Herald Volume LXXXVI Issue 11

THE YALE HERALD YALE’S MOST DARING PUBLICATION SINCE 1986 | VOL LXXXVI ISSUE 11 | 18 NOV. 2019

FROM THE EDITORS Dear Heralders, It’s officially sports week at Yale, which means it’s unofficially sports week at the Herald. I know that the majority of you, dear readers, only attend “The Game” for the ironic Instagram and a couple of cans of free cider from the YCC, but we can agree to appreciate the values central to the spectacle nevertheless: ruthless competition, pushing oneself to their physical limits, playing games, and above all, Tradition. Just kidding. We are too sensitive and cerebral for male Sport here, despite our history of intramural badminton coverage in the 1990s (true!). These days, we explore the more subtle wins, losses, penalties, and overtimes of life at Yale within the pages of this publication. Here’s a snapshot of our highlight roll from this week: On the cover, Hamzah Jhaveri, TC ’22, reports on Pride Corp and the complexity of pink capitalism at Yale. Meanwhile, Macrina Wang, ES ’22, talks with Edwin Torres, foreman of Grove Street Cemetery, about his years in the graveyard, Katie Schlick, SM ’21, checks out Steep, the new cafe in Kline Biology Tower, and Gabby Colangelo, BR ’21, muses about April.

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.

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.

VISIT US ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM

Closing thought: In 1882 Oscar Wilde made a speech on aestheticism at Yale in which he addressed the population of athletes only to remind them that the real purpose of their sport is to make their bodies more beautiful. The Herald didn’t exist then. But if it did, E-board would endorse Wilde’s message.

Go Bulldogs, Ryan Benson

EDITORIAL STAFF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Marina Albanese, Laurie Roark MANAGING EDITORS 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, Will Wegner

DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTORS Paige Davis, Rebecca Goldberg ILLUSTRATOR Annie Yan ONLINE GRAPHICS Eric Krebs

BUSINESS STAFF

BUSINESS MANAGERS George Hua, Michelle Tong

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THE YALE HERALD

IN THIS ISSUE 6

Voices

In four stanzas of rich descriptions, Gabby Colangelo, BR ’21, explores the events of a breezy April day around a lake.

How many different ways are there to bury someone? Teigist Taye, PC ’22, brings the reader into the heart of a toxic relationship.

8

Opinion In search of escape from the hectic Yale sphere, Julia Levi, BF ’23, finds respite in a weekly cappuccino at Atticus Bookstore Cafe.

9

Arts

Painter Krystal DiFronzo, ART ’20, takes the Herald into the liminal space of her artistic practice, where she navigates questions of the rational and chemical versus the irrational and alchemical.

12

Cover

Hamzah Jhaveri, TC ’22, investigates Pride Corp, Yale’s only LGBTQIA+ business organization, and his own relationship to queerness and capitalism.

10

Features

Many of us walk past it daily. Most of us don’t know what goes on beyond the wall. Macrina Wang, ES ’22, talks to Edwin Torres, foreman of Grove Street Cemetery, about his years in the graveyard.

16, 18

Culture In response to a recent talk on the book Don’t Read Poetry, Caramia Putman, BF ’22, seeks to uncover the purpose of poetry and its on-campus perception.

INCOMING Thankgiving.

OUTGOING

Giving thanks.

Melanie Heller, SM ’23, (ship)wrecks us with her analysis of Théodore Géricault’s The Tempest.

Brianna Wu, MC ’21, tries to do the opposite of that in her analysis of Will Wilson’s photographs in Place, Nations, Generations, Beings.

20

Reviews Past clattering construction and sky high glass windows, Katie Schlick, SM ’21, takes a look at Steep, Science Hill’s newest watering hole.

Sonic worlds collide in Sudan Archives’ Athena, and Isaac Pross, BK ’23, describes the beauty that bursts forth from their impact.

In our final regular issue of the 2010s, the Herald looks back at the best shows to hit the small screen in the last decade.

Week Ahead DR. YUSEF SALAAM OF THE EXONERATED CENTRAL PARK FIVE TUESDAY, NOV.19, 6:30 PM BATTELL CHAPEL YHHAP FAST FRIDAY, NOV. 22, ALL DAY HARVARD x YALE: AFROBEATS INVASION SATURDAY, NOV. 22, 10 PM LALIBELA ETHIOPIAN RESTAURANT

INSERTS On the Promise and Potential Pitfalls of Rhyme, or Rather, Lack ADRIAN RIVERA, JE ’20 Thereof.

H ey. Hey, you. Yeah, you with the face. Wanna hear a secret? No? Well here it goes anyways: I’m in a secret society. To the world, we are known as PB&J, but, and I just have to get this off my chest— and I could get in a lot of trouble for this so keep it between us, ok?—we actually call ourselves Peanut Butter and Jelly. What a name, amirite. I mean, you’ve heard of Skull and Bones, Myth and Sword, Rum and Coke (and they’re not talking about the kind in the bottle, hunny!), but peanut butter and jelly? Shivers down the spine, goosebumps up the arms, a good ol’ clench of the sphincter. We’re the real deal, lemme tell you.

Sure, Baga Chipz might hit us with “Baga Chipz is stunning / Baga Chipz is class / Baga Chipz is sexy / She takes it up the (Unhhh!),” but then Blu Hydrangea comes in with her verse, ending with “I can be the hero / for the gays back home / bitches better watch out / now I’ll send them home, home, home, home.” She rhymes home with home—an icon, a legend, a model, a Linda Evangelista, my friend argued.

But I must confess: my time with PB&J will soon be coming to an end. For every Thursday and Sunday, my 14 brothers and sisters expect me to come up with a rhyme, a rhyme which should be inserted as a verse into the song of our founders, which we sing at the beginning of our meetings in the basement of The Schwarzman center. And that rhyme, dear reader, is almost always met with boos, jeers, and slaps to the face (and not the kind that I like, know what I’m sayin’.) My rhymes are terrible. I know it, my brothers and sisters know it, the God to which we pray knows it—I can’t go on like this.

A few days ago, contemplating my mortality and my impending break with PB&J, I came across the immortalized lip sync battle between Alyssa Edwards and Roxxy Andrews on Season 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s the moment Andrews made herstory by giving us a wig reveal only to reveal—wait for it—another wig atop her head. RuPaul’s mouth dropped, Michelle Visage lived for it, and I, along with Andrew’s season 5 compatriot Alaska Thunderfuck 5000, had a seizure!

But you don’t actually have to rhyme, said a friend. Just listen to the U.K. Top 40 hit “Break Up, Bye Bye” by the Frock Destroyers, the one-hit wonder girl group consisting of the British drag queens Baga Chipz, Blu Hydrangea, and Divina de Campo.

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THE YALE HERALD

It just falls flat for me, I replied. Ain’t no jimmies been rustled after listening to that verse, lemme tell ya’.

The lip sync was enhanced—indeed, defined—by the choice of song, in this case, Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair.” Willow rhymes throughout, but then comes the third substantial verse, which she ends with the following lyrics: “I get to the mm-yeah go hard / When they see me pull up / I whip it real hard / I whip it real hard / Real hard / I whip it

real hard.” And I heard the call of a trumpet coming from the east, and I saw four horsemen on the horizon ahead of me. A vision of the Virgin Mary appeared before me. Willow rhymed hard with hard.

Hard with hard. Cue Supa Hot Fire vid. Cue nuclear blast reel. Cue Ana Navarro saying, “The power that that has, the influence that that has, the access that that has, the international implications that that has.” A Kween. A Gawd. A Legend. Hearing that verse, a shiver ran down my spine, goosebumps ran up my arms, and my sphincter… don’t ask what happened to my sphincter.

John Milton once said that rhyme was but the invention of a barbarous age, designed to set off wretched matter and lame meter. Delight, Milton wrote, does not consist in “the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.” Blu Hydrangea and Willow Smith must have read Milton and followed his advice, but as much as I love Blue Hydrangea, only Smith was able to successfully compose her lines without rhyme. She gave me hope that I, too, can create lines that move the masses, even if those lines don’t rhyme.

Friends, Romans, Fellow Members of the Peanut Butter and Jelly Conclave of 2020, prepare your sphincters—rhyme is dead, but I, and the spirit of Hydrangea, Smith, and Milton, am very much alive.

LINDSAY JOST, JE ’21

5

Top 5 Places to Take Poops Where No One Will Go in After You and Say “Ew!”

5.

The bathroom a floor below or above yours in your entryway: Nothing says diffuse the blame like never taking a shit in your own bathroom. A key strategy to avoid smelling up your own bathroom is to simply walk a floor up or down and drop it down there.

Anywhere in Saybrook: If someone can shit in the laundry machines, anywhere is fair game. If you need to lay a quick one before an exam, Saybrook is a location destined to be empty and available in times of need.

3.

The previously closed “staff only” bathroom in WLH: Quiet and undiscovered, if you’re looking for a place convenient to Cross Campus without having your bag “checked” by library security, the newly opened staff bathroom in WLH is the place for you.

That one single-stall bathroom in your college basement: Everyone knows this bathroom was built with the express purpose of privatized pooping. It’s out of the way and poorly lit but hey, it’s home. It has that quaint start-of-a-murder-

mystery-esque ambiance, which spices up your life and gives you that little bit of

T

2.

anxiety we all need to keep pushing.

1.

The CTL Basement Bathrooms: The absolute abyss of this campus. Down two flights of stairs, if you died there I’m pretty sure no one would find you

for at least two weeks. Even so, it’s one of the most reliable places for pooping, crying, or anything in-between!

The Insurmountable wenty-five feet. The training montage music from Rocky IV starts playing in my head as I think back to my preparation these past few months.

They told me my opponent would be indomitable, that the enemy I would face far exceeded my own capabilities. I didn’t listen. Twenty feet. I think back to every squat, every push-up, all those moments where my lungs were fighting for air, my muscles screaming in pain. Every time my body told me it was over, that I’d reached my limit, I broke through that ceiling.

Every time. Fifteen feet. I think back to what that

4.

woman said to me as I got closer to this fateful day.

“You’ll never win. You’re hopeless.” That didn’t stop me—Grandma’s always been a hater. Ten feet. Peter Salovey’s beautiful face appears in my mind. “You’ve been working so hard, King. Go kick some ass.” Salovey never actually said those words to me, but sometimes I like to fantasize about it—my own private pep talk. Five feet. My ex-girlfriend’s voice echoes through my mind, and I remember what she said to me at the pier all those years ago: “I’m breaking up with you.” God, I miss Amber. It’s time. I stand face

IHEA INYAMA, TD ’22 to face with my foe. The Rocky music stops playing.

I take a deep breath, and push with all my might.

Every single tendon in my body lights on fire. I can’t see anymore, I can’t think—all that matters is the fight. I push and I push and... nothing. Despite my best efforts, my enemy does not budge. I crumple to the ground, defeated. In my training I’ve built up a five-hundred pound bench press, and I still can’t manage to push open the Silliman Accessible Doors. Amber will never take me back. I just wanted some hot breakfast.

April

VOICES

Spring’s out and the lake’s so clear you can see duck feet waddling.

It’s 2:35 on Sunday and the Serpentine is littered with birds and blue plastic boats sketching ripples across the water.

Out on the lake most boats press on unevenly, one person paddling. A man rows by with two small children, twins: identical jeans, striped shirts, life jackets.

They’re strapped into their seats but can see everything, everything: they shriek as their father paddles towards the ducks.

Six inches away on the concrete a pigeon eyes a piece of cracker. He sticks a foot in the water. Behind him, a little girl falls off her scooter and starts to cry. All right, then. All right. On we go. The pigeon trots off in the other direction, towards the food-car, the line, the sweet warm almonds.

6 THE YALE HERALD

GABBY COLANGELO, BR ’21

The ducks swim away. Some have green heads and grey bodies. Some glide casually, pushing behind them with legs like frogs, stretching their necks miles from the water wings tucked neatly to their sides.

Close to the edge of the lake where the bread-bits gather a small duck throws his head underwater.

7 Growing Down TEIGIST TAYE, PC ’22

Y

ou were the type of person to wait until I died to give me flowers. You were the type of person to embrace a rotting corpse with more ease than you ever did a living soul. Maybe I was just a decoration, more adorned than ever adored; a pretty girl that died to become an even prettier flower vase. Flowers die, you’d tell me. And baby, we’re forever.

We would wake up at dawn, I would hold your pick-axe, and we would trudge out into the hazy morning. You liked how the fog stung your eyes awake. I had never seen anyone take such pleasure in disfigurement. The rains felt strangely acidic right before you burrowed the ground and right before you got into bed with me.

You were a gardener by profession. You dug up the earth under spaces I used to occupy. Even now, you are still digging. Dirt and mildew stain the undersides of your fingernails that scratch at the ground with such a ferocity people often mistake it for you missing me. People ask about me, but you’re half-distracted and still digging. You talk about how pretty my skin was, how cute you found my nose, how I always looked at you like I needed saving.

Digging.

Did you love me? Or did you love me not? My fingertips turned raw after years of picking daisies.

As you unearth the last few feet between me and the sunlight, your face contorts with concentration.

Sweat drips from your furrowed brow and I gag from the taste of salt it leaves in the earth. You stop for a second and flick the hair out of your eyes; you think about how you called me buttercup, about how you planted ivy in the cracks between my ribs, and remark how amazing it is that beautiful things can still grow in the darkest places. Digging. I was tethered to you.

I am sick of feeling like there is something so bad in me that I need to be exhumed before something good can exist. Acid rain can’t make things grow if it’s acid. I’m not truly growing if I have to be tethered to you. There is a difference between growing with someone and growing on someone and you can only burrow so much before the foundation cracks.

You always said the most important step before growing anything beautiful was preparing the soil.

Flowers are beautiful and they die and that’s fine because things don’t need to grow forever. Not all growth is good. Sometimes growth is infestation, colonization. Sometimes you bulldoze over the best parts (of land, of bodies) in order for something else to grow. All I wanted was goddamn flowers. I am sick of being hollow.

A couple months into knowing you, I started sleeping with the covers over my head. Maybe I hated the acid rain, or maybe I was practicing for when you finally gave me flowers.

OPINION

Coffee at Yale M

y lips meet the frothy surface of a warm ceramic mug. I take a sip, ruining the cute, white heart inscribed on the milk foam. The strong taste of coffee hits the back of my tongue while the frothed milk tames it, bringing out only the right hints of bitterness.

It’s midday on a Friday and I am at Atticus Bookstore Café, my tradition after a long week of classes. I’ve ordered my classic cappuccino with oat milk so that I can complete my last pieces of work before the weekend. I prefer the strong, thick taste of an espresso base over a watered down, tasteless “hot coffee,” as it lasts longer and highlights certain flavors.

Even before moving to campus, I started this tradition of going to Atticus; I define my transition as a Yalie through the cappuccino and grain bowl I had on that first Friday afternoon in August. My connection to Atticus goes back to my first visit to Yale’s campus as a junior in high school. Atticus’s menu and atmosphere were major selling points as to why I chose Yale. If you want to go back even further, my dad frequented Atticus as a student here.

While I tend to make coffee runs between classes or library work sessions wherever is most convenient, my Atticus coffee is always different; I look forward to it both for the actual beverage and the ambiance of the space. While there are some cafés that may come close to achieving the harmonious pairing of coffee and milk, I have realized that they mostly fall short of creating a consistent sip. It is this sense of balance that makes Atticus distinct: not only in its ratio of coffee to milk, but in the way it is both

88 THE THEYALE YALEHERALD HERALD

JULIA LEVI, BF ’23

crowded and intimate, both a part of school and the perfect escape from it.

This search for flavor defines my experiences at Blue State which, due to convenience, is my most frequent spot. While Blue State receives most of my weekday business due to its two central campus locations, Atticus continues to remain the pinnacle of my New Haven coffee experience. I walk into Blue State and am overwhelmed by the tables of students studying. It is loud, and the blue walls lack vibrancy and make me feel caved in. I order my usual cappuccino or latte, but I find it lacking that strong taste. Because of this, I have found myself hovering over the sugar and cream table, cinnamon shaker in hand, hoping to add some punch to my drink. I rarely find that a Blue State beverage succeeds in properly kicking me into shape so that I can work productively. Blue State is a quick medium between one part of my day to the next, but it is never a place I find myself sitting down to enjoy. Atticus, on the other hand, is in itself an activity; sitting with my coffee in hand, hours can pass without my notice.

From time to time, I go to Willoughby’s Coffee and Tea on Church Street, the counterpart to Blue State in atmosphere; it is a tiny, warmly lit, white space with minimal seating. I set up my laptop at a table beside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Yet, I am distracted by the single conversation next to me; unlike at Atticus, there is no merging sea of voices but rather isolated sounds and conversations.

My first time at Willoughby’s, the barista handed over my drink in a disposable cup. Removing the plastic lid, I realized the cappuccino wasn’t filled to the rim

and the thick, airy layer of foam was completely separated from the rest of the beverage. I found myself collecting the remnants of this foam by cranking my head all the way back. I was hyper-focused on the coffee itself and not so much my work. At Atticus, I can engage with my coffee and work with equal attention. I can forget about the drink and then pick it up again, and it will still taste the same.

The Silliman Acorn is almost like a mini, student-run Atticus on campus—its coffees are balanced and served in large mugs, and there is an intimate yet crowded feel to the space. But when I’m at the Acorn, I am in the midst of the Yale bubble. I miss Atticus’s front window where I can look out at Chapel Street, sitting at a small table packed between other people under soft yellow light. The wide Atticus window gives me a direct view of the Yale University Art Gallery and the corner of Old Campus, yet I feel the perfect distance from the school world, surrounded by unfamiliar voices and rows of books that span titles beyond the classes I am taking.

Atticus is more than just a cappuccino for me; it is about escaping the encompassing Yale bubble and finding that medium between school and downtown New Haven. Atticus provides a reminder that there is a world beyond Yale, yet it also allows me to enjoy the best parts of it—its students and teachers who come in and out between and after classes, seeking respite that allows them to refocus and re-engage on campus. As I exit the café, I am energized with a new feeling of aliveness that carries me through the week and into the next Friday.

ARTS This week, the Herald talked to painting student Krysal “rationality” or scientific logic. It’s interesting to hear DiFronzo, ART ’20, about how she navigates her pro- you laugh as you describe the energies in your apartcess, research, and imagery. ment; a kind of necessary contradiction at play in the representation of magic or so called “other-worldliYale Herald: When we spoke earlier you pretty ness,” something which the photograph symbolizes readily identified the occult as a key theme in your so clearly. Representation, at least as we think of it work. I also know that before coming to Yale you today, can’t really be separated from the technologipublished a comic about your experiences as a young cal. Do you think of these paintings as sincere identicancer patient. To start us off, I was wondering if fications with a mystical way of thinking, as trying to you could share a bit about how you see those two break that scientific logic of meaning? sources of content relating to one another?

KDF: They’re mostly sincere. I’m a strong believKrystal DiFronzo: Right now, I’m being a lot more er that women have been placed as witches because explicit about going back to my experiences with of their relationship with death, healing, and birth, chemotherapy and treatment, thinking about mo- their ability to create healing substances that can ments when boundaries of the body and the en- also be poisonous. I like the idea of this feared status. vironment get broken down. With superstition, I Though still I’m unsure where I lie on that spectrum think a lot about the relationship of illness to psy- of ironic distance. If the work is reclaiming an idenchosis and hysteria in history. When I first came tity, a way of thinking, it’s definitely complicated to here, I was doing a lot of work researching histo- do so within this specific historical frame. I do link ries of possession in relation to mental and physical myself strongly to that history, but in the end I’m illness. Susan Sontag has a great quote where she not sure of the extent that the work can do the same. talks about tumors as demonic pregnancies. I’m interested in looking at sickness in this way—the body YH: You talked about aåkind of dominion over the growing out of control, without the ability to resolve natural and this power to convert nature into someitself. What does it mean to have or to be this thing thing that can be healing or harming. There’s an obthat’s of you and not at the same time, taking over vious relationship between that kind of conversion your bodily control and health? and what you’ve been working on materially—using these natural dyes and these complex pseudo-alYH: Do you believe in “irrational” practices as mean- chemical processes. I guess they’re actually just kind ingful to your personal life outside of the work? of chemical [laughs]. But I’m wondering how the metaphor of material translates into the image, the KDF: When I first moved to New Haven, I lived movement between them. in this apartment which I thought––and I’ve never had this experience before––was truly haunted. Like KDF: The chemical has a similarly ironic relation to truly, completely haunted. I grew up in Chicago. It’s the occult, to the alchemical. There are places where not a young city, but it’s not as old as here. The apart- the historical evolution of drug-therapy has hinged ment had the worst energy I’ve ever experienced. I on the apparently sinister. Obviously some Westdidn’t hear noises or anything, you know, other than ern medicine is also a poison. I’ve been thinking a the sounds from the heater, but it just had a bad lot about chemotherapy drugs—the way in which vibe. I guess I do kind of believe in energies. It’s kin- a poison can become medically beneficial. Looking da woo-woo [laughs]. In my work, maybe it mani- into the histories of these drugs and figuring out fests in the transparency of the paintings on silk. I’ve the origins, I could clearly see that some had been been looking at a lot of spiritualist-era photography derived from the production of mustard gas, other of people performing seances and producing ecto- highly toxic, weaponized substances. Almost all of plasm. In these photos, the photographer tried to these things are derived from natural sources, differcapture this moment: both to show it happening, ent types of molds and plants—it’s almost as if the and to debunk it. That liminal space of the photo is scientific interest in these sources relied on a leap of important to me, how it relates to the ghostly, the faith, a superstitious interest in paradoxical effects, superstitious. It’s like alchemy, you know, chemicals to make them into something beneficial. The metaand light becoming image. phor here I take to be integral to my work—the way in which dyes become image, the natural supplanted YH: There’s a kind of irony in that—to preserve the into the realm of the delirious or the occult. mystical while also maintaining your own sense of

Krystal DiFronzo

FEATURE

Grave Beliefs MACRINA WANG, ES ’22, YH STAFF

E

dwin Torres, the foreman of Grove Street Cemetery, believes in spirits. More specifically, he believes there are spirits in Grove Street Cemetery. He knows how that might appear, and that you might not share in his conviction, but he knows what he’s seen.

Edwin tends to the 18-acre grounds and oversees the other workers. Most days, he’s seen making his rounds in a truck, and in his truck patrolling Maple Avenue is where I find him. I had to go to the cemetery to request an interview because he doesn’t give out his phone number out of fear that his wife would get jealous. He acquiesces to my interview request through a rolled-down window, parks the truck in between two slanting rows of gravestones, then steps out, squinting at the sunlight, his hands shoved in his pockets. He smells faintly of cigarette smoke.

He is dressed in faded jeans and a New York Yankees hat. It is 9:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, the birds are chirping noisily, and the wind is brisk. In the summer, much of his work consists of cutting grass, he tells me.

But now, it’s leaf season. We crunch our way through mounds of browning leaves to a sliver of paved road.

Pale gravestones, jutting from the earth, flank us. Directly before us is a marble sphinxlike woman, clad with wings and a diadem, watchfully postured over a tomb.

10 THE YALE HERALD

He’s learned his lesson from the time he picked up a plastic bag he’d seen by a grave.

Edwin responds to my questions matter-of-factly.

There isn’t a romantic backstory to his career choice of foreman: “I needed a job,” he says. “It’s a job. If I don’t do it, someone else is gonna do it.” He is equally curt about his Yankees hat. “Are you a Yankees fan?” I ask. “Yes,” he replies, and does not elaborate. He does share that he enjoys watching, in his free time, Spanish-language equivalents of General Hospital.

Shortly after he answered basic introductory questions—he’s 50 this year, he was born in New York City, he has lived in New Haven for 11 years, his first job in the cemetery was picking up the leaves—he tells me how he believes in evil and good. His voice lowers conspiratorially. “I’ve been working here for a long time. I’ve seen a lot of stuff.” One time, he was sitting on a bench—right over there, he gestures to the one in question—and heard a voice. Then he felt a cold hand grab him. He jumped up and started looking around, thinking a colleague was playing a prank.

No one was there.

“You ever heard of witchcraft, of voodoo?” He asks.

He says some people do black magic in the cemetery by throwing miscellaneous objects on the grounds. “I don’t go near them or touch them. It’s really scary. You grab it, it won’t do anything to you. Down the line, it’ll do something to you.”

11

He’s learned his lesson from the time he picked up a plastic bag he’d seen by a grave. Inside was a chicken with its head cut off. He decided to throw it into the dumpster. Then he started bleeding through his nose, through his mouth—he gestures to each body part carefully for emphasis—and he thought he was going to die. His coworkers took him to the hospital. When he went to the hospital, the doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. They said they didn’t know where he was bleeding from. “That’s why I tell you,” he says to me soberly, “There’s a lot of stuff here. It’s hard to explain a lot of things.”

He clarifies that he believes in the existence of both benevolent and malevolent spirits. But the problem, he says, is that you often can’t tell which is which, because you can’t see the spirits in front of you.

“The New Haven Ghost Walk” is frequently advertised on campus during the Halloween season. It’s a tour that winds through the cemetery, stopping at the graves of Yale’s founders, studded with spectacular stories of brazen fools and skulls and ghost ships. I eat that stuff up. Nothing better than some season-appropriate scaries. But there’s something completely different about learning about spirits outside the controlled context of Halloween, outside of a commercialized tour—$25 for Adult Admission; $20 for

students and seniors—from a man wearing blue jeans eating my breakfast. I’m always on point, you know.” and a Yankees cap.

I ask him whether he believes in an afterlife. He says I stand there, my feet rooted, transcribing his recount- he’s a Christian, and that he goes to Spanish mass ings of spirits and voices and cold hands in my note- every Sunday at a church in North Haven. He says book. I pass by Grove Street Cemetery every other he believes that “if you do good things, good things day on my way to math class. The cemetery is a fixture will come to you. If you do bad things, bad things will on the walk from Stiles to Hillhouse: the Egyptian come to you. The way you treat people, that’s the way Revival gate with its pillars, inscribed with “THE life’s gonna treat you.”

DEAD SHALL BE RAISED”—a biblical message that is either optimistic or ominous, depending on Since his work forces him to reconcile with death and your viewpoint—the trees unloading crumpled leaves grief and spirits, does he think about his mortality at over the wrought-iron gate, all familiar sights as I all? “I don’t know how my death gonna be, but God sprint-jog to class in Leet Oliver Memorial Hall, al- decides how I’m gonna pass away. It could be in here, ready five minutes late. I consider changing my after- it could be out there. I know where I was born, but I noon route to MATH 107: Mathematics in the Real don’t know where I’m gonna die, you know? It got me World. thinking. The important thing is when I die, I wanna go with God. My soul goes with Him.” I also consider whether I believe him. I decide that I do.

He continues, “You see these people here, they’re burEdwin knows the cemetery like the back of his ied...I walk around all day, I see them underground hand, and it seems to me that if anyone should know here all day, in the same spot. The bodies are still there, whether spirits lurk in the avenues of Grove Street but the [souls are] gone. People be like, ‘They’re still Cemetery, it’s him. He likes this job. “I gave my down there,’ but [they’re] not. [They’re] gone.” whole heart and life to this place. When I go home, I’m still thinking about this place—is everything alright, this and that. I wake up early to go to work.

I’m up early putting my boots on, drinking coffee,

I AM PRIDE CORP HAMZAH JHAVERI, TC ’22, YH STAFF

I

found their names on a list of Pride Corp’s board members. We planned to meet promptly, at their earliest convenience. I showed up late and out of breath, unprofessional.

Jared and Tyler—they requested that I only use their first names—stood cramped in a corner of Book Trader Cafe, next to a buzzing line of Saturday morning regulars. We ordered coffees and sat down as I apologized for my blatant tardiness.

Tyler, the “Senior Mentor” of Pride Corp—“Yale’s only LGBTQIA+ business organization,” as its Facebook page boasts—began. He founded the group in the spring of 2018, his sophomore year, after noticing a rift between LGBTQ resources and corporate recruitment at Yale. He wanted to “bridge that gap.”

In the four semesters since its founding, Pride Corp has hit the ground running. The group offers a wide array of programming on a biweekly basis: skillbuilding meetings, resume workshops, question-and-answer sessions led by professionally experienced students, and photoshoots for LinkedIn profiles. Tyler mentioned that the group hosted members of JP Morgan’s Pride network for their inaugural recruitment event. It was liaised with the investment bank’s official LGBTQ undergraduate recruitment program, Proud to Be, a product of the corporation’s stated commitment to curating “a team made up of people with various perspectives, backgrounds and experiences.” “It was at Kitchen Zinc,” Tyler added with pride. “A couple weeks ago we had coffee chats with D.E. Shaw,” Jared, current co-president, mentioned. The two often swallowed the end of each other’s responses with the impassioned start of his own as they catalogued the firms that Pride Corp has interacted with: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble—all household names.

The conversation turned to the topic of mission.

Poised, Jared noted that finance is a “predominantly heterosexual, white male space.” In this sense, he considers Pride Corp’s role as one of amplifying LGBTQ representation in corporate spaces, ultimately working towards a future where

“it’s easier to get through the barriers of entry.”

For Jared, simply put, representation matters: “getting Yale people in the door and through increasing our representation […] that creates a bigger effect.” “I think that’s a good way to put it,” Tyler agreed.

It comes as no surprise that Jared thinks that “mindsets have changed” in the world of finance, a trend that “manifests itself in recruiting efforts.” The two don’t see their impetus as necessarily radical: Pride Corp is “not really changing firms’ recruiting practices,” according to Jared. In this sense, the group is “more of an education and skill-building community than it is an activist one.” Tyler added that representation shows how “you can be queer and you can be successful.” However, noting that queers working in finance are predominantly white and cisgender men, he understands that a lot of people who don’t fit that popular demographic “might not even realize that it’s a place for them at all if they don’t see people [like them] in those positions.”

This begs the question: who can be queer and successful?

During our conversation, Tyler and Jared vacillated between two ideas: a restrained awareness of demographic issues among queers in the corporate world and a recognition of the change brought about by LGBTQ recruitment efforts. Ultimately, the two circled back to an understanding that this change is not structural. And they’re okay with that. Tyler feels that “it would be really nice to break down ‘the structure,’” though that objective is “not necessarily feasible.” His theoretical ambition is tempered by a sense of corporate ‘realism’: “the best we can do right now is to connect students to the resources and hope, little-by-little, that things will change gradually.” For two prompt businessmen, this was certainly a slower pace.

Later on, I emailed Jared with some followup questions, digging for more substance from his original answers. He provided me with a

concise paragraph, a polished version of his previous talking points. He wrote: “Greater representation of traditionally underrepresented groups helps to foster a more tolerant and inclusive work environment that is welcoming and more comfortable for employees” and that “greater visibility in corporate spaces will likely serve as a catalyst leading more LGBTQIA+ individuals to join corporate industries, feeling that they have a place in these spaces.” I was not surprised that he doubled down on the self-serving and corporate-serving advantages of LGBTQ recruitment efforts, deploying the discourse of “pink capitalism”—the trend of incorporating sexual minorities into the corporate world.

It was exactly what I wanted from him. *** “Is the ‘PC’ for ‘Pride Corp?’” asked Nash Keyes, PM ’21, a trans activist, with discernible anticipation and a subtle scoff. They’d snuck an illicit glance at my laptop screen as I was setting up for our interview, and I already felt like a bad reporter.

But their near-instinctual reaction of palpable enmity to Pride Corp—even in name alone— was not unique. I recalled the dismissive responses Pride Corp received at this semester’s Extracurricular Bazaar and the negative comments on their Facebook events that Tyler and Jared had recounted to me. Seeing an opportunity, I asked Keyes to explain.

Keyes is an active member of the queer community at Yale. They’re the co-president of Trans@ Yale, staffer at the Office of LGBTQ Resources, previous board member for the LGBTQ spoken word group VOKE, and an organizer of drag shows—in their own words, involved in “way too much queer stuff on campus.”

“What do you say to people who are structurally oppressed or disadvantaged in various ways, who are buying into these structures of

oppression to help themselves get a leg up, but also doing that at the expense of perpetuating those structures?” they asked, genuinely lacking a satisfactory answer. What Keyes said next was more of a complication than an elucidation.

They see this issue not necessarily as a queer issue but rather as a class issue. They questioned whether or not it is their right “as someone who is very financially stable to tell someone who is not that they shouldn’t be earning a lot of money by working for a corporation.” I began to wonder the same. These questions in the back of their mind, Keyes launched into a critique of pink capitalism vis-a-vis race and class.

They considered the goal of increasing representation as misguided: “If you think that you can change [corporations] from the inside and suddenly make the world safe for queer people and people of color, you are kidding yourself.”

In 2017, in Keyes’ hometown of Columbus, Ohio, four Black trans activists were arrested for blocking the city’s annual pride parade, organized by Stonewall Columbus, the largest LGBTQ organization in the midwest. As Keyes recalls, the activists were attacked and arrested for demonstrating against “the way that [Stonewall] is bringing in corporations and centering whiteness and not making spaces for queer people of color.” Columbus police even “put some of [the activists]”—trans women—“in men’s prisons,” Keyes adds. One op-ed in the Columbus Alive referred to Stonewall as an agent of “Gay Inc,” lambasting their welcoming of corporate pride sponsors. In the aftermath of the parade, the Columbus Pride organizer resigned, and another major LGBTQ group, TransOhio, severed ties with Stonewall Columbus.

Keyes saw an inherent contradiction of corporations showing face at Columbus pride—this year, sponsored by Bud Light, Chase Bank, and PNC Bank, among others—as passive observers of violence against trans women who are just trying to ask for “basic recognition and rights and support.” I pointed out how it mirrored the whitewashed narrative of Stonewall Columbus’ namesake, the bar in Manhattan where the queer liberation movement emerged from the bold activism of trans women of color.

Keyes emphatically agreed.

Identifying the fault lines in the queer community—those of race and class—I asked Keyes about privilege. They find the queer people “who tend to get brought [into corporations] are the people who are already advantaged in the other dimensions of race and class.” In this

sense, Keyes recognizes the treacherous nature of representation: “the people who are coming in are not there to contest the basic principles on which the corporation is operating.” They provide the example of queer police officers, who, despite their identity, still play a part in a system that often amounts to shooting “unarmed people of color in the streets.” In this sense, according to Keyes, “diversity is just sort of a measure that the institutions could use to justify the violence that they’re committing.”

Though this isn’t a direct comparison to finance groups, Keyes underscored the fact that the two

I was not surprised that he doubled down on the selfserving and corporateserving advantages of LGBTQ recruitment efforts… It was exactly what I wanted from him.. contexts are “rooted in the same logic that profit comes first and white people come first and public safety—i.e. protecting white wealth and white people—comes first.”

Keyes feels like “there is a place for critique from within the queer community.” Like myself, they seem to be grappling with the ideal of a universal queer community—one with a shared politic of liberation, of opposition to

racist, classist, patriarchal, and heteronormative society—in the face of a fragmented and siloed reality. Keyes articulated this tension in the context of their work at the Office of LGBTQ Resources. They feel like they have to choose between trying to “make people feel comfortable in the Office, even if they hold beliefs that, [to Keyes], seem incompatible with the work toward liberation for everybody,” or dismissing their attempts to join. Put differently, can everybody who is queer—and uses the label—be queer —in the political sense of the word?

But queerness isn’t a monolith. And, despite my warped desire to simplify its narrative into a caricature of corporate gays, neither is Pride Corp.

Enter Huahao Zhou. Zhou, DC ’21, is a Computer Science and Global Affairs double major and the other co-president of Pride Corp— Jared’s counterpart. I situated myself in my suitemate’s dark and cluttered single, working through some technical difficulties to begin my phone interview with Zhou. To me, another Pride Corp affiliate meant another person on which I could cast a shadow. And the cold, sterile scene I set primed that impulse.

Early on in our conversation, when I had asked about Zhou’s sexual identity, he mentioned how he “can’t really separate one set of identity from the other [sic].” As a first-generation, low-income (FGLI) student from China—a context where queerness is “not socially discussed or engrained”—Zhou notes how differently he relates to his queer identity than other, American students at Yale might relate to theirs. To this end, Zhou organizes another group called Rainbow China Connect at Yale, motivated by a sense of responsibility he feels being in an environment where “gayness is embraced as normal.” His impetus seemed to brush on redistributive justice. I had hit a wall.

Zhou’s perspective was thoughtful, profound even. Building on his previous conversation of race and class positionalities intersecting with queerness, Zhou thinks “queerness is another advantage in an environment where you are already privileged, where you’re using queerness to claim other privilege.” This thought reminded me of what Keyes had articulated about privileged queers entering corporate spaces. To me, the key difference between the two is in their definitions of queerness. Zhou’s is just one of identity, not politics.

Take, for example, his impetus to study Com-

puter Science. Seeing a dominance of straight, white people at the executive level of big technology companies, Zhou was inspired “not just to become a coder, but to become someone who can think about the larger picture to challenge the status quo.” He mentioned presidential candidate Andrew Yang and CEO of Google Sundar Pichai, who, though aren’t gay, are examples of people providing representation for Asian Americans and, more generally, Asians across the world. But how is this representation any different than that espoused by Jared and Tyler?

His answer boils down to something Zhou said when I asked him if he would agree with Tyler and Jared’s claim that Pride Corp is not an activist group. He thinks they are “absolutely right,” given that “it’s not in the mission statement” that Pride Corp should play an activist role. To Zhou, “it’s up to the individual what they make of Pride Corp,” where activism and structural change come into play through representation. Zhou continues: “I always want a challenge. For me, I always feel the urge to make a difference.” He echoes his previously stated drive to challenge the status quo. To this end, Zhou sees pink capitalism as an opportunity for queer folk who are marginalized across different axes of race and class oppression, like himself, to “reflect on what it means to get those resources” that groups like Pride Corp provide.

Zhou is riding the pink wave to his own world of liberation, and he knows it.

As much as I tried to harbor animosity towards him, I found Zhou’s motives clever, his passion endearing. Much like Keyes had expressed before, and again in a follow-up interview, I thought to myself, Who am I, with my financial privilege, to critique Zhou and even Tyler for their ability to game the system? The old me would have told myself: You’re a queer. Now, I don’t know what I would say.

Overcoming my growing personal attachment to Zhou, I managed to push back against his arguments. As much as he’s gaming the system, Zhou is still joining it. He admits that he’s been questioning how to “work in the existing system with the understanding that you can make a difference, you can change it,” adding that he’s “always questioned ‘the system.’” He goes so far as to say that he actually doesn’t like capitalism,

but finds it hard to escape. Hopeful, he believes “what you can do, being a person in the world, is define your ethics for yourself, so you are living a more authentic life that has more meaning.” He goes further, arguing that “just the fact of attending Yale is also a way of being in a capitalist machine.” I asked about the people who come out of Yale to do social impact-oriented work. His response: “They cannot deny that they get resources from the reputation that Yale has, from excluding other people, from exploiting other parts of society.” We ended around there. I was not fully sold on his arguments, but I was no longer fully sold on mine either. *** “Who gives a fuck? You know what I mean?”

Daniel Yadin, MC ’21, a Peer Liaison for the Office of LGBTQ Resources, was responding to my question about representation. The Trumbull dining hall was noisy and crowded at the height of its late lunch hour, and I hoped that the recording of our interview would be audible. He had a lot to say.

Whereas Keyes and I were still struggling with the concept of a queer universality, Yadin had long abandoned that fever dream. If queerness is not a monolith, “What is it?” he asked, indignantly rhetorical.

I asked him if he thinks finance is anti-queer. In his characteristic style, he responded with more questions: “Is [finance] harmful disproportionately for queer people? Not acting in line with queer values? But what are queer values? If it’s not part of the critical project, whose critical project?” For Yadin, evidently well-versed in queer theory, the concept of queerness is still nebulous. Yadin contrasts the lack of a unified queer community to the left-leaning Israeli-American community in which he grew up.

He was frustrated when his friend decided to join the Israeli Defense Force. He justified his reaction; he and his friend “were in a community that had values that [they] were contending with together,” values that were in opposition to what he sees as violent Zionism. Yadin doesn’t identify a corrolary universal queer community with a shared set of values. “These fucking random gay people who wanna go to Goldman, I

don’t give a fuck what they do. People will go to Goldman all the time.” His apathy was explicit.

Yadin finds issue in “pointing fingers” and “policing the boundaries of queerness.” He wonders: “Maybe we need to evolve past ‘queer.’

These people are queer. They’re doing what they want to do with their own queerness, and if that identity term—or what that identity has become at least—allows for that, why are we attached to it so much?” So what, then, are we left with? Yadin is “more interested in developing an identity group that does the same identity work as ‘queer’ but also has more in it that is anti-capitalist, that is actually radical,” positing the addition of suffixes like “queer-Marxist” or “queer-anarchist” as options moving forward. I wondered if queerness had become so diluted, so fragmented, that it is no longer radical. Unsurprisingly, Yadin was quick to respond: “Look around. It’s obviously not.” He claims that “a lot of the people who present as ‘queer radicals™’ here are rich, grew up rich, [and] have never done any kind of radical study.” There are holes in his blanket statements, but I don’t think he is too concerned about them.

The conversation turned back to finance. Yadin said, “People want a job at Goldman Sachs to get rich, either to maintain their current class position or to attain a higher one.” I asked him about how race and class factor into these claims. “It’s true that people need to survive.”

He is not interested in the psychology of a queer, low-income student entering the world of finance to support their family. “You can make a judgement whether you think their choice is right or not,” he says, “but the conditions are created by capitalism.”

Yadin—in his cynical, blunt way—pointed to more overarching threads of capitalism. He asked, “What’s connecting Pride Corp to the millionaires in Fence who shop at Savers?”

Suddenly, my thrifted pants felt heavier. “That’s me,” I chimed in, somewhat ashamed. He appreciated my frankness. Yadin is understanding of that fact that “we’re living in a corporation.

We’re studying all of this in a corporation.” Yes, pink capitalism rears its ugly head in groups like Pride Corp, but I wondered if there was something more sinister about its covert manifestations, those closer to my identity. As if he were reading my mind, Yadin said, “Obviously

what [Pride Corp] is doing is egregious and pathetic. But everyone does some pathetic things, and it’s way more generative to turn the question on yourself.”

I took his advice and began to wonder how I have deployed my queer identity to obscure from the fact that I’m a cisgender man of economic means. Queerness, as I told Yadin, has been the perfect mirror in front of which I put on poorface. Borrowing from that imagery, Yadin says the problem of “queerness as this thing that unifies people across generations and across every other kind of disparity is that you can have a cis gay man who is a millionaire and goes to Yale looking in the mirror and seeing Sylvia Rivera. Because they’re both queer.”

It’s no surprise that Yadin—like Keyes, but more harshly—discounts representation as “the easiest diversity [for a corporation] to have because you can just get white dudes who are gay, and that counts as whatever points they think they might be getting.” He was picking up speed, now talking about identity politics: “So often, the phrase ‘as a blank’—‘as a gay man’—is a marketing tactic.” Yadin recognizes that one’s identity can be deployed towards a professional end with the knowledge “that it carries a certain cachet.” He adds “all these labels are created under capitalism, and they all progress under capitalism, where the impetus is personal success. [...] All people become brands, and all self-expression becomes marketing.” Though what he was saying was not news to me, it was still sobering.

My discussion with Yadin reminded me of a conversation I had earlier that day, with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies professor Evren Savci. Crammed into a half-hour slot during her packed office hours, I had too many questions for her, and she had an abundance of answers. What resonated with me most in our unrecorded conversation were her thoughts on how representation risks overriding politics.

According to Savci, discourse surrounding representation centers the subject’s body—and the way their body has been labeled—rather than their politics. It’s what makes all the difference between hiring a woman and hiring a feminist, to paraphrase her words. When I brought this up with Yadin, he agreed.

Both Yadin and Savci see the obfuscatory na-

ture of identity politics emerging in concert with the dilution of the term “queer” and subsequent expansion of the queer community writ large. On this note, Yadin remarked: “The first gay man running for president. Okay, who gives a fuck? [...] That doesn’t make him radical.” The heated conversations surrounding Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign are not new. A white, male veteran with an Ivy League degree and work experience in finance running for president is an easy antagonist for many progressive voters. Add the label “gay” to the mix, and we begin to see discourse not unlike that in Yale Daily News columnist Jacob Hutt’s piece on Buttigieg—“Poster Boy Pete.” Hutt claims that the candidate is a “stark distinction from the profit-driven former CEO of the Trump Organization” and then mentions his experience at the “hallowed McKinsey” in the same breath. Contradictions abound. And though Buttigieg doesn’t use the word “queer” to describe himself, that’s not the point. The point is that others do. Hutt did.

Applying Yadin’s arguments, I wondered if there were any other famous queers whose capitalist ways slipped under the radar as a result of their identities. I thought of Ellen DeGeneres.

Once praised for her radical presence in the media as an openly gay talk show host, Ellen has recently come under fire for spending time with former president George W. Bush, DC ’68, at a football game in Texas. Ellen is clearly not immune to the powers of pink capitalism, a matter of fact long before her public cameo with the Republican president. Still, until recently, I saw Ellen as different than Buttigieg, more radical, more queer. If Buttigieg reflects the politics of Pride Corp, does that make me Ellen? *** At this point, I am left with more questions than answers (I just asked myself if I was Ellen). I can confidently say that I still believe in the power of queerness, that as an identity category or a set of politics, queerness is liberatory in nature. But what, then, does that liberation entail?

For members of Pride Corp, queer liberation might mean liberation within capitalism, or even at the heart of it. It is liberatory to join the system. For those in opposition, liberation

might mean liberation from capitalism, from class itself. These modes of liberation are contradictory. Yet, at the same time, they are complementary for someone like Zhou.

Moreover, while queerness can be and has been powerful in theory, is it relevant to a critique of capitalism in practice? Or is it obfuscatory?

Centering sexual identity in this discussion made it clear to me that queer discourse—in the context of identity—can often distract from, rather than promote, conversations about class and race. After all, the queer community, however one might conceive of it is not a monolith. Why does Zhou need a group like Pride Corp to achieve his liberation, if his liberation is liberation from class? Why is there no FGLI Corp?

I’m starting to buy into Yadin’s suffixes. Maybe “queer Marxist” or “queer anarchist” would allow for more productive discourse after all. *** Across a table of sugar cookies and colored frosting at the Office of LGBTQ Resources, I sat down with some board members of the CoOp. I was curious about an exchange that Keyes had mentioned to me between the Co-Op and a consulting firm.

Earlier this year, the Co-Op board received an email from a McKinsey & Company scout, asking them to plug an event to their panlist.

This sparked a series of discussions among the board on whether or not to disseminate information that the board members may or may not ideologically agree with. “Being an umbrella organization is weird,” a board member stated. Ironically, by the time they had come to a decision to commit to “making sure that every queer voice on this campus has a platform” and “that queer people get to make their own [informed] decisions,” the McKinsey event had already passed.

People showed up. Some applied, are applying, will continue to apply. The world turns.

CULTURE Imma Read (Poetry) CARAMIA PUTMAN, BF ’22, YH STAFF

I

don’t have a personal definition for poetry, but I know it when I see it. In a talk on Thursday, Nov. 14, Stephanie Burt, GRD ’00, defined poetry as “an ordering of words that is not prose, but ordered for the sake of the words.”

Though she followed this definition with other disjointed explanations, Burt strongly asserted that poetry isn’t a mystical enigma. She spent the hour dissecting poets while drawing an unlabeled, incomplete circle with each point.

Though the drawing itself was hard to decipher as more shapes overlapped, it felt fitting.

Burt is an English professor at Harvard, co-editor for The Nation, and poetry critic. Lily Moore-Eissenberg, SY ’20, studied under Burt over the summer, and asked her to join the board for Brink. Moore-Eissenberg also asked Burt to speak at Yale as part of the Poynter Fellowship’s series of lectures featuring media professionals.

Burt didn’t provide information about herself before diving into her talk. The event wasn’t a reading or a lecture necessarily, but a synopsis of her most recent book, Don’t Read Poetry. Contrary to its title, Burt’s book is a guide created to ease the digestion of poetry. It outlines six categories of poems, including ones in which readers identify with the speaker, poems that give a character profile, poems that represent a community, poems that have unique forms, emotionally affective poetry, and lyrical poetry.

Burt argues that people might be daunted by or even claim to dislike poetry because of education systems’ misleading portrayal of the form.

16 THE YALE HERALD

If someone encounters a poem they don’t like or understand in the classroom, that can translate into disliking poetry in general. But taste in poetry, like music, depends on its purpose. Our moods change constantly, and with that, so do the poems that we enjoy at a given moment.

Academic settings hold poetry to divine standards, as if it can’t be everyday. At the beginning of the talk, Burt broached the topic of defining poetry, saying, “If you’ve spent ten minutes in any intro creative writing course, you’ll have two students arguing over whether their favorite musical artist is a poet.” We often forget the non-academic forms of poetry that seep into our lives—much of the music we listen to or the nursery rhymes we sung as kids could be considered poetry.

Our knowledge and enjoyment of poetry is tricky to explain. After Burt’s talk, which was both demystifying and riddled with inaccessible jokes, I interviewed two friends to see how, if at all, poetry has a place in their lives. One friend said that, while he has bought books of poetry such as those of Audre Lorde, he “wanted to dive in but never did.” The other friend said she’s just started getting into the craft through a weekly poetry seminar. “[I read poetry] for class every week, if not every other day,” she said. “It’s pretty much a new part of my life. I associate [reading poetry] with writing poetry…” The class has changed the way she reads poetry, too: “I think I’ve liked poetry for several years now, but I hadn’t found poets I liked, so I wasn’t reading for pleasure.”

17

Burt claims there’s poetry for everyone— you just have to find it. But for many people, that’s often easier said than done.

Though both friends easily asserted their enjoyment of poetry, they struggled to explain why they like it. The first told me about how much he cherished a certain Langston Hughes poem, explaining, “I don’t know how to approach it critically…

It makes me feel something. It feels like it’s connecting back to moments I’ve had.” He quoted the poem, “‘Roaming the night together’… that pulls me back to [those past moments], and it connects me to the time in which it was written.” My other friend said, as an example, that she appreciates poet Emily Skillings’ work for its internal, fragmented style and dry sense of humor.

Burt claims there’s poetry for everyone— you just have to find it. But for many people, that’s often easier said than done. Most people at the talk were older professors and scholars with a few undergraduate English students—all people who have likely received some level of guidance in reading and interpreting poetry.

“I find [Audre Lorde’s poetry] inaccessible, even though I want to understand,” said my friend, who has not taken a poetry class before. “I want to give it the patience it needs.

I just think I’m a bad reader. I don’t think my brain works verbally in a way that lets me really appreciate writing, even if I understand that it’s really good. I think there’s some blockage in my head where writing doesn’t land.”

Though she may have learned how to get more enjoyment out of poetry in class, my

other friend still feels, “The academy of scholars of poetry can be very insular and hard to access. Certain poets [feel inaccessible], but other poets are easy to access.”

She gave Mary Oliver as an example of a poet she finds more accessible than others.

Burt argued that the best poems, the ones that last, fit under many of the labels she gives, if not all. Her points began to merge like the circles on the board. The purpose of a poem is not clearly definable. Maybe it’s dismissive to agree with critics who say the purpose of poetry is its purposelessness, but I can’t tell how this is different from the answer Burt gives of there being multiple muddled purposes.

Despite its puzzling nature, my friends still continue to keep poetry in their lives. My friend who writes says she intends to keep reading poetry and to be “less disciplined about writing actual poems.” As for my friend who doesn’t write, poetry still maintains a certain allure that makes him “want to learn. I want to learn to read poetry.”

CULTURE W

andering the endless halls of the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) at the beginning of the semester, I stumbled across Théodore Géricault’s Shipwrecked on a Beach (The Tempest) (1823). I almost walked past it, as the canvas was so small compared to the others in the room. But boy, am I glad I stopped.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Salon, an annual juried exhibition, controlled the Parisian art scene. Salons rejected pieces that did not follow their strict guidelines, stipulating what could be depicted and how. But many artists, like Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, felt trapped by the Salons and rebelled against the institution. They argued that art is not created by following the rules, but by breaking them. Their defiance took many forms, from casual nudity, such as Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, to adopting new genres, like Realism and Romanticism.

Courbet, the leader of the Realism movement, even opened a Pavilion of Realism where he could display his works that the Salon had rejected.

Géricault shocked the 1819 Paris Salon with his Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), a larger-than-life canvas depicting the remains of a vessel, the frigate Méduse, and the dead and dying aboard. The shipwreck was a real event and, more crucially, an embarrassment for the French. The inexperienced Vicomte de Chaumareys captained the ship, leading it off course and eventually crashing off the coast of Mauritania. The inadequate lifeboat capacity was filled by de Chaumareys and his crew, leaving more than 100 people to make a raft out of the ship’s remains. Rations on the raft quickly ran out, leaving those aboard to resort to cannibalism.

After less than two weeks adrift, only 15 survived. Raft of the Medusa proved influential to younger artists, including a young Eugène Delacroix, who posed as one of the dying people in the painting. Géricault’s entry to the Salon—a depiction of a contemporary catastrophe—departed from the traditional heroic themes and solid forms of Neoclassicism and rocked against the bourgeoisie idealism of Rococo.

Like many of Géricault’s later works, Shipwrecked on a Beach is much smaller than Raft of the Medusa and features much larger, looser brushstrokes. In fact, the brushstrokes in the work are so loose that they feel almost impressionistic. The viewer has to take more time to see the image as a whole because the brushstrokes abstract the scene. A shipwrecked man on a rocky beach during a storm comes into focus when viewed at the right distance. Once the viewer understands the narrative, they feel pity for the man’s situation, fear for his well being, and anger—he did not deserve to be shipwrecked like this. The viewer’s emotions mirror those of the shipwrecked man: at first, he doesn’t understand where he is, and then he is overcome with grief.

A wave breaks on a rock next to the man in the scene, its whitecap contrasting with the rest of the dimly lit canvas. Although the dark, crashing wave shows the strength and ferocity of the storm, this lighter shade of the whitecap almost creates a sense of warmth.

The whitecap is among the only well-lit details of 18 THE YALE HERALD

Pondering the Shores of Grief the work and is what initially draws the eye of the viewer. Darker pigments—like the ones used for the rocks on the shores of the beach and the sea on the horizon—are indicative of mystery. The man is afraid to venture inland but is also hesitant to go back to sea. Why should he trust the water again?

While the sea holds a fear the man has already experienced, he has not yet explored this new land.

It could be the key to finding civilization, but it could also hold even more misfortune. The man is drawn to the shore as this is all he can see. In this way, it is what is familiar to him. He believes himself to be safe on the coast, but if he stays on the shore, the waves will crash upon him. The man is stuck.

The French title of the painting, Naufragés, meaning castaways, implies there is more than one shipwrecked person. After hours of looking at the canvas, I found myself only seeing the one figure.

Where is the second man? Was I not looking in the right places? Is he Géricault? Géricault is known for depicting stressful, emotional scenes, from defeated soldiers (like his The Wounded Cuirassier) to various studies of severed limbs straight from the morgue (such as Anatomical Pieces). Toward the end of his life, he was in great pain, both physically and emotionally. Perhaps the depressed Géricault felt just as hopeless as the man he painted.

When I see this piece, I see myself. Maybe I am the second naufragé in the painting. Perhaps the confusion of the viewer mirrors the confusion of the man in the painting because the viewer is tending to their own set of hardships along with the man in the canvas.

Keeping a nose to the paint can bring out the finer details of some paintings, but not Shipwrecked.

Looking closely only brings blurriness and confusion. To see the scene for what it is, we must step back and view it from a distance. We must evaluate the situation as a whole to find the clarity needed to fix the problem.

The man stares back at the sea. The rough brushstrokes obscure his exact expression, but Géricault conveys a sense of longing through the figure’s leaning body. Most likely, the man has spent a long time at sea; he has befriended the waters.

Finding himself a castaway, he realizes the sea has betrayed him. What was once a venue of passage has become a barrier. As he watches the waves, he yearns for something—but for what? Perhaps he longs for home, wishing he could hang his hat one more time. Maybe he wishes he had a chance to say goodbye to his wife and kids. He might be asking for forgiveness, from the sea and from God. What transgressions has he committed to be abandoned (by society, but also by his surroundings and by his faith)? Time passes and the storm recedes. The ocean apologizes. The man continues to watch the waves come to shore. Their steady pace calms him as he begins to think of a way home.

I like to believe the man on the shore will come to eventually accept his situation. He knows either path he chooses—inland or back to sea—will bring him more suffering. With enough exploring, however, he may come to find safety. The only option that will extend his misery indefinitely is staying on the shore. He can sit on the beach feeling sorry for himself while the waves crash against him, or he can channel his despair into something productive and get back to his life. When life is testing us, I think we have to push inland or out to sea. There is no reason to stay put.

MELANIE HELLER, SM ’22, YH STAFF

19 BRIANNA WU, MC ’21, YH STAFF

T

Listening to Will Wilson’s Portraits

hree visitors were standing in front of Will Wilson’s three photographs in the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) on Saturday, staring so persistently at the images that I found myself nearly elbowing them to get a view. Once before the photos, I understood the crowd—the portraits created

by Wilson, a Diné (Navajo) artist born in 1969, felt almost liquid in their spectral grays interlacing to form the wrinkles of old hands, the pattern of curled hair, the pout of lips. Wilson’s images of Enoch Kelly Haney, Ann Marie Woolworth, and Brielle Turney have captured reality, only to later well it up like a dream.

The photographs are on display in Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art (PNGB), the most recent exhibition to open at the YUAG and the institution’s first major show to concentrate on Native art. PNGB was curated by three recent graduates—Katherine Nova McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa–Cree), GH ’18, and Leah Tamar Shrestinian, MC ’18, with Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe), ES ’19—who began the project during their time at Yale.

This is a radically simplified origin story; the expanded version begins in the fall of 2015, as a tidal wave of student activism responded to a series of controversies, including the renaming of Grace Hopper College and Professor Erika Christakis’s letter on cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes. The YUAG and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, acknowledging the movement, launched the Native American Art Initiative Internship in 2016, a position awarded to McCleary and Shrestinian. That fall, Laurence Kanter, the chief curator of the YUAG, reached out to them about formulating an exhibition.

McCleary and Shrestinian tapped Zordan in turn, and the three began to work on PNGB. These questions of revising history, reformulating narratives, and granting marginalized voices also figure crucially into Wilson’s photographs.

They’re the products of the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX), a project launched by Wilson in 2012. Its goal, in his words, is to “supplant” the work of Edward Curtis, a settler photographer who took portraits of Indigenous people. The North American Indian, his monumental portfolio, contains more than 40,000 individual photographs; while among the most significant settler records of Indigenous culture, its creation was predicated on the photographer’s belief that Indigenous Americans were “a vanishing race.” Primed by this romanticization, Curtis frequently altered the appearance of his sitters to

be legibly “Indian,” often by posing individuals in headdresses either obsolete or infrequently worn.

A preemptive nostalgia for societies under the threat of elimination—this is precisely what Wilson overturns in CIPX, by “resum[ing] the documentary mission of Curtis from the standpoint of a 21st century indigenous, trans-customary, cultural practitioner.” The artists’ continuity is demonstrated materially, as Wilson chose to work in the same medium as Curtis: wet-plate collodion photography. The 19th century technique is both intensive (an aluminum sheet must be primed with multiple chemical layers before exposure and a portable darkroom used to develop the image) and time-sensitive (in order to work, the entire process cannot span more than 15 minutes).

Today wet-plate collodion photography is, unsurprisingly, scarce, enabling the materialization of Wilson’s three figures in PNGB to serve as a bait-and-switch: their initial perceived age soon deteriorates into their present reality. Unlike in Curtis’s images, each subject has chosen their own pose and clothing, has written their own caption, and has been gifted the aluminum plate—the reproductions we see in the YUAG exhibition are archival pigment prints from a high-resolution scan of the original, on loan from the Beinecke.

The photographic exchange is literal, as is Wilson’s reinscription of Indigenous culture, both shifting the seat of influence towards equality.

The portrait of Enoch Kelly Haney comes alive with Wilson’s augmented-reality app, Talking Tintypes, which he created for a selection of the works from CIPX. Hold your phone up to the photograph and Haney will begin introducing himself: as a former Oklahoma State Senator, an artist, and a citizen and Principal Chief of Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

He’ll tell you that when he spots a red-tailed hawk he sees his father. Listening to him, you’ll be reminded that power so often resides in the voice, and stepping back to look at all three photographs, you’ll understand the power of image, too

See Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art at the YUAG until June 21, 2020.

REVIEWS

The New Kid

But with the new Biology building and revamping of Science Hill, KBT was eclipsed and replaced by a newer, cooler lunchtime hotspot. Steep Café is state of the art. Just like every other new Yale

science building, it’s sleek, steel, and expensive.

Juice Box juices and Katalina’s baked treats stare you down behind shiny glass cases as you wait to order. No more egg-and-cheeses or BBQ playlists, a lot more fluorescent orange and flashy branding.

Admittedly, the space is full of all things fancy and fresh—think Linzer tarts, spinach and goat cheese quiches, praegels, and vegan brownies—but it’s still a bit bare and confusing to navigate. Where does one stand to order a smoked salmon toast?

Which way does one walk to retrieve said toast?

How does the 24-hour fridge work? Why does it have a security camera? Who is on the other side?

And, most importantly, where are the recycling and composting bins?

In short, Steep is no KBT—yet. The warm and sunny KBT we knew and loved had years to grow and find its classic groove. Steep is young, still filled with clattering construction, slight confusion, and a slight lack of personality. But the same kind faces greet you at the counter, and the same friends join you at the tables. Eventually the construction will subside, they’ll find the right tunes (maybe some Smooth Jazz?), the natural light will freely shine, no longer shrouded by construction tarps and machinery, and (hopefully) the recycling bins will find their labels. At first, the new café may not seem like everyone’s cup of tea, but remember, even the tastiest tea needs time to steep.

on the Hill

O

n Nov. 1, KBT Café closed forever. R.I.P. The little café sat at the base of Kline Biology Tower (KBT) with refreshing views of Science Hill. It will forever be remembered as a windowlined oasis in the bustling hustle of academic life––a local watering hole for old faces from seminars past, overworked and underslept grad students, that Econ professor (and her husband), flannel-clad Foresters, dining hall-deprived STEM majors, and the occasional wildly lost humanities student. Minutes after morning classes adjourned, trains of customers lined up at the register, their arms filled with kombuchas and neatly packed sandwiches for speedy consumption before physics lab. Others hovered by the cooler shelves waiting for truly massive yogurt parfaits, steaming chai lattes, and melty egg-and-cheeses. Some did the quick maths and hit their nine-dollar lunch swipe on the dot, others played it safe and took the loss, and others still chose to pull out their credit cards for an extra bag of Deep River Mesquite BBQ chips. And the BBQ vibes did not end there–– the “Barbecue” Pandora Station was a go-to for the KBT staff, blasting hits like “Purple Rain” and “December, 1963.”

KATIE SCHLICK, SM ’21

20 THE YALE HERALD

21 The Herald’s Top 10 TV Shows of the YH STAFF Decade 1) Glee Formative, but problematic—just like our parents.

2) Fleabag Fake intellectual television.

3) Jane the Virgin REAL intellectual television.

4) All Vines.

100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

5) Shake It Up Without Shake It Up, we wouldn’t have had Euphoria. Think about it.

6) Game of Thrones We have to put it on the list. Our hands are tied.

7) The Great British Baking Show.

They’re so nice to each other. I am so calm.

8) Chopped I saw the devil, and her name is Alex Guarnaschelli.

9) Sherlock Gave us the hot priest before he was the Hot Priest!!!

10) American Horror Story I mean, it’s no Good Luck Charlie, but it’s pretty freaky.

P

layful pizzicato erupts from the first note. A fiery voice joins in, exclaiming, “I realized I lost my mind / When I was a little girl / I thought I could rule the world.” Kick drums bump through, paving the way for gnarly 808 bass lines as Sudan Archives—the pseudonym of singer-songwriter Brittney Denise Parks—sings, lamenting lost love. The song expands into a symphonically rich soundscape, layered with endless strings, percussion and voice. “Did You Know,” the first track from Sudan Archives’ new album Athena, perfectly encapsulates her world of questions and possibilities.

This new album, aptly named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and courage, crosses genre and bridges sonic worlds. Brilliant and poppy songs like “Confession” flow into tenacious offkilter elegies, like “Black Vivaldi Sonata.” The title alludes to the Baroque Italian composer and violinist, reinterpreting his 17th century style into a modern idiom. She plays an electric violin over West African-inspired rhythms, even including the popular drum sounds of trap music. Some songs pay tribute to Parks’ Sudanese heritage with spectacular violin strumming––like a banjo. Parks grew up practicing classical violin in elementary school in Cincinnati. After she heard the traditional fiddle styles of Sudan and the Yoruba people, she grew intrigued by the overlap between Irish jig and West African rhythms. As a teenager, she experimented, mixing violin with electronic beats.

While none of the songs feature as left-field and wacky beats and percussion as her 2017 eponymous EP (“Time” is a personal favorite), this new album features her most mature songwriting. Her new love songs feature her most intimate lyrics, tinged with a breath of hope and optimism. In “Iceland Moss,” she sings about a breakup: “I love you soft like Iceland moss / I hold you close then I saw you off.”

Songs like “Green Eyes” contain her most beautiful harmonies yet, reminiscent of lush impressionist composers. In “Stuck,” bright violin shines atop gritty, twisted bass and broken snares. After two EPs released by LA label Stones Throw Records, Athena—her first full-length studio album—is her most daring, concise, best-produced work yet. Her music represents a perfect integration of violin into pop, a typically tricky line to toe. This rich album proudly boasts both ballads and bangers.

Ballads & Bangers: Sudan Archives’ Athena ISAAC PROSS, BK ’23 YH STAFF

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

OUR KIND SPONSORS

Patron T. Spielberg

The Black List things we hate this week

things we hate this week

Harvard/Yale.

There’s a lot to hate here.

Trains, planes, & automobiles.

.

Hmm, big carbon footprint you got there.

JUST KIDDING I LOVE TO DO THIS.

Crying to Joni Mitchell.

Turkey Slaughter.

I prefer turkey LAUGHTER.

The first five years of the 2010s.

Low point for culture.

The last five years of the 2010s.

Low point for geopolitics.

Rich Mulch.

I prefer his nickname,

Dick Mulch.

Exposed shaft.

I almost fell down!

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