lost a hundred pounds. But all those things happen regardless of whether or not I call myself fat or plus-size or pleasantly plump or thicccq. The years of self-love I lost because I’d been taught to hate the spread of my thighs when I sat on the floor or the way smiling made my cheeks look fuller in pictures is time I can never get back. Hiding and dodging and nicknaming didn’t make my stomach any smaller.
As much as Twitter Doctors like to caveat, I’m not fat because I have an illness that causes me to gain weight. I’m fat because my parents are fat. I’m fat because dougnuts are fucking delicious and cardio is boring. I’m fat because I have depression and food makes me feel good. Do I want to be fat? Not really. If I weighed less, it’d be easier to do sports and my knees would hurt less. If my body was smaller, I could borrow my girlfriend’s clothes. If my stomach didn’t hang over my waistband, I could wear bikinis without having to make every beach day a silent political statement about self-love. Am I going to try to lose weight? No. I’ve got homework to do, theater to produce, Survivor reruns to binge. I’ve tried to lose weight my whole life and the only thing it’s given me is an ingrained instinct to try to make myself smaller. But, my dear Skinny Readers, there are some rules. Like all labels, it’s not all encompassing for the group it references. Lots of people aren’t comfortable with the word fat. It’s being reclaimed, and some people aren’t claiming it—it’s their choice to make. If you’re sitting there, thinking: well, how am I supposed to know? Ask. But only if it’s relevant. No need to turn to the kid next to you in lecture and say: “Hey I’m Greg, I see you uncomfortably wedging your body into these LC desks, do you prefer fat or plussize?” Also, don’t use fat as an insult. If you’re making fun of something about a person’s appearance that they can’t easily change, you’re not edgy—you’re just a dick. To my fellow Chunky Children of God, fat doesn’t have to be your word. It can be your word later, or never. You have the right to take up space. Whether that’s in the classroom or in an airplane seat or in people’s vocabulary. You’re a valid person, even if you’re not endorsed by skinny people or you’re not “fat, but healthy” or trying to lose weight. And it’s okay if that’s something you’re not ready to accept yet. As straightforward as it is, “fat” is immensely complicated. It’s complicated to be fat, to feel fat, to talk about the realities and nuances of living while fat. Fat’s not a bad word; in fact, I argue that it’s the best way to describe this state of being. But it’s a laden word. It’s heavy. Use it with intention and respect, but use it.
7
hands.
ADHYA BEESAM, MY ’22
T
lightspeed. Without knowing it, you could be idly running your thumb over the back of your partner’s hand while watching a movie, subconsciously memorizing the contours of their knuckles. Or, if you’re like me, maybe you cup your hands tenderly around a warm And, yes, I know how this sounds. I know that most mug of coffee and try to ignore all the research that people are first drawn to the eyes as an act of familiar- has proven people use heat to mimic the warmth of ity and mutual vulnerability. It’s cute to lock eyes with another human person. someone for the first time, seeing them just as they’re seeing you. On the other hand, a stranger noticing me The vulnerability that hands display is part of the reazoning in on their cuticles with precision focus would son why people are so attracted to them. Hands and forearms have become the buzzword for girls to feel probably lead to them purchase mace. quirky during sleepovers as they whisper hushed conWhile I don’t mean to look like Quentin Tarantino fessions of their love for calloused fingers and proseeing a female foot for the first time, I can understand nounced veins. As “random” as you might want to seem how the unknown motive behind my hyper-fixated for getting weak-kneed at a confident grip or dexterous stare can be jarring. In reality, watching people’s hand piano skills, it’s not that deep. Vulnerable movements movements is an abstraction of my interest in getting are beautiful. Watching someone nervously twirl a pencil between their index and middle fingers and not to know people. immediately swooning is an anomaly. Noticing a friend Eyes are the window to the soul, but they’re only capa- hovering their fingers over their keyboard in contemble of giving away what we are subconsciously prepared plation while typing an email directly correlates with to part with. Anything that’s revealed by your eyes has the desire to give them a forehead smooch. Glancing at already been spoken aloud by your heart. Every flash of a TA confidently thumbing through homework pages disappointment, flicker of admiration, and crinkling of to find mine has led to dangerous thoughts that I will crow’s feet belies an emotion that you are deeply aware not apologize for. The dance of one’s hands can provide of (whether or not you’d like to admit it). However, an almost shockingly clear statement about their curfor every one emotion we are equipped to understand, rent emotions and desires. In fact, hands are an absothere are at least 20 that we suppress so intensely that lute must for evaluating attractiveness. we refuse to be aware of their existence. Oddly enough, I’m not going to lie, part of this assertion that hand our hands give them all away. movements are hot and important is to persuade peoHand placement has its roots in the deepest recesses ple to look at and be attracted to my hands, because of our psyche. Facial expressions are easy to manipu- they truly have a mind of their own. I’ve been known to late; however, our hands always provide a clear window run them through my hair, dig them into the grooves of into our mental turmoil. In fact, some psychologists call tables, test out a variety of grips on a variety of surfaces, them our “emotional barometer.” Despite us failing to and tap incessantly. They are distinctly hyperactive and recognize it, they are thinly-disguised coping mecha- distracting, and I wouldn’t have them any other way. nisms, the tie between the limbic system in our brain My hands are a secret code with treasures untold for those who happen to decipher them. It’s ironic, because and our physical body. I’ve always been told that I’m not expressive enough. For example, think of how you might feel giving a slow, However, that really couldn’t be farther from the truth. confident speech while your hands death-gripped the podium. Catch yourself when you pick at your nails or So, if you think someone’s being a bit of a closed book, play aggressively with your rings while completing a look down. p-set. Recall the last moment you said “No worries!” while your fingers tapped away on a surface with near But, not that far down. he first thing I notice about people are their hands. I constantly find myself fixated on a set of typing fingers, the pale expanse of an upturned palm, some haphazardly applied nail polish.
8
Hot Bird Summer KATIE HANDLER, TC ’21
I
’m not pre-med; I’m pre-vet. Instead of interning at a hospital or working in a lab last summer, I spent eight weeks living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere Oregon, treating sick birds. 13 hours a day, seven days a week, 50 species, 200 animals, and zero days off. While these critters ranged from baby hummingbirds to injured eagles and a few scattered mammals, caring for them generally followed the same procedure.
After examining the pectoral area, move down to the hip and pelvic bones. Lower body injuries can be assessed by comparing the lengths of the right and left legs. Differences can mean either fracture or dislocation. Head trauma can be examined at the foot level through reflexes. Push up on their legs gently to see if their claws close; to avoid falling off of branches when sleeping, birds’ claws default to clenching when their legs are bent, and they relax when the legs An animal arrives at the clinic at any hour of the day, are straightened. any day of the week. Birds come in cardboard boxes three-times-too-large or rusty cat carriers. The first After palpating, we tape the birds to the center of step in any examination is to get them out of the box the exam table, keel straight, wings outstretched. The and onto the exam table. The first rule to holding radiograph is meant for a small animal vet’s clinic, but a raptor is to secure the feet, and regardless of what the settings for a cat work just as well for a hawk. happens next, never let go. Even when a bald eagle is To read the radiograph, we look for asymmetric trying to bite your neck. Never. Let. Go. Wrap a towel structures, comparing the left and right sides. around the bird to keep its wings tucked in, and hold them against your chest as you fit an anesthesia mask Birds with healable injuries get splinted: wrapped legs, around its unique beak. A hummingbird receives taped wings. Birds with unhealable injuries (gunshots anesthesia through a repurposed bottle cap; a pelican’s and bad crashes) get euthanized. bill fits perfectly into an old pasta strainer. We necropsy them later in the week to learn more When the bird’s eyes close, its head drooping and legs about what went wrong inside. Time and time again it relaxed, the search to find the injury can begin. Palpation shocks me that inside every bird, the same fundamental starts by placing your index finger in the center of the units exist. The heart pumps blood, the liver filters and lower neck where the clavicle and coracoid bones meet. detoxifies materials, the gizzard and small intestine Work your way down the arm bones to their equivalents break down food. All these processes need to function of our digits. Symmetry is key for flight; a broken wing properly in order for an animal to survive in the bone can make the difference between a releasable and wild. I’ve learned about the vertebrate body plan in non-releasable bird. anatomy class, but it was not until I worked with these animals, feeling them closely for broken bones, A bird’s keel is an extension of their breastbone, which propping raptor beaks open with my thumb as I supports the extra wing muscles needed for flight. A feed them through rubber tubes, that I appreciated healthy, active bird will have large muscles, rounding how life—and the body’s ability to function and out the keel. The keel of a sick bird will lack muscle and sustain life—is just a bunch of organs diligently doing feel sharp. The emaciated birds will be tube-fed mouse their jobs. slurry for three days.
THE YALE HERALD
9 Bodies in Motion A
lot of people ask me why I scoot. Often, they don’t ask so much with their words as they do with their incredulous stares. Other times, they do ask me with their words, but not in literal terms. When raucous strangers shout “Do a kickflip!” at me outside of Soads at 1 a.m., I’m not too prideful to miss their subtext—they think scooting is uncool. Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to such a display of foolishness? The scooter is a monument to compromise. My wheels occasionally struggle with their basic function—they’re too small to propel like a bike, but too rubbery to be feet. The scars on my right hand and elbow can attest to at least two of the cases when especially uneven pavement caused my scooter to cease scooting at the worst moment imaginable. But each morning I climb out of bed onto my scooter, and each evening I step off it back into bed, and I lull myself to sleep in satisfaction for having scote the whole day through. Why? Because it feels good. The pulsing pressure on my left calf kicking back against the ground. The invigorating current of air rushing past my face and whipping up my hair. The visceral jolt beginning in my arms and ricocheting though my whole body as I pass between sections of pavement. It’s fun. So what if I can’t “do a kickflip”? Scooting—and the resulting marriage of the human and mechanical—is an art unto itself.
FOR THIS WEEK’S ISSUE, THE HERALD ASKED WRITERS TO SHARE THEIR FAVORITE MOMENTS WITH THEIR BODIES.
I
’ve never been a very sporty person. I’m athletic, sure, because I dance, but I lack a certain competitive instinct. When my mom/coach screamed “Be aggressive” during basketball clinic, nine-year-old me got anxious, not motivated. When it comes to sports, I’ve always felt uncomfortable in my body; compared to my L.A. soccerstar cousins, I’m weak, pale, pathetic. By and large, I like myself, but sports have always sucked the positive energy out of me. This summer, I went to a rock climbing gym with my boyfriend for the first time. After many falls, I finally completed a route and, for once, was pleasantly surprised with what my body could do. I could already see new muscles in my forearms, ones I’d never had the chance to activate before. The strength in my legs and shoulders from years of dancing was relevant in a way I hadn’t imagined it could be. I loved the challenge of each new route—loved knowing that I could work hard and actually become good at climbing. When I left the gym for the first time, sweat running down my face, arms and abs aching, I felt truly present in my body. Graceful and strong, beautiful and powerful.
EDIE ABRAHAM-MACHT, BR ’22
WILL WEGNER, MY ’22 YH STAFF
I
’ll never forget the day I truly felt free. It wasn’t from the tyranny of parents, nor the confines of school walls, but something deeper, more personal.
downward with all the human strength within me, as I climbed slowly, painstakingly, yet steadily, up those massive slopes, I laughed.
Only nine months had elapsed since I completely ripped through a vital ligament in my right knee, though I felt I’d aged a lifetime since. My subsequent surgery left me with dull pain hammering everywhere beneath my skin, sharp pain echoing within; with a wheelchair, then crutches, and finally with two bulky knee braces I wore every moment of the day. Just like that, my senior year soccer season evaporated into thin air.
I reached the island’s northernmost point, and my beaming smile was unmistakable. Oh, how good it felt to be free again! I stopped to enjoy the stillness of that peaceful Saturday, preparing myself to race down the West Side into the afternoon sun.
That day, it was just my bike and me, unstoppable in the crowded, beautiful streets I call home. Anyone familiar with Upper Manhattan knows the hills there are no joke. But as I lurched my body over the pedals of my soul-powered machine, thrusting my legs
That day, I reconqueredthe engine of my soul—the body that had pumped out passion and happiness since the day I was born. That day, I biked 31 miles all throughout Manhattan.
SEBASTIAN BAEZ, BF ’23
10
Forgotten Bodies MACRINA WANG, ES ’22 YH STAFF
N
obody alive today knows who the 1,887 people buried in Woodin Street Cemetery are. None of their bodies are marked with gravestones. The only clues to their identities are little rocks that were interred with them, but these rocks have long sunk into the earth. Attached to these rocks are bronze discs with identification numbers. The only rock that hasn’t descended below ground commemorates a man named Lorin C. Hay, who died in 1960. It was dedicated by his son Larry, and reads “I LOVE YOU DADDY.” The last burial was on Nov. 30, 1984, for a man named Raymond Shea. The cemetery closed in 1985. Since its closure, the Woodin Street Cemetery of Hamden, Conn., has deteriorated to the point that it no longer resembles a burial ground; rather, it simply looks like a small field enclosed by forest. The space has descended into general disarray. There used to be an engraved metal plaque demarcating the cemetery, but it has since been stolen. Fallen trees have not been cleared from the area. Most people don’t even know the cemetery exists. Bill MacMullen wants to change that. He wants to fix the gaping hole in the mortuary roof. He wants to replace the missing lettering on the gate. Using ground-penetrating radar, he wants to locate the discs in the earth and link the disc numbers with records of the deceased: he wants to identify the bodies. He hopes to completely restore the Woodin Street Cemetery. MacMullen is an architect, Navy veteran, and
THE YALE HERALD
historical reenactor. Officially, he is the Architectural Capital Projects Coordinator at the City of New Haven and has been working with the city for the past 19 years. “I was lucky,” MacMullen said, “because I started doing architecture in high school. I was 15 years old. I lied about my age to this architectural firm... They put me in a drafting room with an old guy teaching me how to draw lines until I got more and more responsibilities.” He’d been interested in architecture as a career path ever since his engineer uncle recommended the profession to him as a child, hav-
But try and live it, do the same thing and you’ll get a whole different perspective. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t heroic. It was boring.
ing seen MacMullen’s drawings of buildings. At the time, he wrote out the word “architect,” and decided he liked the way it looked. He attended Yale for Naval Science until the program was discontinued in 1971 because of the Vietnam War, and he consequently transferred to Boston University. For many years, MacMullen worked out of Boston—that is, until he got an offer from a developer in Boston called the Beacon Company to work on a $144 million project in New Haven. Elm Haven was a run-down public housing project, and MacMullen was tasked with redeveloping its 23 acres into the residential neighborhood now known as Monterey Place. That project led to another, then another, and ultimately he decided to stay in New Haven. Since then, his work has included the construction of the new Q House, the community center and fixture of the Dixwell neighborhood; the implosion of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the former New Haven sports and entertainment center, to make way for Gateway Community College; and the erection of a monument in the police station commemorating officers who died in the line of duty. MacMullen says that he is trying to make a difference through his work. He wants to make people as comfortable as possible in the spaces he converts because “the more comfortable people are, the more successful they are.” He went on to say, “I figure I’ll only be here for a while...at least while I’m here, I want to be able to say I did a number of things that have some value.”
11 A bizarre event from 1994 incited MacMullen’s passion for history. He was Executive Director of the Naval Shipbuilding Museum of Quincy, Mass., when, one day, he received a package. The museum frequently received donations, so he didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary. But as an intern was carrying the box, the bottom collapsed and a skeleton rolled out. A note was glued to the skull, requesting for these remains to be sent to the Surgeon Major in Fort Warren “for interment up North.” Reading the note, MacMullen realized, “This guy was never buried.” With this revelation, he set out to uncover everything he could about the identity of this body. He sent one intern to Washington and another to Boston to look up identification records. He called the University of Massachusetts’ Forensic department to examine the body. What they learned was that the man was African American; he was five foot eight; he’d chewed tobacco; he’d likely done a lot of manual labor in his life; and appeared to have either died from shrapnel or a bullet. The interns returned with two I.D.s: he was either a man named Abraham Jenks or Abraham Jenkins. As MacMullen tells it, Abraham Jenks had been a laborer in the Confederate Army. He was wounded and captured by Union forces and then sent to a hospital in the middle of Boston Harbor. While there, a Surgeon Major asked him why he was fighting for the Confederates since he was African American. Jenks clarified that he wasn’t fighting: he was only building roads and hauling things. The surgeon told him, “You should be fighting for your freedom,” to which Jenks agreed, so he traveled to Maryland to join a specific regiment of the Union Army. He was killed at the Battle of the Crater, just before he would have arrived in Richmond. Because he’d told his fellow soldiers to contact the surgeon in Boston in the event of his death, his corpse was shipped to Massachusetts. But nobody could track down the surgeon and Jenks’s body was left unclaimed. For ten years, his body was kept at a funeral home, then his remains were moved into smaller boxes. Eventually, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a Civil War veterans’ group, offered to give him a proper burial, but ended up placing his body in a basement and forgetting about it. When their last member died in 1956, GAR dissolved, and members’ relatives were allowed to take belongings from the basement.
One woman found the box containing Jenks’s neglected by the living. A sign arching from the body and donated it to the Naval Shipbuilding gate enclosing the graveyard once read “Unto the Museum where MacMullen worked. Least of These,” a biblical reference that reveals that those entombed there were poor people— MacMullen wanted to give Jenks the burial he people with nowhere else to go. That very sign deserved—but not just any burial. He wanted to is now missing many of its letters, so that it has recreate what a funeral would have looked like in become almost indecipherable. Perhaps the peo1864. So he obtained a formal death certificate ple interred in Woodin were allowed to be forfrom a coroner. Then he contacted around 700 gotten because they were “the Least of These.” historical reenactors to attend the event. A local But MacMullen refuses to let this stay the case. funeral parlor agreed to make a coffin from the era. Stop&Shop donated big tents, coffee, and beans. The cookie company G.H. Bent made When he unearths the rocks buried with these hardtack, a simple type of cracker commonly bodies, he will refer to the Woodin Street Cemeaten by Civil War soldiers. An encampment etery Burial Book, in which almost every interwas installed in the park where the funeral was ment has been documented. He will look at the held; cannons started to show up, along with number of this disc appended to the rock and people on horses. At this point, MacMullen was refer to a lot number. This lot number will reveal very interested in historical reenactment: he, too, Name and Date of Death: Eloise Horning (1was measured for a uniform and joined the pro- 16-1933), Mary Patton (5-23-1972), Emanuel cession. About 34,000 people attended Jenks’s Clark (6-10-1983). Not a single one of these 1995 funeral; the local church overflowed. Jenks, 1,887 bodies will be left unknown. a man who had for so long been denied his funeral rites, finally got to rest in peace. He said, “These people lived their lives. They had relatives—mothers, fathers, sons. Now they’re “People aren’t aware of the past,” MacMullen dead, and nobody knows they’re there. Their said. “A lot of the times they’ll look at a mov- whole lives added up to no one knowing they’re ie and think that’s what [war] was. Or read a there. I don’t think that’s fair. That’s why I’m dobook. But try and live it, do the same thing and ing this. That’s why I’d still be doing this, even if you’ll get a whole different perspective. It wasn’t nobody asked me to.” fun. It wasn’t heroic. It was boring.” Because he wants to better understand the realities of war, MacMullen continues to reenact historic scenes after Jenks’s burial. Recently, he did one event in Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie, for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. He played a soldier from the Commonwealth forces—the first one ashore and therefore responsible for telling comrades where to go on the beach. In October, he will attend another World War II reenactment in Stowe, Mass. MacMullen leads a life dedicated to historical reenactment and conservation because he believes he can “learn something from it.” He learns from each figure he plays and gains “a little more understanding for what it was like to be them.” His ambition to restore the Woodin Street Cemetery stems from similar reasons: “I want to find out as much as I can about who they were.” The bodies buried in the Woodin Street Cemetery currently dwell in obscurity, having been
I Became Queer, I Have Always Been White KELLYN KUSYK, SM ’20 YH STAFF
I
became a lesbian around the same time that my eyes were opened to Charlottesville, Va., my hometown, which is to say that my relationship with my first girlfriend was wrapped around the landscape. We started dating the summer after my junior year of high school, and in terms of the great outdoors, we had nothing to hide. The first time we had sex was in her car at a bonfire near a reservoir in a protected park. When we finished, we peed in the woods and cracked the windows and slept on top of each other in the backseat. I hosted the bonfire and couldn’t relax the whole night because I was so scared of the cops getting called. It never crossed my mind that everyone I had invited was white and that it wouldn’t have made a difference if the cops had come. We, white high school students, were safe in the woods at night sitting around our illegal bonfire and drinking alcohol someone had bought with their fake at the ABC Liquor store, part of a chain in Virginia. I started dating Margie in secret from my family, and, at first, in secret from hers. We did a lot of driving that summer, through the woods up to the mountains. The world smelled so strongly when we were together—it was like taking a bath. There was a big, blue mountain right behind her house and I looked at it every time I parked my mom’s
car on her street and went up the front steps onto her porch. When we were in her room together, the air was always heavy at first. It came in through the open windows on the second floor and a big box fan would just stir the air around without cooling us off. As the night went from dusk to black, the humidity would lift up, but usually it would still be so hot at night that we’d sleep lying next to each other on top of her sheets, our hands touching. Margie taught me to look at the mountains with my eyes scrubbed clean. Before she left for college, I let them mark how much I loved her. I was primed for this conflation of place and person because, the spring before, I had started reading Annie Dillard. Dillard spent a lot of time near my home; she wrote “The Death of the Moth,” her famous essay about the writer’s purpose, somewhere near Charlottesville, camping and writing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. My English teacher explained that the titular moth, who dies a gruesome, self-immolating death, represented the writer, who lived a life of solitude and self-flagellation in order to make her art and speak her truth. Annie Dillard seemed noble for making her own life painful. I was fascinated by her eye for the region—I loved reading her rhapsodize about Angus cows and muddy creeks. But both of us had a lack
of awareness of the implications of a life of voluntary pain in order to produce art. We did not understand—or at least could not articulate—that even if the pain of writing was real, even if the pain of living was real, we were still granted worry-free existences insofar as we were white. Dillard’s writing, and her self-imposed isolation, sought to remove the Blue Ridge from the context of its people to let it stand as a soft, neutral backdrop for her thoughts on religion and nature and intellectual history. I wanted the Blue Ridge to be this for me and Margie as well. But the myth that the landscape is an inhuman thing to be “observed” and filled with meaning is a dangerous one. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes: “Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America... are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians,” are interred histories of enslavement and dispossession of Black people, are interred resistance and struggle at high cost of human life. If Charlottesville is built on any solid foundation at all, it is its deep hypocrisy, as with most racist and segregated cities. That night I hooked up with Margie, drunk on illegally purchased Fireball, I had my first,
rosy inklings that I might have been a lesbian. In grim juxtaposition, that same fall in 2015, ABC made the national news when ABC Liquor agents—the chain’s unofficial hired “police force”—brutalized Martese Johnson, a Black University of Virginia (UVA) student who was trying to legally enter a bar with his government-issued ID. The impulse to de-historicize and de-contextualize is a key tool of white supremacy. When the KKK rioted in downtown Charlottesville on Aug. 11th and 12th in 2017, Jia Tolentino wrote a piece in the New Yorker about the town’s particular brand of racism. She said, “It’s a community that manages to embody the honeyed ease of a small Southern enclave while modelling the progressive values and professional advancement of a liberal city.” The city is full of rich, liberal white people who have moved down from New York, D.C. and other big, Eastern cities, or occasionally up, from the deeper South. All of these white people are amazed at Charlottesville. It’s like an amusement park of glorious contradictions. It is Southern but it is liberal, like a warm satellite of New England. It is small but it is full of educated people; it is economically prosperous but the pace of life is slow; it is a college town surrounded by rural countryside. We are self-consciously Southern. We spend summer afternoons in swimming holes and listen to bluegrass music and lose our minds when it snows because no one knows how to plow the roads. We have all the markers of liberal progressivism, the morality we assume we’re guaranteed because we are middle class, college educated, and put “I’m With Her” bumper stickers on our mid-2010s model SUVs. We’re surrounded by enough red-blood-
ed, white, Southern conservatism and outright bigotry that we believe we have somehow succeeded because we are white, and yet, we are liberal, we are wealthy—we don’t live in trailer parks. In doing so, we hold the South at enough of a distance that we are able to romanticize it. Thomas Jefferson might as well be a living presence on UVA’s campus, but Jefferson’s legacy as an enslaver is somehow never relevant to the conversation. There are so many white people here who profess not to be racist while denying the flagrant racism and segregation in the city. Perhaps we feel unconsciously that we don’t deserve to have our “honeyed ease” in a place as physically beautiful as Charlottesville. We feel guilty for living somewhere that makes white people’s lives so easy, and our minds contort themselves collectively to build an image of the past and of the present that is not so bad, not so violent. By our own mythmaking, we are absolved. Hilton Als, professor at Columbia University and critic for the New Yorker, says about the politics of observation: “I do not go unobserved in the world of my street, thus making me free to observe in relative safety and peace.” A Black queer man, Als is painfully surveilled, exposed to observation and unable to thoughtlessly observe. “Privilege” as a term is so overused that it barely has meaning anymore. But if we are to consider the things we do not have to think about in order to survive, we begin to see the differences in how we are surveilled; the differences in what we have access to and what might endanger our lives. In my experience, becoming a lesbian in Charlottesville meant some moments of surveillance
and genuine fear—no one ever touched me, but there were always eyes lingering on me too long and the occasional “DYKE” screamed at me from a pickup truck. In an interview he did with Richard Goldstein, James Baldwin said, “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.” Visible queerness does come with real danger—not just in the South, obviously, but that summer as I was coming into my lesbian-ness, I did think a lot about an example close to home. In 1988, Rebecca Wight was gunned down in the act of having sex with her partner, Claudia Brenner, while camping along the Appalachian Trail. While the anomaly of my sexuality did sometimes put me in danger, my estimation of that danger was most certainly overdrawn. For one, at the time, I never considered the fact that Wight was Iranian and Puerto Rican and had been killed by a white man. The love I shared with Margie was not the love of the sacred white heterosexual family, but I was still white—there was a difference I did not consider between my lesbianism and Wight’s. I sometimes wonder if the fact that I was a lesbian meant it took me longer to realize I was also white. I’m not speaking phenotypically, but rather in terms of having investments in the root of the same violence that leads some creepy white men to hate me for being queer. I notice something similar in the particular ways that we white queer people sometimes perform our queerness. We feel guilt (for what, we don’t fully know) and, in response, we try to distance ourselves from whiteness. We assume queerness and obsess over our presentation because doing so makes us feel different at face value from the white people we see with the more obvious markers of being overtly racist. If the white suburban soccer parents and the poor white people living in trailer parks are genuinely racist, surely we are exempt if we pierce our noses and live in co-ops and say “fuck the cops” under our breath when we drive past them. Racism and heteronormativity go neatly together in our mind, but we have only gotten it half right. Cutting our hair does not mean we are divesting ourselves from whiteness, and I worry that at certain points in my life, I have allowed myself to believe it has. Recently, my friend Irene Vázquez, BK ’21, sat me down, and over the course of a very long and frank conversation, brought to my attention ways that I let certain behaviors act as a buffer between me and my whiteness. It doesn’t matter how many Ethnic Studies classes I’ve taken or rallies I’ve attended—if embodying anti-racism is not an intentional, daily practice, she reminded me, then I am failing to do my job as a supposed “ally.” Embodying queerness does not absolve me from racism. Embodying an-
ti-racism is not a simple box to check—it means changing fundamentally the ways I interact with people on a daily basis. After the KKK riots in 2017, my Facebook feed was filled with posts from my white Charlottesville community, friends or friends of friends, with the hashtag #notmyCharlottesville. “So sad,” someone wrote, “Charlottesville is full of wonderful, diverse, kind people who do not deserve… the hate that was brought into the city by others.” Another posted, “Disappointed </3 in the city I grew up in... #notmyCharlottesville. We need you, Jesus.” I talked about this with my friend Kiran Baucom, BF ’21, who is white and who lived in Charlottesville for four years before coming to Yale. They brought up this particular reaction after speaking about how the town is literally built to make white people feel “so comfortable”—until, of course, the KKK arrives with tiki torches and puts our quaint little town in the national news. Baucom talked about the importance of sitting with the discomfort of whiteness, and how, frustratingly, the KKK riots made it even easier for white Charlottesvillians to just blip over this, because it was something extreme and “other” to point to, beyond the scope of their personal responsibility. If it is in the scope of our collective, personal responsibility, how do we meaningfully commit ourselves to justice? To get somewhere closer to answering this, I talked to two people from my hometown—Grace Herons, a friend whom I met at a protest in Charlottesville in March of 2018, and Leslie Scott-Jones, and activist and artist who I reached through the Facebook page for Charlottesville’s chapter of Black Lives Matter. Herons identifies as a multiracial Southerner of East Asian descent. She lived in Charlottesville for eight years after moving there from Roanoke, Va. to attend UVA. She has strong roots in the South, especially in traditions of Southern organizing. To her, and to people close to her, “Charlottesville can tell the whole fucking story if you let it,” from white settlers taking this land from Monacan people, to settlers enslaving African people on it, to Thomas Jefferson founding UVA, to the razing of Vinegar Hill (a Black community), to the establishment of monuments to confederate generals, to centuries of structural dispossession and segregation. Many other people have already told these stories far more eloquently and completely than I can hope to here. When white people claim that this is “Not Their Charlottesville,” she said, they are refusing to acknowledge these histories, and, further, ignoring the fact that Charlottesville actively facilitated the riots in 2017 by permitting the KKK and maintaining a racist and violent police presence on the 11th and 12th of August. Leslie Scott-Jones, who is Black, said that this lack
of an understanding of racism as structural is what plagues the white liberal community in Charlottesville (and beyond). When white people go to a city council meeting and “call for civility, they don’t realize that they are literally telling every Black person in the room to sit down and shut up—and then they wonder why we’re angry.” “Niceness”, she said, is not going to fix anything. “Well meaning white women… really don’t understand why they are part of the problem. You kind of have to educate them and say, ‘you do realize that 85 to 95 percent of the owners of slaves were white women— that’s how the wealth was transferred— through dowry.’”
Herons is someone who thinks a lot about “ritual and ceremony space.” She sees them as “the way we can create a container that can metabolize and hold emotions to allow us to move through the intensity of our times.” During the intensely traumatic time that was 2017, she started a relationship with a person named Rowan, and that winter, at a spectacular bonfire celebration, Rowan proposed. The following May, they were married. “I definitely felt that the ritual celebration of queer joy—letting people feel queer joy and feel the joy of a relationship that had been forged in the summer of 2017—was what let the wedding ceremony feel like more than just a celebration of two people, but a celebration of a community.”
But, while she often finds herself put into the role, Scott-Jones said helping white people see their whiteness is “not something I need to take time out for.” During 2017, Scott-Jones made the conscious decision that she would not be on the front lines protesting: “that wasn’t a risk I could take for my life because I have children, and now a grandchild—my people depend on me.” Instead, “I can make the choice that every single piece of art that I make tries to enlighten, tries to tell a Black story.”
I think it’s important, when I hear about anti-racist efforts on the part of white people, to remind myself that this kind of work, even at its most taxing, is still in many ways the bare minimum. Just as there is nothing inherently radical in identifying as “queer,” there is nothing inherently radical in identifying as “anti-racist” unless you’re taking real steps to put that into practice. “Queer,” to Grace and Rowan, is not just an identity, it is a way of loving that can hold and honor an entire community, beyond the individual players in a single relationship.
What Herons finds “really powerful about the South is where there’s always been the heart of empire or oppression, there has also been the heart of the resistance”—legacies of struggle by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, as well as “white people defecting from whiteness.” Herons mentioned the lives and work of John Brown and Mab Segrest. “It’s these stories of solidarity like [those] that fucked my shit up” and led her down the path of organizing white people for racial justice. In the midst of everything going on during 2017, she said her community of mostly queer people was thrown into organizing. Herons had a large role in establishing a chapter of the organization Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) in Charlottesville. Members of the organization—a coalition of non-Black people working for racial justice—put their bodies on the line during protests in 2017. The national chapter “showed up” for Charlottesville by raising money for Black and Brown communities most affected by the protests in the wake of August 11 and 12th. Since 2017, work by members of SURJ has continued. Scott-Jones cited Charlottesville’s new “Hate Free Schools Coalition,” started by mostly white “soccer moms”— “after [August 12th], they were like, SURJ is not enough.”
The white liberal people who walk into city council meetings and call for “civility”—those same liberal white people descended from enslavers—are my community. When I go home to Charlottesville, I go home to those people. Having “uncivil” conversations with them is something I must constantly remind myself is in my court to do. I recognize in them an impulse I often have—of conflating identity with radical politics. Because I was a lesbian, I felt like the most oppressed person in the entire world. I couldn’t possibly be a lesbian and white at the same time! By the same token, because we identified Charlottesville as a “nice” town, we couldn’t possibly be racist! White people must recognize the fact that we all have different stakes in this struggle, but we still have stakes in it nonetheless. As ScottJones said to me, That’s another thing that most white people don’t realize—is that this system created a superiority complex for you. Why do you think that assumption you live under doesn’t damage you as much as it damages the people who don’t have that?” We have to consider white supremacy our issue, one we have a shared responsibility for and shared stake in ending. I think it behooves us white queers in particular to consider the debts we owe that sometimes feel so much easier to forget.
16
sitting down at breakfast with Mafalda von Perhaps I’mAlvensleben, BC ’22. I’d forgotten about this article until I saw her walk into the Branford dining clothing, in its hall. She was wearing a navy blue wrap-around dress, its shoulders a little puffy, in a fine, thick fabric; necklaces; large earrings. The outfit looked like best form, can two something that Artemis, the Greek goddess of the be a way to moon and the hunt, might wear. Alvensleben’s grandmother used to take her communicate Von mother out of school on occasion—she’d call the office and say the two of them had a very important to attend, and they’d sneak out and go with oneself. appointment shopping together. It’s been a tradition for the women her family to care about clothing, and when her For some, inmother moved to a big city—from the “German equivalent of the South”—she took advantage of this clothing practice. “Through clothing, [my mother] was able to fake her way through the social structure in the city,” Von Alvensleben. “She could look the part, so loses the says she was able to establish herself in that community freedom of and that world.” What’s difficult about clothing is that one can’t Perhaps, if we could, we’d all have more creativity and “opt-out.” brainspace; we could be naked all the time or wear a single uniform. But in our current instead mindlessly world, even if you don’t spend time on it, every choice is a form of communication. We becomes clothing can’t opt out from being seen. So why not use all the camouflage.
THE YALE HERALD
channels we possess to say who we are? “I think I feel warm and connected to my body when I’m able to create and share the image I had in my head to the outside of my body,” says Beatrice Greeson, a friend of mine from Washington, D.C. We used to work together at a vintage clothing store, where we would try on dresses from fifty or a hundred years ago, take pictures in them, and enjoy the feel of the fabric. “The same way that you should be careful about the words that you choose, you should be careful about the clothes that you wear,” says Ismael Jamai Ait Hmitti, SY ’22. We talked about how men are not always asked to be so conscious of what they’re wearing. “You could just walk around in the street and get the same amount of respect [no matter what you wear],” he tells me. Hmitti believes that, as a result, fewer men choose to take control of this form of interaction. “Men are cut off from that form of communication,” Ismael says. We both agree it’s kind of sad: a missed opportunity to express oneself, to talk, and to listen. Clothing can be a positive means of engagement with others, and a way to construct oneself. “I find a lot of joy in it all being a Costume!” Greeson wrote to me. But how people perceive others is heavily influenced by external, potentially harmful, structures. “So today I will wear my white button down / at least I can still be neat / walk out and be seen as clean,” sings Mitski
17
HERO MAGNUS, SY ’22
Talking Style
in “A Burning Hill.” For Mitski, the white buttondown is a way for her to limit the racialization of her body and existence. Clothing is also heavily gendered: “If women want to access power in, say, an office scenario, their options are often to either dress like a man, in a pantsuit, or dress like an ‘archetypal’ woman,’” says Rachel Calcott, BC ’22. Caring about what people think of us, and therefore editing our image through clothing, is often necessary in order to operate in certain spaces. For some, clothing loses the freedom of creativity and instead becomes camouflage. Perhaps clothing, in its best form, can be a way to communicate with oneself. Nyeda Sam, PC ’22, is another woman who puts care and an enormous amount of creativity into what she wears, talked to me about her recent lingerie party. She played a lot of Solange Knowles, and the party was only open to women and non-binary people. “Imagining a lingerie party that was opened up to straight men would just give such a different experience. I know myself. I would subconsciously, even, be appealing to those men.” She called the party a “holistic, worthwhile experience.” After her party, Sam posted a few pictures in the lingerie, just for close friends, but quickly took the pictures down. She felt that there was no need for anyone else to see them: “I felt fucking sexy, and that was an experience for myself and for my body.”
At the end of my breakfast with von Alvensleben, we discussed the idea of clothing as a means of communication not just with others, but with oneself and one’s body. She described the body as something you can care for and treat well, like a person—someone you can speak to. “Clothing has helped me heal my relationship to my body in many ways, too,” said von Alvensleben. “Maybe I don’t like the way I look stark naked in front of the mirror or something, but if I put something over it that I love, it almost feels like I’m caring for my body. That’s another way of showing your body that you love it. And sometimes I struggle to do that with feeding it properly, and I struggle to do that with exercising in an appropriate way, but I know that with clothes that’s one way that I can definitely show it that I care.” It can be fun to construct ourselves in the outside world, to communicate through this creative and complicated channel. But when we speak to others, we’re also speaking to ourselves. What a lovely opportunity to be kind.
18
Nude for Thought: William A
re nudes unacceptable in today’s society? Can we differentiate between fine art and dick pics? What happened? I accidentally left my “Safe Search” on when I googled Titian’s Venus of Urbino for class and failed to find an uncropped image of the canvas. I thought this was the age of freedom!
ster Professor Emeritus of Art upon his retirement in 1995. What sets Bailey’s style apart from his contemporaries is that while many mid-century artists depicted subjects in the abstract, Bailey strove for realism. He relied on his memory and imagination to paint his canvases.
The nude has a rich history in Western art, dating back to Ancient Greece. The Greeks are considered to be the first humanists, with some of their philosophers believing that “man is the measure of all things.” The original Olympic athletes competed in the nude. Male subjects of Ancient Greek statues were almost always nude, and throughout Greek history, female statues became more and more revealing (See: Polykleitos’ Doryphoros). The rise of Christianity saw a fall in nude art, as modesty was considered sacred. The Renaissance brought the beginning of a tradition of reclining female nudes (See: Titian’s Venus of Urbino). Naming the nude women “Venus” was almost a loophole for artists—the classical goddess of beauty shan’t be censored.
After reflecting on the various women in the exhibition, I couldn’t help but notice they all had similar facial features, body types, and skin tones. The only variables were their positions and hairstyles. Because all of Bailey’s canvases are derived from his imagination, he only sees these women as paint. When Bailey wants to depict a body, he defaults to a young, skinny, white woman. Is this his perception of beauty?
The 18th and early 19th centuries were the age of the salon, a juried annual exhibition with strict rules about what could be depicted. Nudity was only allowed under certain circumstances, like a painting of a woman titled “Venus” or depicting the woman as “exotic” (See: Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque). When salons fell out of fashion, artists took more liberty in their depictions of the body. Late 19th and early 20th-century art saw more risqué nudes, often with prostitutes as models (See: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). William Bailey, YC ’55 ART ’57, spent most of his career at Yale, becoming the Kingman Brew-
THE YALE HERALD
L’Attesa (The Waiting) (2006) depicts a woman in a white slip dress peering out a window. Although she is not in the nude, the light and shadow on the dress imply the curves of her body. The background includes a vase with white flowers upon a table. As the scene was from Bailey’s imagination, all details were placed there on purpose and therefore carry significance. Why does she wear white? She’s innocent; the shade is a symbol of purity, untouched by other pigments. It is impossible to mix colors to create white. For whom or what is this untouched woman waiting? Will she still be “pure” come morning? Another fascinating detail of this work is its light source. The light coming from the window shines upon the woman’s body, not her face. This is a departure from conventional portraiture. The face is the core of the individual. This is where we are supposed to look while having a conversation. By shining a spotlight on her chest and obscuring her face with shadow, Bailey obscures the humanity of the woman. Bailey gives solace to the viewer because the wom-
an is nothing more than a figment of his imagination, or perhaps he doesn’t care about who this woman is, and his only concern is what lies beneath her dress. Portrait of S (1979-80) is the other work that caught my eye. The painting depicts a seated brunette with her shirt undone, revealing her bare torso. Other than the figure, the canvas is noticeably bare. The background is a solid shade of olive green, a symbol of peace and tranquility, which matches the color of the woman’s eyes. The model is relaxed in her semi-nude position. Her shoulders and forward are slouched, almost implying apathy. The woman stares directly at the viewer, establishing an intimacy between the canvas and the viewer. The model’s clothing is also all white. If she is a true symbol of purity, why does she seem so comfortable in the semi-nude? I wasn’t the only one to find a mysterious beauty in this painting. Portrait of S appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1982. Compared to the likes of Playboy, the issue was banned or otherwise obscured in many vendors across the country. According to a Washington Post article, Bailey wasn’t pleased with the mass production of his canvas, saying, “This is not a real person; it’s a painting, a vision from my head. I think there’s an entirely different aura created when a person views a figure painting in a museum than when it’s seen on the cover of a magazine.” Bailey’s art also figures into the more recent history of the nude. Upon viewing William Bailey’s nudes, my first reaction was to avert my eyes. There were naked ladies in front of me! A few moments later, I realized they were references to vanitas. Vanitas, often associated with still life, is a genre of art that
19
m Bailey at the YUAG MELANIE HELLER, SM ’23
alludes to the inevitability of death. While some canvases display more obvious symbols of death, like skulls, others use fruit in prime ripeness or flowers in peak bloom. Although the perfect looking apple on a canvas seems like a symbol of life, the ripeness only lasts for a short while: fruit rots and flowers wilt. The bodies depicted in Bailey’s tableaus are young, devoid of any wrinkles or blemishes. These models will age, though maybe not quite as quickly as an apple. Their hair will turn grey, their skin will sag, they will die. Typically, vanitas captures the futility of pleasure and justification of displaying wealth. A reminder of the memento mori draws beauty from the temporary nature of the female nude. The name of the exhibition is “Looking through Time.” All things fall victim to time. Bailey’s works display an interesting juxtaposition between idealism, abstraction, and reality. Bailey picks and chooses which imperfections his models
have. This is not a study of the model: this is a study of the human body. The exhibition at the YUAG displays not only portraits but still life paintings. Integrating portraiture with still life might seem strange, or even accidental, as the genres don’t seem to have much in common. But Bailey integrates portraiture and still life through vanitas, and the exhibition seems to equate the two genres by putting them in the same space. While we as a society have yet to separate artistic from erotic nudism, still lifes rarely cause controversy. Putting nudes on the same level as still lifes argues that there is nothing wrong with a naked body. Nudism in art has long been likened to the beauty in each person. Everyone has a body, and each body is unique. The exhibition “William Bailey: Looking through Time” will be on view until January 5, 2020.
Breath Becoming Body Breath: it’s where it all starts. We all take it, even if we don’t notice—even when we don’t want to notice. Breath is always there. In many ways, it’s one of the most bodily things about us. It tells us (and others) what we’ve consumed, if we’ve cleaned our mouths recently, if we’re stressed or relaxed. Controlling it is a sort of superpower, to contain that which sustains you.
tion for my pair of lungs during my life. I time how long I can hold my breath; I love to run aimlessly, just gallop away across a field of sidewalk. In that feeling of not quite having enough oxygen, of needing to breathe that much more so you can keep going, breath becomes movement itself. Breath becomes striding legs and pumping arms. Breath becomes you.
Breath, a real breath, can be exhilarating.
And yet, the convergence of an act and the person doing it—you—isn’t always pleasant. Breath smells. Breath hurts. Sometimes people breathe smelly breath in your face, and sometimes you hold yours and you feel small and constrained. But I also think we can appreciate this unpleasantness about breath. Breath tells you about yourself and others. It’s the soft data of our lives. Perhaps more than that, it’s a tool, an instrument for measuring the weather or a gauge for your own feelings. In its immateriality, breath actually proves a medium for connection, whether or not the connection of garlic breath to my nose in the architecture school elevator is desirable is another question. But connection nonetheless! Breath reminds us that we are permeable.
Our bodies begin with our breath. Or, well, maybe not begin—who’s to say if a gust of wind on its way to become breath, or a plucked tomato on its way to becoming brunch, isn’t you as well?—but it at least offers one route of mapping our bodies. Our bodies change all the time. We molt and shed, drip and emit. The act of breathing is just a little quicker. Breath leaves and enters us so often that we don’t think of it as ever being part of us. But where would we be without it? Not far. Breath can be joyous. I don’t know when I began to like breathing. I mean, I’ve always liked it, insofar as it’s kept me alive, but I’ve developed a real apprecia-
RASMUS SCHLUTTER, MC ’21 YH STAFF So, take some more time with your breath. Hold it for a few seconds and let it go. Bring it back in. Breathe in, breathe out. Wonder at how much it does. When does that puff of air become you? When does the oxygen that guides your thoughts and fuels your strides become those actions? And when does that double shot of espresso breathed right into the unsuspecting nostrils of your cute TA become your essence? Take joy in the particles which cross the fictitious bounds of body moment by moment. Marvel in your porosity. Breathe.
20 The Yale Herald: Maybe we could start by talking about this piece worms in my mouth again, since it seems like you’ve been working on it for almost your entire time here [at Yale]. PP: The semester before I started I was thinking a lot about states of the body: “fight or flight” and “rest and digest.” I was thinking about how when you’re stressed out you cannot digest food, and you conserve energy to deal with whatever you’re dealing with. I noticed that in my studio I kept starting things without finishing them, which I think was part of coming here and having so many studio visits, so many people constantly looking at my work—it froze me up. I was having no actual output, and I was like, “What am I doing here? I’m taking in all this information and moving my hands around but nothing’s getting done.” This might be T.M.I., but last semester I got really sick. I was having a lot of abdominal pain and ended up in the hospital for a week with a bowel obstruction and a torsed ovary—literally turned up inside. It was the embodiment of what was happening in my studio: my studio was having a bowel obstruction. YH: And that’s exactly what ended up happening with this piece. PP: Yeah, I think it became about the intestines, the process of getting twisted up. After I came back from the hospital, I started making this big tube, this worm thing. The fans on either end of the tube are so loud. When you’re inside the tube, it would seem like the fans would be scary, but that’s actually the best time to be in it; you can move in ways that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. I had performed in it once and when I got out I remember talking to my partner about how I’d never seen [the tube] behave like it did. It was really tumultuous. He said, “The only thing that changes every time you get in it is you.” I get a totally different performance every time. It moves differently every time. But that was when I realized: I’m digesting myself.
PP: Now that I’ve performed in it several times, I do think I can explain to someone how to be in the tube and how to perform in it. But at first I had to spend so much time in the tube to understand how to move in it. I’ve done so many performances in the wrong room, or with too many people, or where I couldn’t get to the wall and write on it or where I didn’t want to write on it. I’ve done it so many times I think I’ve encountered every type of problem I can have. Now I understand the language enough where I can communicate that to someone. I mean, I hesitate because I don’t think that it’s important that it’s me or my body, but I think that the relationship between the body and the object has to be established in a way that I can’t really ask somebody else to do. So I can build that relationship and then explain it to someone, if they want to do it. But you know, it’s something like a language in a relationship that has to be built. And it’s hard. It’s hard to do. It’s not an easy ask. YH: Do feel like you’ve maintained a certain level of experimentation when you’re performing with the worm? PP: Well, I’m pretty comfortable with the worm now. I don’t really get as nervous anymore unless it’s a weird room that I didn’t see before doing the performance. But I feel comfortable because I’ve gone through it enough that I know how to handle it when it gets twisted. When I’m in it, I can’t really orient myself within the room, and I’m moving so much that the colors don’t matter, you know? If the fan at my feet turns on but the air doesn’t get to me, I know it’s twisted somewhere between my feet and that fan. So I have to go that way and then find the twists, get in the twist and then roll over. If it’s really twisted I have to see which way it’s twisted and then put my hand in it to see how far it’s gone. So I’m at the point now where I know what to do if things go wrong. YH: I wonder how you think about the knowledge you’re accumulating from all of this experimentation. You clearly have a really, really intricate and detailed understanding of the ways that one should navigate this tube. But where does that accumulated knowledge or understanding go?
PP: That’s a good question. I mean, I really believe that nothing is true, everything is just kind of permitted. YH: It’s a sort of inverse, as opposed to you digesting My truth is that I think going through the worm did the work, having the work consume you in some sort inform me in my body on some level. My hope is that of way… Did you end up conceiving of this piece as a it fixed my intestines. result of your experience in the hospital?
YH STAFF
Artist Portrait: Peyton Peyton
This week, the Herald interviewed sculpture student Peyton Peyton, ART ’20, about her performance piece worms in my mouth again. We discussed the body as a source of inspiration and the kinesthetic knowledge which object-based performance facilitates.
PP: Yeah, going to the hospital was first. In my crit before that, I had [made] this crocheted tube, on the end of which was basically underwear that snap close, like a diaper. There was another one on the other end, so two people could get in it. After making that I knew I wanted to crawl through a tube, maybe for a video. I wasn’t really thinking about it being a performance at first. Then I got the fans, and became really interested in what could happen between the two fans. Even then, I wasn’t thinking about me being between the two fans. YH: Have you ever considered using performers who are not you to manipulate and use the objects? Still from worms in my mouth
THE YALE HERALD
21 Body Shots YH STAFF
I
s the person more than their pose? Can you figure someone out based solely on their figure? See if you can match these Herald editors to their majors! 1. 2. 3. 4.
C.
English Major, Performatively Econ Double Major, Reluctantly American Studies Major, Ironically Art Major, Obviously
A.
D.
B.
Answer Key: 1B, 2D, 3C, 4A
Gold Contributor Abra Metz Dworkin Molly Ball Christopher Burke Silver Contributor Dan Feder Brian Bowen David Applegate Fabian Rosado Donors C. Morales Ervolino Sam Lee Joshua Benton George E. Harris Laura Yao Ted Lee Michael Gerber Brendan Cottington Marisol Ryu Natasha Sarin Emily Barasch Marci McCoy Julia Dahl Maureen Miller
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Patron T. Spielberg
The Black List things we hate this week
things we hate this week Emaciation.
Fleshlights.
Musk.
Putting your foot in your mouth.
I like a healthy, active bird. Worse than an aura.
Natural deodorant. I’m cancer-free, but smelly as can be!
Hickies.
Hate to see it. I literally hate seeing it.
I can’t see anything in here!
Put it in my mouth instead!
Elbow Sweat.
What happened to good, old-fashioned elbow grease?
Bowel Movements. DON’T LEAVE ME.