This is Also What it Looks Like

Grandma Ghee died in the summer, and a week later Tara drove that Buick across the High Plains, through the Continental Divide, just under a thousand miles, until she saw the sea. And then she parked it. Took out her bag and chemistry books and didn’t touch the car for a year.

From the high window of her brick dormitory, Tara would watch her grandmother’s car, suspended in the corner of that black asphalt lake. Shy underneath a streetlamp.

Then it’s the last morning of the spring term, and the first sun she has seen in weeks. Tara approaches the Buick from its side like she would a skittish creature. She stands, her hand on the warm metal of the hatch, trying to form an apology.

“Hey,” she says, turning her single key. “Did you forget about me?”

The trunk pops and releases. Somewhere between Montana and here the rubber hoop sealing the trunk came loose, or disintegrated, and the cavity filled with months of late afternoon rain. A shallow, muddied pond formed, with bits of red carpet floating on its surface and colonies of mold climbing its banks. A wasp’s nest, too, in the driver’s side door. The original architects had long since abandoned their papery scaffold, but Tara skirts it anyway to reach the ignition. The Buick gasps but its engine does not turn over.  Under her abdication, the cold, mossy landscape had begun to claim the car as its own. She glances around, feels as if the damp is shrugging at her: what did you expect, it asks, you should have come sooner, you should wear your keys like a badge, where’s your allegiance, what happened to your pride?

When the mechanic arrives the sun has faded. He steps down from his truck. He turns in circles, in awe of the old academic buildings, fortified and shining against the encroaching moisture.

“I’ve lived in this town for over twenty years,” he hiccups, “and never been here before.”

He walks once around the car before disappearing into its metal belly. “What’re you doing here?” comes his muffled voice.

“Not much on the day-to-day,” Tara says, and then changes her mind. “I mean, I study. It’s my first year. I study chemistry here.” Tara feels pleased with her answer—its aloofness, its refusal to stake a claim to this place.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” he asks. “I saw your license plate.”

Tara shakes her head. 

“Montana.”

“Uh huh, Montana! No kidding. Montana is what America used to be.” He clears his throat and Tara hears spit land somewhere deep in the interstices of the Buick’s pipes.

“I’d like to hear what you’re picturing, exactly.” 

The mechanic jerks out from underneath the hood, meeting Tara’s eyes. He looks suspicious. 

“You need to drive this thing,” he warns. “Or run it, at least, a half hour here and there.” He closes the hood and looks over the Buick once more. He whistles slowly. “Someone loved this car very much before you,” he says.

“I love this car very much,” Tara answers, but the words break off halfway to her mouth.


In a late, red October, around the time Tara turned seven, Grandma Ghee moved them all out of the county seat to Brady. As they drove into town, the last grain silo standing caught on fire. The volunteer fire department quickly dampened the flames, but the grain smoldered for an entire week, a question mark of smoke drifting out of the charred metal above the landscape.

Grandma Ghee purchased a sprawling, rusted estate. One of the old ranchers had given her the deed. That first evening, the two stood on the sagging back porch and gazed out at the fields of dead winter wheat.

“Where does my land end, exactly?” Grandma Ghee asked, creasing the deed with her thick fingers.

The leathery man shook his head. “You could use twice as much as you can see and still not bother no one, none,” he said.

So Grandma Ghee marked Tara’s boundary as the last corroded truck bumper, which rested several hundred yards from the main house, just before the stalks of the fruitless field became taller, thicker. Tara didn’t mind. Within the razed dirt yard there lay large, cavernous woodpiles and a tangled playground of old farm equipment and car appendages. A gutted ’76 pickup squatted in the side yard, and Tara played hopscotch between old tires. Tara thought the real prize, though, was the unstained wooden barn behind the house. It had a loft filled with sawdust and still smelled warm and ripe like animals.

The boys didn’t have boundaries. They roved the property late into the night, howling and sweating. No coyotes close, only “brothers.” Grandma Ghee’s brood, in true Montana style, was half blood and half something else: they were Tara’s friends, cousins, an old schoolmate whose parents disappeared, maybe because of amphetamines, maybe not. They always rose early, darted through the kitchen, past Grandma Ghee, to grab cold cuts of turkey from the fridge and knives from the butcher’s block. Then they tumbled, whining, snarling, out the backdoor and into the dirt and sunshine. Grandma Ghee spent her mornings swaying in the kitchen with a cigarette between her lips, her arms bent stiffly in front of her, resting on an absent lover. Tara watched her from the cool kitchen tiles. 

The house felt empty during the day, almost skeletal, but there were no extra beds come nightfall. Tara slept beside Grandma Ghee every night, the weight of her body bowing the mattress and drawing Tara in, its own gravitational field. On the nights when Tara came into the room after Grandma Ghee had begun to snore, she moved delicately. She brushed each foot clean of dirt and cigarette ash and slipped, toe by toe, into the damp sheets. She breathed shallow. When Grandma Ghee stirred, as she always did, she reached out to find Tara, pulled her to her chest, and her sweat pooled to create a slick coat between them. Tara, a thin stick in her grandmother’s arms.

When Tara awoke she smelled of Grandma Ghee—of smoke, old bedding, and hair oil. When she awoke, alone, she looked at the depression in the mattress with a mix of love and shame.


It was the end of a grueling summer—less than three inches of precipitation in three months. Tara awoke for her first day of fifth grade to find Grandma Ghee’s white Buick missing from its spot. Tara stepped barefoot onto the back porch. The morning wind blew thick streams of dust that itched her nose, that settled in a dark ring above the collar of her nightshirt. She squinted. She wound her way through the yard’s morass of metal parts and chicken wire, resisting the urge to shimmy through the old tractor wheel. She wasn’t supposed to play on school days. She wondered what to do with herself, or whether she could cook herself breakfast. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the route of the two-lane country highway that led to the elementary school in Dutton. The wind beat steadily across the High Plains.

Tara squatted in the dirt near the ’76 pickup to watch the gopher holes. Every few minutes, a fat, tan head would emerge from its burrow to chirp, setting off a symphony from gopher holes both near and far in the surrounding fields of winter wheat. Tara could mimic a gopher’s chirp better than anyone. She could bugle like an elk, too. When the wind shifted direction, she heard a new sound, though. She followed her brothers’ laughter into the cool stillness of the barn. From the ground floor, she saw several figures hunched in the loft. Their shifting feet sifted sawdust through the gaps in the floorboards, and Tara gazed upwards, a fine, ticklish sprinkle on her face. Like snow. As soon as she began climbing the worn ladder rungs to the loft, the laughter stopped.

“Who’s it?” said one of her brothers.

Tara wriggled her narrow chest over the loft’s lip.

“Why aren’t you in school, girl?” Another brother kicked a molehill of sawdust towards her.

Tara’s eyes adjusted slowly to the low light of the room. Her brothers sat along the slanted walls, and their friends, too, looking at each other or at the floor.

“You oughta be in school,” said her youngest brother, hard, quiet. “You shouldn’t be here.”

One of her brothers lit a cigarette, one of Grandma Ghee’s. He held it in his lips, like she did, his hands somewhere dark Tara couldn’t see. Her body began to shudder, and she couldn’t explain, then, about Grandma Ghee’s car, about the two-lane highway turning around in her mind. Right, then left. Left, then left. About Grandma Ghee’s car. About cooking breakfast.

She shook her head and a tan rope of hands pulled her into the loft, farther into the loft, into the thickest shadow. The laughter resumed, her brothers’ friends—her brothers?—her brothers’ friends touched the back of her neck, tugged their pants down their hips.

Later, after, she sprinted towards the house, and her bare heels hit the dirt so fast it felt like concrete. She imagined her brothers running behind her, but they were all younger, all her age, their eyes boyish and eager. They were running together, she in front, colorful strips of cloth tied around each of their foreheads, whooping. It was a movie scene, behind her eyes, and she saw her brothers clearly, spit foaming from dumb joy, their cheeks ruddy, hollering: who’s the fastest, who’s the fastest?

She was. She was just a flash of taut limbs, bone grinding on bone, but so fast. She was laughing and laughing, and there were tears in her eyes and the yard was blurry and boundless as she blinked away that warm water. The scene stopped as she collided with Grandma Ghee’s soft stomach. Grandma Ghee sucked her teeth and held Tara, rocked back and forth, moaned, “Girl, girl, girl.” Her voice croaked.

From the corner of her eye, Tara saw Grandma Ghee’s Buick parked safely back in its spot. Something new beat in Tara’s chest and Grandma Ghee cradled her under that cold sun.

She didn’t play with her brothers much after that. Instead, she slept. Instead, she unrolled dozens of feet of chicken wire and staked it in a crude circle around her favorite part of the yard: the hopscotch tires and the old tractor wheel. The gopher holes were outside the chicken wire, and she mourned them, briefly, as she wiped the rust from her hands. She collected oranging leaves from the bushes surrounding the house and beds of evergreen needles to make salads. She made four salads. She hosted a luncheon.

She ate cigarette butts for the better part of a year before someone caught her. She would palm them from Grandma Ghee’s brass ashtrays, from the boards of the back porch, from beneath her brothers’ bedroom windows. The less tobacco left, the better. She chewed the cigarette butts into a fleshy, tan pulp, and then formed a compact ball using her tongue. After a few minutes of chewing, dark gray spit would gather at the corners of her mouth. The morning one of her brothers discovered her, her heart broke softly.

He, the oldest. He called the other brothers and their friends, “Come look at this,” and they all stumbled onto the back porch, baying with laughter. They made gagging noises and fell all over one another, held their stomachs, pretended to throw up. Some shuddered violently, and tongues lolled out of their mouths, while others reached down and pronounced them dead. 

“You’re crazy, girl.”

Crazy girl.”

One of her brother’s friends leaned in and wiped ash from her chin with a calloused thumb.

Grandma Ghee thrust her heavy bosom out the kitchen window, yelled, “Shoo! All you, shoo!” She walked around to the back porch and crouched beside Tara, brushing the dry cigarette butts back into the dirt. She held out her hand and Tara ejected the mound into Grandma Ghee’s cracked palm. “Nuh uh, don’t listen to them,” Grandma Ghee cooed. “You’re the quick one, girl. You’re gonna go to college, just like I did. You’re the quick one, gonna be something greater.”


Tara lets the engine run that night, like the mechanic suggested, and pores over her chemistry workbook under the Buick’s striated ceiling lights. Outside the driver’s window, Tara sees silhouettes of students in rubber hoods slip back into their dormitories, together shaking off their wetness, opening heavy wooden doors with relief. The dormitories will soon empty for the summer, students trickling home, to their brave states or elsewhere. She thinks of the last time she saw Montana, with its westernmost fields still and indifferent in the August heat. Fading to yellow from her brothers’ coughs and spit.

Tara switches the overhead lights off and stacks her chemistry books on the floor. The car that brought her here hums along in the cicada dark. She lifts her skirt above her hips and spreads her legs wide across the faux velvet bench seat. She brings two fingers to her mouth and draws them in, reaches across her body with her other hand and holds her ribcage, the strongest part of her. She rocks back and forth in that red plush and sweat, feeling like she is in utero. 

She emerges, slimy and exhausted. A sheet of warm moisture has formed over the driver’s window, and as she now looks out, she sees no dormitory, no students, no asphalt, just her own heat and sex reflected back to her.

Tara lays her cheek flush to the passenger seat, inhaling the flat smell of cigarette smoke that had long seeped into the fabric. She lies there, quiet, her hands touching one another. The thuds in Tara’s chest slow, matching the plastic arms scraping rain back and forth across the windshield. 

The Word You Don't See

I know you couldn’t know this, but that next morning I woke up in my twin bed stomach-sick in a way I have never been, before or since. I woke up without thoughts in a viscous world, my mind full of sludge, my veins full too. I had a word nobody wants near them stuck right to me, though I wouldn’t know it for a long, long time. That’s the way sludge works: it protects me from feeling the harm that's been done. You woke up with that word too, but you still don’t know it. That’s the way privilege works: it protects you from seeing the harm you inflict.

That morning, my friends trickled into my dorm room. They raised their eyebrows, ready to mirror my reaction to whatever it was that had happened the night before.

They asked, “How do you feel?” I said, “I feel weird,” and I did.

As my friends and I walked to brunch that morning, I watched slow scenes from the previous night: kissing in a stairwell, opening a bathroom door. “Are you sure?” I hear you say, and I answer, “Yes,” as if I am. Me, pulling a slinky black chiffon shirt over my head in one inside-out swoop. My hands are pale and blotchy, my fingers braced on a shower stall wall. 

And then I’m clutching a woolen cardigan on a lonely walk home, biting air and wet hair. Our friends’ whooping hollers echo down to me from the window of a dorm room, marking your triumphant entrance. Finally, you all must have thought, that was a long time coming.

They thought so; you thought so. And what did I think? I didn’t. I walked slow that night, slow that next morning. Slow and sick.

I said, “I don’t want it to be weird,” (the way I felt) as we walked to brunch. My friends told me not to worry, that you and I were friends, so I slow-nodded. I stuck the word “regret” to the scenes in my head and to the slow sickness they brought on, hoping both could pass as such. The whole week was slow and sick, but I told myself that slow weeks are OK sometimes because we’re in college and we do dumb things, and sometimes we knock ourselves down hard enough that recovery seeps past Sunday.

Four days later I had a dance performance. That’s a place where slow-moving is not acceptable, nor would I want it to be. I am on a high at performances, always. But that night, the first night of the show, I found myself on the dressing room floor with sludge heavy in my veins. It congealed in my wrists and in the crooks of my elbows. My arms pinned me to the floor. While all the other dancers drilled and stretched, hair-sprayed and eye-lined, I stared at the ceiling, unmoving.

My own body scared me. This feeling was too foreign to pass for regret. On the dressing room floor, I heard echoes of that other word. I didn’t want it near me, so I pushed it away and searched for an immediate fix.

I texted my best friend, I can’t stop thinking about it, meaning my pale hands on the wall of the shower stall. She replied, Just text him. You’re friends. You can talk to him about this, and it all felt so very (un)reasonable. So I did text you, Can we talk later? and that unstuck me from the floor.

Later did not come when I wanted it to (immediately). It came three slow days later. After an arms-length kind of Friday night, after Saturday night, after I texted, please I really need to talk to you, please today, please come outside, on a Sunday morning. Three in a row. I would have sent 200 if that’s what it would have taken. You walked to the picnic table where I sat, your stride long, your blond hair bed-head messy. My hands shook.

“I need to talk to you about the other night,” I started. “I’m just freaking out because I’m kind of in a bad place right now, and I feel like I made that decision from a really irrational part of me. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just need to know I have you as a friend.”

See, I had invented one (faulty) dichotomy to reason away what had happened: if we were truly friends, then there was just a mistake and this flat, uncomfortable energy between us. If we were not, then you must have taken advantage of me, and a space would open for that word to sneak in. 

At the picnic table, you said nice things like, “You are one of my best friends,” “I really care about you,” “I’m sorry you feel like this,” and “If I had known, I never would have done anything.” You reminded me that you have sisters.

When we finished talking, you hugged me tight. I saw a strand of my hair caught in your beard when you pulled away.

I clung to that moment white-knuckled and threw it at every surfacing doubt. I reminded myself of the way we used to dance together all night long, a charged three inches between us, and the way you could anticipate my every step. 

I told myself that what had happened in the shower stall was a long time coming. When an image of my hands on white tile flashed up—as it did from time to time—I cut in fast with the scene in which I pulled off the black chiffon shirt. I played “Are you sure?” “Yes,” and “You are one of my best friends” like rotating soundtracks, asking myself, how on earth could he have known that I would end up so sick?

It worked for a long time. The sludge thinned away.

And then one night, three months later, I got way too high. My brain moved at breakneck speed: whirling thoughts and nothing I could do to stop them. All those scenes played again and again while I paced my room, remembering the slow sick of that sludge and the way I could not get up from the floor, thinking, why are the shower stall hands coming back again? Why can’t I let it go if we were good friends with real chemistry? Why can’t I let it go if that night was a long time coming? Isn’t that why I said “yes”?

No, came my own insistent answer, along with a memory I had dismissed as unimportant. Two weeks before we got naked in a shower stall, after a different night out, you sat across from me at your coffee table.

“I just don’t want a random hook-up with you. I’m not interested in doing that,” I said. 

You sighed, “I just don’t want a relationship right now.”

I rolled my eyes and reminded you, “I never said I did, either.”

So I did know what I wanted. And I had said it, so you knew too. There I was, pacing in a panic around my room, wondering why I had said “Yes,” wondering why the conversation had ended there. What kind of friend would not check in after that night? What, I wondered, high and wired, would cause me to act against my own instincts? And how could I let that happen, because aren’t I strong? Aren’t I? So what had overpowered me? Was it you?

And then a new scene for an answer. New as in forgotten, forcibly forgotten:

We stepped into the shower stall. I felt cold and reckless, disconnected and unsafe. The dorm’s bathroom lights were fluorescent and harsh. I stopped kissing you. Before we went any further, I pushed my hand against your chest, trying to find you, trying to de-escalate. No reaction. I pushed again.

“Wait,” I said softly. “Wait.”

You pulled back, eyebrows arched. I mumbled something wordless, confused, unsure how to reach you. A drop of water rolled down my left temple. You brushed it away with your thumb. 

“Mont,” you said,  “we’re already here.” And then we were. 

And my hands reached the wall.


That was the moment when my instincts reared up and were trampled. That moment had been drowned in sludge. When it resurfaced three months later, I watched my will concede to yours. It sent my mind reeling, panicking, thinking, I did not say “Stop,” but I did say “Wait,” and maybe that should be enough. (Of course it should be.) And the way my body shut down—I know that is not the way I have sex, and if it was not sex then what was it? And if you should have known “Wait” meant “Stop” but you kept going, then that is how we get to the word “rape.”

So there I was pacing around the room, the word a siren in my head. I thought, if I hear “rape,” does that make you my rapist? And then I had to wonder, would this be like that stereotype story where my grades drop, and I can’t be in the same room as you, and I start having flashbacks during sex, and this comes to define all of college for me? But then of course this is the flashback panic attack, and how could that have fucking happened when I said “Yes” and it’s us? It had been a long time coming, what with the way we used to dance.

My blood pumped so fast I couldn’t feel my limbs. I wondered where my body had gone. I texted my roommate, Can you come home?, meaning, I have lost my body.

When she came in, all soft voice and soothing, she curled up with me under my lavender comforter, and I found my body again. I told her about the way I could not stop seeing the stall and I didn’t know why. I told her I did a thing I did not want to do and I didn’t know why. I did not tell her that I had said “Wait,” and I didn’t utter the word that the resurfaced memory brought with it. I hoped she would help reason it away. 

She did. She reminded me that you had said, “You are one of my best friends,” and how it had stopped the panic. She reminded me that I always punish myself too harshly for my regrets. That was true. I clung to it. I added it to my old loop: “You’re always too hard on yourself,” “You are one of my best friends,” and “Are you sure?” “Yes,” again and again. I pushed the word away, and it receded, taking my panic with it.

It receded except when I heard it. When I heard that word, I saw the shower stall. The wall of it, white tiles, and my hands braced there. Of course, it didn’t happen often, since it isn’t said all that much in polite conversation. It’s a word we like to keep abstract. But six months later, I sat at my study-abroad program orientation watching a Powerpoint about how to stay safe in a foreign city. They didn’t want to send us home stuck with that word. My program coordinator was standing there saying it over and over again. In a foreign city, in a random room with 35 students I didn’t know, I kept seeing the shower stall. I’d shove away the image, of course, but then she’d say the word again, and it would pop up.

So, finally, six months later and half a world away from you, I thought logically and measuredly (with some lingering panic), shit, maybe I am stuck with it. Over the course of that semester, I started to talk about it, how it got there and what it meant. I came to another conclusion: if that word is stuck to me, it is stuck to you, too.


It’s hard to see, I know, especially considering that it had been “a long time coming,” and that you asked and got a “Yes,” and that we considered ourselves friends. It’s confusing because “Wait” is not exactly “No,” because the word “rape” is woven so seamlessly into our cultural fabric that it usually disappears—until we look. This is not about a criminal charge, and this is not a public skewering. This is a work of unstitching.

I want you to know I’m sorry for bringing this word into focus for you. I spent a long time feeling guilty for seeing my shower stall hands when I heard it, thinking you didn’t mean for that, not at all. There are a lot of people who would argue that I’m excusing you by saying “I’m sorry.” In some way it is excusing, because I do believe that you didn’t mean for that, not at all.

You didn’t mean to hurt me, but you made no attempt to resist a culture which constantly tells you that you are entitled to anything you want, and which constructs me as such: a thing. That is objectification, and that culture is a rape culture. Within rape culture, not only are feminine bodies objectified and men made to feel entitled—it’s also all made to seem normal. 

This system is not immediately transparent, especially to those whom it privileges. Rape culture only manifests overtly when one person forcibly wields their power over another person in the form of sexual violence. Even then, we prefer to think of rapists as lone psychopaths, not normal people whose actions are the result of deeply rooted cultural narratives.

We avoid challenging those cultural narratives by placing rape culture’s covert manifestations within a supposed gray area, rendering it unclear whether an encounter qualifies as sex or rape. When people ask questions like, “Well, was she flirting?” they are asking whether or not one person had implicitly promised sex to another person—and in turn, whether or not one person was entitled to sex with someone else. These discussions imply, then, that there is some context in which one person can be entitled to another (there is not). The gray area discredits an individual’s narrative (“I’m not interested”) by privileging a narrative constructed through rape culture (“It was a long time coming”). So the perpetrator’s behavior is perceived as normal, and that makes rape seem like sex that someone had “promised.”

I was attempting to reject that narrative when I told you, “I just don’t want a random hook-up.” By responding, “I just don’t want a relationship right now,” you assumed that if I don’t want sex, I must want a relationship. Worse, though, you implied that I was withholding sex in the hopes of gaining a relationship. There I was, explaining clearly how I felt, and instead of engaging with me, you replaced me with a sexist caricature of “woman”: someone who must want to be caught. Because to be caught is to have been wanted, to be the chosen thing. As long as that narrative persisted, the only question for you was: when?

In an attempt to dismantle the notion that one person can be entitled to another’s body—and to remind the world that women have sexual agency—people have begun to encourage clear, verbal consent. Theoretically, this kind of dialogue would eradicate the gray area by promoting genuine respect and communication. In this way, verbal consent could directly combat objectification and entitlement. But rape culture appropriates verbal consent, reducing it to a one-item checklist (“Are you sure?” “Yes”). This checklist serves as a cop-out protection for perpetrators. It absolves you of the responsibility to actually engage with someone. It masks a real lack of understanding by purporting to grant permission to a body. 

So the consent checklist, which seems to create clarity around rape, actually masks all the potential coercion and objectification that cannot coexist with true consent, but can coexist with a checklist. It simply changes the question from “When?” to “When can I get her to say, ‘Yes?’”

The checklist coexists with objectification because the checklist fixes consent as a static object, as a thing to acquire, in the same way objectification fixes me. But consent is not a fixed thing (neither am I). You cannot “get” consent as some all-inclusive contract that will “get” you another thing, which is sex, which is me (as a thing, fixed). Consent is not fixed because despite the unfortunate fact of our syntax, sex is not actually a thing you have, it is a thing you do—together. True consent is confirmed, reaffirmed, and acted such that what “Yes” actually applies to is understood. If you believe that me saying “Yes” before our clothes have even come off entitles you to sex, then true consent is already no longer possible. Both consent itself and my body have become things owed, things to be gotten and given. 

So there you were in a dormitory bathroom, thinking it was appropriate to reward yourself with a metaphorical “check” (meaning checkmate, meaning caught) at any point a “Yes” is received, and to proceed without questioning the long history of “No” that had come before it. It prompted you to disregard the context that I had established in favor of the narrative, “It was a long time coming.” You thought the consent you “got” entitled you to sex, so when I told you, “Wait,” you said, “We are already here,” meaning You already signed your body away. Your checklist question blinded you to “Wait” (meaning, stop, meaning, I am not on the same page as you). It excused you from the responsibility to pay attention. It locked me in passivity. (I was a thing you caught.) Of course, you caught me rightfully, according to rape culture. You played by all its rules.

And there I was in a dormitory bathroom, all my instincts rearing up to remind me I do not want this. I could not find the language to say “No” because “No” would contradict a “Yes” that I had already said. On some level, I had internalized the message that the cultural narrative was more important, more valid than my own—that I should want to be caught. The path of least resistance for me was to comply willingly and to like it. I wished I could. I felt guilty for taking back a prize and scared at the realization that I was one. These scripts we learn have their own inertia, and I could not extricate myself quickly enough to stop it. In that moment, I hoped “Wait” would derail us.

When it did not, I tried to convince myself that it did not matter. The fact that the word was so hard for me to see (and harder to accept), the fact that you don’t see it at all, does not mean that the word isn’t there. On the contrary, our denial is symptomatic of the way rape culture simultaneously encourages and erases rape, leading me to believe that we were just friends who had bad sex.

It took me a long time to understand: The standards to which we hold our friends should not be gendered. The standards to which we hold other humans should not be gendered. 

I don’t think you woke up that next morning stomach-sick in a way you never have been, before or since. Unlike me, you did not compromise yourself that night. Despite the fact that you said, “You’re one of my best friends;” since that day at the picnic table, you have not once addressed what happened or treated me with any of the care and respect that title deserves.

So what we called a friendship was not. It was the dancing and the chemistry, but even more so it was the insinuated promise that one day my “No” would become a “Yes.” What we called friendship was predicated entirely on sex. But what we called sex was not. That relationship was predicated on rape. And while neither of us really understood it, that’s exactly what happened. 

Details have been changed to protect the anonymity of those mentioned. 

The Long Run

Six years ago, a naked, emaciated, 14-year-old boy crawled to a road in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula. Last fall, this same boy—now clothed and sinewy—passed me in the Colorado Springs Marathon, a full lap ahead. He had four miles to go, and I had over a dozen. Soon after that, his body started shutting down. The whole race, he did not stop for water. And though in training he had run over 30 miles without water, his body did not handle it well this time. Had he kept his original pace, he would have finished in two hours and 24 minutes, about 21 minutes shy of the world record. Still, Awet Beraki won the race with a time of two hours and 40 minutes. But Awet failed to break the all-Colorado marathon record for the 19-and-under age group. He had set it the year before.

The next week, at 6:30 a.m., we met for an eight-mile run. In the dark, we started our watches and took off down the red dirt of the Monument Creek Trail. Awet began telling me how he had come to Colorado Springs, speaking with ease, despite the six-something-minute-mile pace his GPS watch showed. I realized I would not be doing much talking. Awet would later tell me that was his “easy run.”


Awet grew up in the village of Bogu in the mountains of Eritrea, where his family lived in a thatched roof house made of stone. In the winter, the Beraki boys all had jobs. One tended the goats, one the cows, one the donkeys and camels, and one helped their parents sell eggs. Awet’s two sisters helped his mom in the house. “Over six years old, you have a job, you have to take care of something,” Awet says. One of his earlier jobs was tending the goats. The village boys and their goats would walk barefoot through the mountains from seven in the morning until six at night, when the stars would torch the sky. “My friends and I would hang out, talking, being distracted. We’d chase rabbits, eat them if we killed them, usually by throwing rocks at them.” Baboons, Awet says, were more elusive. “Baboons try to kill the goats, so we’d have a few of us chase the baboons, but we were never fast enough to catch them and kill them.” One day, the boys got distracted, and the goats strayed. Awet found several of his goats dead, baboons gnawing them to bits. The boys pelted the baboons with rocks and went home defeated. After that, Awet’s father made him work on the farm.

In 2011, Awet was 13 years old. The fall harvest had ended, winter was on its way, and Awet was free from chores. He and his childhood best friend, Ahmed, walked in white jellabiyas to the city of Keren to spend the day. They had been going to Keren on their own for years to eat lunch and watch the bike races. “City people make me laugh. I liked to watch them,” Awet says.

Awet and Ahmed stood in the shade of a building, watching the people walk by in white robes. A man approached the two of them and offered them work in his garden. The boys agreed, thinking of how happy their parents would be to have some extra money. They got in the man’s car and drove to Sawa, a nearby village. The man told them to sit under a tree and wait. He left, and after a long time a truck pulled up. The men in the truck spoke to them in Arabic. Awet could not understand what they were saying. Ahmed had studied the Quran, so he understood enough Arabic to know the men were offering to help them find work. The man who had brought Awet and Ahmed there returned and told them that these men would pay them much more. The boys believed him and nodded. They hopped in the truck.

The bulbous Taka Mountains rose from the horizon as the truck approached Kassala, Sudan. The truck had made it across the Eritrea-Sudan border without a problem. The men in the truck spoke Tigrinya, a language Awet and Ahmed had learned in school but not the one they spoke at home. They told Awet and Ahmed how fortunate they were to be free from the Eritrean military. For decades, Eritreans have streamed into Sudan to escape conscription, risking imprisonment or execution if they are caught. (Awet’s cousin has been in an Eritrean prison since he was caught trying to flee four years ago.)

The men said they would feed the boys and bring them to the refugee camp in Khartoum, where Awet and Ahmed’s friends from Bogu lived. Ahmed also had a brother there. The boys smiled and talked about seeing them all soon.

The men said they would feed the boys and bring them to the refugee camp in Khartoum, where Awet and Ahmed’s friends from Bogu lived. Ahmed also had a brother there. The boys smiled and talked about seeing them all soon. Awet and Ahmed had already forgotten that the men offered them work back in Eritrea. The truck rolled into Kassala, past the open-air markets, the donkeys, and the people standing in white robes. The boys assumed the men meant what they said. Awet had heard of kidnapping before, but he says, “I never believed it until it happened in front of my eyes.”

The truck stopped. The men told the boys to get out and go with those two men parked in a nearby truck. Awet and Ahmed did as they were told. The truck started and sped out of Kassala. “Then we knew something was gonna happen,” Awet told me. “They were acting crazy.” Dust rose from the unpaved road—the truck veered off, past mounds of desiccated earth and a few determined shrubs. They stopped outside of a brown brick house. A pack of men were shouting in Arabic, Kalashnikovs in some hands, knives in others, a handgun in every belt. Awet had never seen people brandishing weapons and yelling like that. He started shaking.

“I got off the truck and had a gun pointed to my head, and they told me to get on my knees,” Awet says. A man holding a knife spoke to the boys in Arabic. But Awet spoke only Blin and Tigrinya, and Ahmed did not know enough Arabic to understand what the man wanted. A translator told him in Tigrinya that the men would take the boys to Israel. Awet was still set on going to Sudan to see his old friends. The man with the knife asked the boys if they wanted to go to Israel, adding that the trip would cost 120,000 Eritrean nakfa (about $8,000 at the time). For Awet and Ahmed, the price was far too high. “We have nothing,” Awet said. Another man stepped closer and pressed the barrel of his gun to Awet’s face. Awet realized that they had been kidnapped. These men were only pretending to offer the boys their freedom. Immediately he replied, “I’ll go!”

“Basically, before you die, yeah—you’re gonna say yes,” Awet later told me with a laugh.

The man gesturing with the knife walked over to another prisoner, a 36-year-old, ex-military Eritrean. He had been caught after crossing the border to escape his military duty. Now he was kneeling in the dirt. All Awet heard was “No.” And then another man holding a Kalashnikov stepped up to the man and bashed his skull with the butt of his rifle. Two more men beat him with their fists and their rifles. Most of their blows landed on the man’s skull. His face fell to the bloody dirt. 

The captors slid their rifles over their shoulders, grabbed the fallen man by his shoulders, and pulled him back to his knees. One of them put a handgun to his head. Just before they would have killed him, the man on his knees raised a hand and yelled, “I’ll go.”

The men locked them in a truck and drove to another house 30 minutes away. They dragged the three captives down into the basement of the house. Awet saw 26 other Eritreans, most of them around his age, mostly young students, lying on blankets in a circle. Most of them had their feet tied. One man had his legs free, a privilege, because his Arabic was good enough to translate for the kidnappers. With guns pointed at their backs, Awet and Ahmed gave their wrists to a man who chained them together with padlocks then chained their ankles together. The captors locked them in the basement: two men, 24 boys, and three girls. When Awet needed to pee, two men unchained him and took him outside, holding a knife to him to keep him from running. A day passed like this. Awet was confused because the men had not even tried to make him pay the 120,000 nakfa. Another day passed. The captors gave them flatbread scraps and some water. Awet and Ahmed waited, expecting to be taken to Israel soon.

But no one would go to Israel. No one would go home, either. A week passed with the captives arguing about why they were there, where they were going, and when. Finally, the men herded the 29 starved and dehydrated Eritreans out from the basement and into the sun. A pickup truck was parked in front of them. The men no longer had to point their guns for their captives to obey. The men stripped the white jellabiyas off of Awet and Ahmed and gave them dirty shorts and T-shirts before packing them into the truck bed. “They layered us, several children and a tarp, then more children and a tarp,” Awet said. “We rode in the truck for a week like this.”

There were no roads. The truck bounced over dusty, broken Sudanese soil that still bears ready-to-detonate landmines left over from days of war. The truck stopped only once during the weeklong journey so that the captives could be fed. The men unloaded the captives from the truck and gave them bits of bread. They called the Eritreans animals and told them to eat. Then they put the withering bodies back in the truck.

The truck stopped in the Sinai Peninsula. In a week, they had driven over a thousand miles—about the distance from Los Angeles to Denver—over unpaved terrain. “We were unloaded from the truck. The boys that were on the bottom of the pile were dead,” Awet says. “I suppose they died by being crushed by the weight of all the children laid on top of them.” Awet was convinced that he too would die, that there was no way out.

The men left the shrunken, crushed corpses in the desert sun. They asked the captives to identify as either Christian or Muslim and then separated them into two groups. They shot each Christian in the head. Though Awet was raised Muslim, the men did not believe him because of his Christian name. “I managed to convince them,” he says. “I lived.”

The men brought the remaining Eritreans to a slave auction. “The place looked much like the camel market in Keren,” Awet says. “I have spent much time in the camel market, watching men sell and buy camels. Now I was the one being sold.” Someone bought Awet, Ahmed, and 11 other boys, as a group, for $33,000. Awet was worth $2,538.46.

The buyer and his men dragged the 13 boys away, loaded them into a truck, and drove into the desert. The truck stopped, the buyer and his guards removed the boys, and the boys saw a few scattered houses. The buyer had a gun on his hip and another strapped around his chest. He was known as John Cena, after the American wrestler, although this man was thin and his violence was not staged. The boys were led into a windowless room and chained to six other boys who had been there for six months. Each of the six boys had already paid their previous captors $25,000 for their freedom and transport to Israel. But John Cena, who was supposed to smuggle them to Israel, had kidnapped them instead, ransoming each of them for another $10,000. Their families had no money left to send.

They shot each Christian in the head. Though Awet was raised Muslim, the men did not believe him because of his Christian name. “I managed to convince them,” he says. “I lived.”

For years, men have smuggled Eritreans to Sudan, Egypt, Israel—really anywhere outside of Eritrea. Some smugglers offer no guarantee that they will refrain from selling their “cargo” to human traffickers before the journey’s end, should the trip’s cost cut into profit or if they just want to make more money.

The men who sold Awet and those who had bought him were part of the Rashaida, a Bedouin tribe known for trafficking humans in Northeast Africa. Traffickers are known to take Eritreans both from refugee camps in Sudan and from smugglers whom refugees pay to take them out of Eritrea. 

Between 2012 and 2014, CNN produced two documentaries about refugees in Northeast Africa and the risks they face, including kidnapping and being left to die after having their organs cut out and sold. It was not until 2017 that the Sudanese government launched a plan to combat human trafficking by attempting to reduce the number of refugees who are vulnerable to kidnapping. The year before, the Sudanese government “deported over 300 migrants, most Eritrean, including six registered refugees, back to Eritrea, where they faced abuse,” according to Human Rights Watch. But much of this abuse goes unnoticed. The international aid organization CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) ranked Eritrea as having the second most underreported humanitarian crisis in 2017 with only 69 media articles published about it last year. 

This November, CNN reported on the slave auctions of migrants in Libya, igniting a protest in front of the Libyan Embassy in Paris. Anes Alazabi, a representative of Libya’s Anti-Illegal Immigration Agency, told CNN that the government plans to convict those who have violated human rights, “but also to identify the location of those who have been sold in order to bring them to safety and return them to their countries of origin.” But returning refugees to their homes often means putting them back in danger. So, the question remains: should Eritreans who were kidnapped and sold return to Eritrea, where the government might imprison and torture them for fleeing conscription? Those who return have good reason to flee again, perpetuating the cycle.

Many Eritrean refugees are kidnapped by human traffickers once they cross the border into Sudan. Awet’s story is unique not only because of where he ended up but also because he was not trying to leave Eritrea. Rather, he accepted an “offer” at gunpoint and ended up imprisoned with people who had been trying to escape Eritrea.


Awet called his father to ask for his third ransom. Awet’s father and uncles had taken out loans for Awet’s first two. The voice on the phone replied, “Tell them to kill you. I got nothing.” A pause. “I have nothing. I’m not lying to you.”

When John Cena said he had five days to contact his family, 13-year-old Awet was so scared that he almost could not remember his father’s cell phone number. Finally, it came to him. Then, morning and night, with John Cena’s phone, he called his father, mother, every family member, really anyone he could think of in the time the man gave him to beg for money. Each time, Awet’s family said they could not pay his ransom but they would try. “I come from mountain people. We have no money!” Awet told him, but John Cena did not listen. 

For those five days, John Cena was kind to the 13 new prisoners, giving them three meals a day and enough water. In that windowless room, the prisoners saw no sunlight, and every morning and every night was black. At the end of those five days, not one of the captives had come up with enough money to buy his freedom. 

The food and water stopped coming. The prisoners only saw light when John Cena came in with a lamp to torture them. He soaked their bare, chained feet in freezing water and whipped the tops of their feet with a metal rod.

Awet called his family again, but no money came. He remained a prisoner in that dark room for three months. He did not see the sun, and he had no way to keep track of time. He only knew it was night when he heard John Cena and his men talking in the adjacent room. 

Awet’s captors continued to beat and whip him. They hung him by his ankles from the ceiling for an hour each week. Awet says that at one point a 300-pound guard, “just came to me and said, ‘Why are you not paying the money?’ I said, ‘My family’s searching for the money.’ Then he just came and punched me in the teeth. Three of them fell out.” Awet called his family again and found out that they had come up with $20,000, enough to satisfy John Cena temporarily. Awet’s uncle in Israel had taken cash to a man in Tel Aviv who worked with Awet’s captors. John Cena insisted that Awet get him the remaining $13,000, but for a couple days, he fed Awet more and stopped beating him. Awet struggled to eat the bread he was given. He had lost three teeth, his gums were swollen, and he swallowed blood with each bite.

John Cena was expecting to buy another group of Eritreans, and he needed to make room for them. He knew another trafficker who had room for prisoners in his own house. He gave Awet, Ahmed, and another three boys to the trafficker to imprison them. The man locked the boys in another room with no source of light. 

 Again, Awet called his parents to ask for the ransom. This time, they came up with $13,000 from family members who had fled to the United States and Europe. Ahmed had already paid. But instead of freeing them as promised, John Cena decided he wanted more money. He moved Awet, Ahmed, and the rest of the captives to a third house. 

By this time the boys’ bones jutted out from their skin. John Cena was feeding them scraps every other day, only becoming more generous when someone’s family member paid. Dehydration forced Awet to drink his own urine. The chains had cut the skin from his ankles to expose the white bone underneath. Once, when Awet was awake, unsure of the time in the dark house, a light came on. John Cena approached Awet with a cup in one hand and a gun in the other. He ordered Awet to stand up, and Awet stood straight against the wall. “If you move,” he paused, balancing the cup on Awet’s head, “I’m gonna shoot you in the forehead.” Awet shook with fear, and the cup fell to the ground. The man grabbed the cup, put it back on Awet’s head, and stepped back, raising his gun. Awet shut his eyes and tried not to tremble. The man shot the cup: target practice.

Awet called his father to ask for his third ransom. Awet’s father and uncles had taken out loans for Awet’s first two. The voice on the phone replied, “Tell them to kill you. I got nothing.” A pause. “I have nothing. I’m not lying to you.” 

Months passed. Awet watched the bellies of women who had been raped by their captors swell. The captors beat the women and poured molten plastic on their backs. Awet could no longer walk and was barely breathing. His only consolation was that Ahmed was still with him, and a little bit healthier. Ahmed could stand up, at least.

One night, the captors decided that Awet, Ahmed, and a few other boys were too skinny and too close to death. “No one was going to buy us. We were just bones,” says Awet. The men had starved and tortured them for 11 months. The captors loaded their bodies into a truck and drove through the desert towards Israel. They stopped near the border, left the boys there naked, and sped off. Awet thought he was dead. The boys who could stand, including Ahmed, limped away. They left Awet and, as he later found out, reached the Israeli border. Awet crawled by himself for five minutes until he reached a road. Before long, an Egyptian army patrol truck pulled up next to him. A soldier got out and carefully lifted him into the truck. The boys who had left Awet had already been picked up and sat across from him. 

They were brought to a hospital in Arish that held 20 other Eritrean victims of human trafficking. The hospital workers locked the Eritreans in a single room, ostensibly to make it easier to keep track of them. Every two weeks, for five minutes, the hospital attendants let the Eritreans outside to see the sun. The attendants brought them food, and they could shower, sleep, and go to the bathroom as they pleased. Because Awet could not walk, he needed someone to help him take a shower.

In the hospital, Awet met Alganesh Fisseha, an Eritrean humanitarian worker, known among refugees as “Doctor Alganesh.” She cried when she saw Awet struggling to walk and often gave him extra rations. 

By his second month in the hospital, Awet could walk again. One month later, he and Ahmed had recovered enough to leave the hospital. Dr. Alganesh gave the boys, and anyone else who agreed not to return to Eritrea, money for food, plane tickets, and a car ride to Mai-Aini Refugee Camp in Ethiopia.

By the time they left the hospital, Awet had barely seen the sun for 14 months. “I was staring at the sun,” says Awet. “Everything was dizzy.” Upon entering the Mai-Aini Refugee Camp, the boys met with Ethiopian government officials to plan their next move. Awet told them in Tigrinya what had happened and showed them his scars. An Eritrean man helped the boys translate some details from Blin to Tigrinya; school had not taught them the words for what they had been through. 

The officials asked the boys, “You want to go to America?” Awet replied, “Yeah. I want to go to a better place. I want to get an education.”

The last time Awet had called his parents was five months before, when they had told him that they could not pay to free him. He dialed his mother’s number and said, “Hey, Mom, this is Awet.” She did not believe he was still alive, and tested him on his brothers’ names and where they lived until she was convinced he was her son. Awet’s father told him that his mother had cried every day since he had been kidnapped.


Awet turned 14. Some days he talked with officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) who asked him what he had been through. His scars were his testament. Other days he walked to the hospital for treatments and medical exams. One day, playing soccer, a friend accidentally kicked Awet where the chains had cut the skin from his ankle bone. The wound split open an bled. A doctor told him to stop playing soccer until he healed. After six months, Dr. Alganesh visited the camp to give advice to refugees. She did not recognize Awet because his skeleton no longer showed through his skin.

Awet met a number of kids at the refugee camp who were hoping to pass through Sudan to get "to a safe place like Europe or America." Awet says, "I told them not to go to Sudan because they're going to get kidnapped, but they just...nobody believes it. You can see all the scars, but nobody believes."

After the boys had spent a year and eight months in the refugee camp, UNHCR officials posted a list of eight people who would be relocated to the United States. Awet raced to the nearby kitchen to read the list. He and Ahmed would leave together in one week. He ran to the nearest phone to call his uncle in Virginia to tell him he was coming to America. 

"The week felt like a month," says Awet. He bought clothes and Ethiopian spices to take with him. (He has now almost run out of the spices.) Awet thought they would go live with Eritrean people, hopefully his uncle in Virginia. Instead, they were moved to Peyton, Colorado, a suburb of Colorado Springs, to live with a white foster mother who spoke neither Blin nor Tigrinya. Neither of the boys spoke English. "I was super uncomfortable," says Awet. "I didn't know what to say when I needed water. They called the translator who speaks Blin. They translated it, and then they said if you need water, ask."

Awet started running in 2014. He was 16, a freshman in high school, and he wanted to play soccer. After Awet had lived with his foster mother for three months, she encouraged him to run cross country because she had watched the New York Marathon on television and saw that all the winners were African. “Do it for me, one year, then you can quit,” she told him. That year he ran cross country at Falcon High School in Peyton. “I was on JV,” Awet says. 

Whenever Awet wanted to call his parents back in Eritrea, his foster mother would tell him that he had to earn that right by doing chores. At the end of the school year, they took a vacation to San Diego, where Awet saw the ocean for the first time in his life. Three days after they returned to Colorado, his foster mother told him she wanted to adopt him. He called his uncle, then his parents, to ask for permission, and they all said no. So Awet told his foster mother that she could not adopt him. They argued. That night, he left the house and slept under a bus stop bench next to his high school. The next day he moved in with a new foster family in Colorado Springs.

Amaury1 web.jpg

That summer, Awet worked for the Mile High Youth Corps rebuilding hiking trails. He sent the money to his family back in Eritrea. His dad called and said, “You don’t have to worry about us. Take care of yourself. You’re in high school.”

By late 2016, his junior year and his last cross country season, Awet had dropped his 5K time to 16 minutes and four seconds. He moved out of his foster family’s house to live in an apartment with Ahmed, where they live now. Awet was probably already among the top 100 runners in the country in his age group, but he was hoping to get even faster and run a 5K in the 15:40s. That September, he ran the American Discovery Trail Marathon in two hours, 38 minutes, and 18 seconds. He placed first in the race, setting a new course record for the 19-and-under age group. He still holds the all-Colorado record for the marathon in the 19-and-under age group, according to Colorado Runner Magazine

In the spring of 2017, Awet got hit by a car and got a concussion. A week later he had a track meet. Despite his injury, he ran the mile in four minutes and 33 seconds, and the two-mile in nine minutes and 35 seconds. His doctor was not happy. Back in 2011, his captors had frequently struck him on the head, and he had suffered what were later diagnosed as multiple concussions. Proceeding to run while concussed, especially with his history, was particularly detrimental to his recovery. He still had frequent headaches. His doctor ordered him to stop running, so he did, but only for a month.

“I want to be a good runner,” Awet says, after explaining that he’s only been taking running seriously since last year. Awet says a year of serious running is nothing; he can only keep up for two miles with the Kenyan-Americans who run for the U.S. Olympic team. Awet tells me that their advantage is that they don’t have to go to school, so they can train twice a day and nap in between. They have it easy. Awet hopes to train like them one day.

“Running was my way to get out of my depression, to stop thinking about what happened,” Awet says. “It makes me super free, happy.” His coach warned him not to run marathons during cross country season, that his body did not need more of a beating. But Awet wants to run long distances. “People say I’m crazy, but I was stuck in one place for 11 months. It’s nothing for me. I’m not scared of dying. I’m not afraid of it,” he says. Then, with a laugh, “People think marathons are hard.”


Awet will graduate this year from Palmer High School. He has a full scholarship to Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, where he will run cross country on an NCAA Division I team in the fall. Talking to him, it is easy to forget where he has been. He seems like any high school student who watches movies, cracks jokes, and plays cards with friends. If he appears exceptional, it is for his athleticism, not his history. 

But Awet’s history is, of course, exceptional. It drives him to run, and it also seems to have given him a kind of gentleness you might not expect in anyone who has lived through what he has. Last fall, we met up for breakfast. A bumblebee landed on my grapefruit half and stuck its face in it. Awet looked at it like, “What are you doing, man,” shook his head, and reached for it with his pointer finger and thumb. He lightly pinched the bee’s wing and placed it down on the other side of the table, with no harm to either of them.

As gentle as he is, Awet runs with abandon and refuses to stop. After college, he wants to run marathons. “I want to go to Kenya to train,” he says. He hopes to see his family, whom he has not seen in over seven years. But he will not return to Eritrea unless he becomes an American citizen first, because otherwise the Eritrean government would arrest him or force him to join the military. He calls his family once a week now. A year ago, his father was forced to join the military. “He has the gun. At night he has to go guard something like property for the government,” Awet says. Awet’s younger brother, now 17, started smuggling people across the Eritrea-Sudan border to make money. “They ask him to take them. He only takes the money they give him,” Awet says, insisting his brother is not a human trafficker. Their father told him not to return because the government would arrest both of them for Awet’s brother’s smuggling operation. Recently Sudan closed its border with Eritrea, and Awet says his brother has not been able to return home. Another one of Awet’s brothers was in the Shagarab refugee camp in Sudan, near Kassala. He has now safely made it to Egypt and waits in a refugee camp to come to the United States. Awet does not know how long that will take. He will probably have to wait for his parents to escape to a safer country before he sees them again. He hopes that running will give him the freedom to travel and see his family sooner.

Awet mentions Meb Keflezighi, an Olympic silver medalist who won the 2009 New York City Marathon at 34 and the 2014 Boston Marathon at 38. Meb was 12 when he and his family came to the United States from Italy, where they had lived for a year after fleeing Eritrea in 1986. “I have years to get there,” Awet tells me. After college, he says, “My job is going to be, ‘Run.’”

Awet 2 web.jpg

On September 4, 2017, he ran the American Discovery Trail Half Marathon. He finished in one hour, 10 minutes, and nine seconds, setting the new overall course record and the all-Colorado record for the half marathon in his age group. About four weeks later, Awet was hanging out with friends on a Friday night and went to bed late. He woke up after five hours of sleep and biked down to Acacia Park to run the Colorado Springs Marathon.

That morning, around 11 a.m., I saw Awet for the second time, now wrapped in a green and yellow windbreaker, leaning against his bike, holding a first place trophy, and talking to Ahmed. I had no idea Awet was mad at himself. “I’m not happy with it,” he would tell me weeks later. “I believe I can run 2:24. I didn’t get enough sleep.” Awet told me that near the finish line his vision blurred and his legs seized up. The finish line photos show the face of someone who is not sure if he can stand. But he stayed on his feet.

A Bloody Exchange

How much would you charge for one of your kidneys? $1,000? $100,000? Sure, the general medical consensus is that you can live with one kidney. But what if that kidney fails? At best it sounds like a gamble. At worst, you die.  But if someone offered you enough, would you take it? How much will it be? 

The truth is that it doesn’t really matter in the United States. Since Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act in 1984, it has been illegal to sell human organs, though a person can choose to donate their organs. While the sale or donation of organs might sound sinister and distant, a topic reserved for black markets or postmortem specifications on drivers licenses, blood donation, which is fundamentally comparable, is probably a little more familiar. 

There are manifold opportunities to give blood, especially for young, rosy-cheeked students. Blood drives pop up on college campuses like zits on a 13-year-old (as you might be familiar with (the former, not latter (maybe both))). But selling blood, while technically legal, is stigmatized: in practice, hospitals don’t buy blood labelled as “sold,” largely because of the shadowy ethical foundation surrounding these sales. For many people, something seems rather distasteful about the idea that people can profit off the sale of a part of the human body. So, when you give your blood, you donate it. An act of total altruism.  

While you can’t walk out of your neighborhood blood drive with a crisp $50 bill in pocket, you can donate blood plasma for compensation. Plasma is a part of your blood—55 percent of it to be precise—and is largely composed of water, in addition to electrolytes and hundreds of proteins. In your body, suspended amidst the plasma, are white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. Once separated from the rest of your blood, plasma is a worn-out, off-yellow liquid.

Having tripled in size from 2008 to 2014, plasma pharmaceuticals now constitute a nearly $20 billion industry. Plasma, used for research and development of medicines for hemophiliacs, treatment of serious burns, and certain immune disorders, has settled into a cozy and expanding niche in the American medical industry—indeed, only in the American medical industry. The U.S. supplies around 94 percent of the plasma used around the world. A portion of donated plasma goes toward research, but the rest fuels the production of a variety of pharmaceuticals.

The industry of plasma donation has a scarred and tumultuous history. In the mid-20th century, companies interested in harvesting plasma compelled prisoners to “donate” by offering them pennies on the dollar as compensation. In the 1980s, reckless medical practices during plasma withdrawal resulted in a wave of HIV and hepatitis spread by the ingestion of drugs that contained donated plasma. Plasma sales shot down for a few years because of the scandal, but, after the implementation of stricter regulations and oversight of plasma extraction, the market began to grow again. Total “donations” jumped from 12.5 million in 2006 to about 23 million just five years later. Although most plasma donations are compensated for, clinics unflinchingly use the term “donation,” trying to escape the ethical ambiguities involved with selling parts of the human body. 

While health standards for plasma donation improved, regulation of Big Plasma’s business practices and ethics remained sorely lacking, and now a select few companies dominate the field. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complains in a 2011 report that “the plasma-derived products industry has operated as a tight oligopoly,” and describes “intentional sharing of competitive information” by companies to avoid “oversupplying the market or starting a price war.” The FTC adds, “There was evidence of a history of coordinated activity in the industry, and that is going to raise concerns when you’re reducing the number of competitors.”

While the journey of blood plasma after extraction is tremendously complex, the donation process itself is relatively simple. After sitting in a waiting room of a plasma clinic for what can often stretch to a couple hours, you’re brought to a part of the clinic lined with identical, sterile hospital beds. Standing to the side of each bed, as though guarding it, is a complicated medical device with tubes running in and out of it. In an explanatory video by BioLife Plasma Services, which operates a clinic in Colorado Springs, this instrument is referred to, rather ambiguously and ominously, as “the separation device.” Once connected to the machine, the “separation device” draws blood from your arm as you flex and relax your fist to stimulate blood flow. It separates out plasma and then, for another few minutes, pumps plasma-deprived blood and a sterile saline solution back into your arm. The newly-extracted plasma is sent to labs for further “fractionation,” where specific proteins are separated from the rest so that they can be used in pharmaceuticals. 

Overall, the process seems benign enough. Most clinics incessantly claim that no long-term consequences exist. But Dr. Roger Kobayashi, an immunologist at UCLA, warned during an interview with ABC News that “we really don’t know what the long-term effects [are] because it’s a relatively new phenomenon.” That’s largely why other medically advanced countries have balked at allowing plasma pharma businesses to take off. 

Recent Colorado College graduate Isaac Radner donated plasma in the Denver area. He recalled feeling that something was off during the process. As the non-plasma constituents of blood were pumped back into his arm, he “had an awful feeling of pressure building up in [his] vein.” Since this part of the cycle only happened for five minutes at a time, Radner didn’t have time to mention the discomfort to an attendant. He added that during his visit there was a shortage of saline, which is normally used to help rehydrate patients—a shortage the clinic claimed was “nationwide.” They made him drink a Gatorade before he could leave, a common policy to ensure a patient’s well-being. Radner might have walked out of the clinic $50 richer, but he was left wondering if everything had gone right. After a prolonged reflection on selling his plasma, Radner would soon decide that donation just wasn’t worth it.


Talecris Plasma Resources is hidden amongst one of those brutalist medical industrial parks, its windowless brick exteriors matching that of the surrounding buildings. When I stopped by to learn more (I have wretched, iron-rich blood, so I can’t actually go through the donation process), the clinic didn’t seem too different from a regular doctor’s office. Though the clinic was lacking in Legos and subtly outdated copies of Sports Illustrated Kids, I might as well have been at my old pediatrician’s office (kind of). A row of machines was visible from the waiting room, where patients entered their basic personal and medical details. Hidden from view, an attendant screamed first names and last initials to summon the next donor in line. The attendants aren’t doctors, nor are they required to have nursing certification.

I visited the clinic at 10 a.m. on a Monday, and the eight or so patients in the waiting room represented a diversity of age, gender, and race. After aimlessly milling around the small waiting room, I approached the receptionist in hopes of learning about the process. But, she demanded to see my Social Security card and that I pass an initial exam to learn anything more. 

Few of the patients appeared young and healthy, of the ilk that campus blood drives seek out. A couple of the plasma donors with whom I’ve spoken mentioned that, at clinics they attended, most other patients “seemed like they might really need the money.” This sounds presumptuous and pejorative, and perhaps it is. But there might be some truth to it. The industry exploded during the Great Recession of the early aughts, as thousands of Americans lost their life savings and looked for quick sources of income anew. About 80 percent of the plasma donation clinics in the U.S. are, suspectly, located in the country’s poorer neighborhoods—places where poor health is endemic. 

This disproportionate distribution has aroused a fair amount of criticism of the industry for targeting poorer Americans, who are far more willing to supply plasma than their wealthy counterparts. Watchdogs of the industry wave a red flag at this paradigm and often suggest that incentivizing poor and disadvantaged patients to donate plasma makes it more likely that they will have contagious diseases and that they will lie about these pre-existing conditions to get the promised compensation. The presence of this structure of incentives led to the late-century wave of infections from plasma donation, though hematological health screening has improved greatly since then due to market growth and greater pressure for accountability.

Dr. Kobayashi puts the result of this targeting of poor Americans succinctly when he says, “A simple gift of life has now evolved into a multinational, highly profitable corporate enterprise...what was once an act of altruism has now evolved into an act of necessity or desperation.” Sure, to some extent people can do what they please with their body, as they should be able to. But in well-established market economies, some unsavory realities emerge with regard to body commodification. When you’re poor, selling your plasma can become less of a choice and more of a necessity. Thus, we see the overwhelming majority of plasma clinics in impoverished neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are populated with marginalized people who have been shoved, by that brutish invisible hand, into needing a $50 stipend from selling a part of their body to put food on the table. Does the donor really have a choice? At clinics like Talecris, most donors are repeat donors. They speak of ritualized processes, like using their left arm for the donation one week and then their right arm the next week. 

It strikes me as imposing and pretentious to tell the people waiting in the lobby of Talecris Plasma Resources that they shouldn’t be able to sell their plasma for $40 to 60—that they’re “commodifying their bodies,” or that it’s wrong. Even if the process takes you three hours, the donor is earning far more than what a minimum wage job could offer in the same span of time. It certainly seems like a worthwhile use of their time. 

Clinics like Talecris insist that any compensation they provide is for the time spent donating, not for the plasma itself. They tirelessly obfuscate the fact that you are profiting off of a part of your body. Testimonial videos, forums, and Facebook pages are filled to the brim with customers gushing over how good it feels to “save someone’s life.” Explanatory videos feature cartoon characters like “Grif the Elf” who is apparently “looking for way [sic] to make a difference in his community year round.” 

Many plasma donors speak warmly of their experience. As a bonus, the compensation allows them to get their kid a Christmas gift or the week’s groceries. One donor celebrates, on Facebook, how “the donor compensation gives me a little bit of money to spend on the kids every week after my wife spends all of mine.” Another proposes an idea: “How about special recognition rewards for the most loyal and dedicated donors. I am coming up on donation #200 since November of 2015. By the calculations, I’ve donated over 43 U.S. gallons of plasma to date.” 

Hannah Bollen, a junior at Colorado College, noted that, for her, donating plasma and blood was “a form of community service.” Her comment was reminiscent of the remarks made by dozens of Talecris’ donors. She donated plasma at a blood drive run in the Worner Campus Center, so she wasn’t compensated. But when I pressed her to consider getting compensated for her plasma, she conceded that it might “stop feeling like community service.” 

Plasma donation in its current form may strike you as benign, and it very well might be. But it raises a series of important questions about a person’s freedom with their body and the shadier, more insidious side of market economies. Medically modernized countries (mostly the U.S.) draw an arbitrary line between the ways people should and shouldn’t be able to sell parts of their bodies. Our medical system turns up its nose at selling blood but screams to buy a part of that blood from you. 

A couple years ago, a 2011 Federal Appeals court case made it legal to sell your bone marrow, a body part previously forbidden from being sold under the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act. We all-too-easily lead ourselves into simple delusions, comfortable ones. Like that the $50 from a plasma donation center is for “your time” and not a part of your body. Or that selling plasma is substantively different from selling blood. Or that it should be legal to sell bone marrow, but selling a kidney should not be.  

The market for blood plasma is, to me, not so much  a cultural infection—something bad in and of itself—as it is a symptom. No, the government shouldn’t be able to tell anyone that selling a part of my body to make a needed $50 is wrong. But the fact that any American would need to do this in the first place is profoundly discouraging. Perhaps there is more to why the U.S. is the only medically modernized country that has embraced the unfailing advances of Big Plasma. We are seduced by profit motives, and struggle to see beyond them. 

America has so much trouble helping those citizens who really need its help. With such a destitute and inadequate net for social welfare, it makes sense that market solutions avail themselves to people who need $100 more a month than they are getting. And when the market’s solution involves selling a part of your body, it is not evidence of the moral shortcomings of donors, but rather a glaring indictment of the American government’s treatment of its disadvantaged.

Born of Necessity

“Quimbombó, quimbombó echoed off the sides of the weathered concrete buildings of Havana. A man poked his head out from a terrace and tossed a woven basket on a string down to the street below, where a woman with a shopping cart full of okra, or quimbombó, stood waiting. She replaced the coins in the basket with okra, and the man hoisted it back up to his balcony. 

This woman spends her days delivering okra directly to her neighbors—a trusting exchange we don’t see often enough in the United States. In modern industrial societies, food production happens on a much larger scale. The mass production of food usually depends on polluting the environment and our bodies, wasting enormous amounts of food, and exploiting low-wage labor. What’s more, the U.S.’ system prevents the kind of personal connection through food that this woman seems to have with her neighbors in Havana. Industrial agriculture offers us an overwhelming abundance of options on supermarket shelves. But it also means that the choice of what to buy at the grocery store becomes a political one. 

In the United States, attempting to buy only organic, non-GMO food means you fit the mold of a crunchy, progressive friend of the earth. But being a healthy, environmentally responsible citizen is a choice only a privileged few get to make. You need the money, and the knowledge about how food is produced, to be able to go to King Soopers and support your beliefs with your dollars—to choose multigrain bread over Wonder Bread. If you can afford it, you can even go to the local farmer’s market instead. The true puritans cultivate vegetables in their backyards, so they don’t even have to enter a lowly supermarket. 

Cuba seemed to fulfill this green dream on a national scale. Buying and growing organic is ubiquitous in the Cuban food system. Cuban farming practices are exactly what New England organic growers drool over: no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, and no petroleum-powered machinery. The only crops that are produced on a large enough scale that they need to be grown nonorganic are tobacco and sugarcane, export crops grown in order to satisfy Americans’ desire for a classic Cuban cigar or mojito. This means that Cuba’s only pesticide-laden crops are sold to developed nations that already indulge in pesticide-laden industrial agriculture. 


My desire to study Cuban agriculture arose out of a longing for familiarity, both of farming and my own Cuban roots. Before visiting Cuba I only had my father—a white-passing, introverted immigrant—to give me any idea of what Havana was like. He left the island in 1960, at eight years old, just a year after Fidel Castro came into power. Most Cubans who escaped during the revolution were relatively wealthy, educated, and conservative. They had both the values and the means to escape across the Florida Strait. But my dad ended up further to the left than Bernie Sanders. 

He doesn’t talk about his Cuban roots unless probed, and because his accent faded long ago, a conversation rarely gives him away. But when he sings, it’s often in Spanish. Some of the strongest connections to Cuba I experienced growing up were the island colors he chose to paint the walls of our house: mint green, peach, rubber duck yellow. And my father still retains his staunch frugality, refusing to throw away the stuff that’s accumulated in piles on the shelves. Like the island where he was born, he is colorful, resourceful, and reluctant to spend money on anything new. This I have inherited (sometimes with an ounce of resentment). 

The importance of community is at the heart of my dad’s beliefs, which is why I ended up being raised in an intentional, sustainable cohousing community. Pioneer Valley Cohousing is a mix between a condo association and a commune, where neighbors share land, values, and resources in an attempt to foster community. Cohousing residents are responsible for collective chores and collaborative decision-making. For the first two decades of my life, I lived among this quirky mix of retired hippies and young families, nibbling carrots in the garden, collecting chicken eggs, and eating meals made from these homegrown ingredients with 40 of my neighbors twice a week. Crunchy paradise, indeed. 

Now, community and sustainable agriculture are fused in my mind. To make small-scale, eco-friendly farming work, you need a network of consumers who share values. The existence of community has always depended on equitable food systems and vice versa. In the U.S., a cooperative lifestyle is a privilege, accessible to few. But in Cuba, community and organic food appear to be woven into the fabric of society. At least that’s what it looked like on paper. 


By the time I stood in a checkout line at a Cuban supermarket, my hope of rediscovering agricultural community had faded. Beads of sweat gathered along my hairline as I fumbled with two five-gallon jugs of water. Vegetables were absent from the shelves, which were sparsely stocked with plastic-wrapped, vacuum-sealed, and not-quite-frozen food that appeared to be sweating as much as I was. Despite the sparseness, the bustle of Cubans shopping for staples filled the air with chatter and a jovial spirit you don’t see at American grocery stores.

My spirits lifted a bit when, walking home, I passed an agromercado, an outdoor air market overflowing with root vegetables, greens, and tropical fruit. All of the produce was fresh and organic, as I had been expecting. But I would later learn that the agromercados were only masking the reality that rice and beans characterized the Cuban diet, not organic produce. Most Cubans can’t afford to shop at the agromercados on a government salary. I set out to find a farm that supplied a market vendor with vegetables so I could follow the process of organic farming from the source. I ended up at the largest and most renowned urban farm in Cuba: Vivero Alamar. 

I had met a British woman living in Cuba, who told me to wait on a street corner in Old Havana for a shared taxi heading toward the district of Alamar. I squeezed onto the wide leather seat in an already-packed 1950s Cadillac. After nervously searching the passing buildings and beaches, I somehow found the correct soda stand that marked my destination. I hopped out and asked around until I found myself staring at an overflowing vegetable stand beneath a chipped white sign that read “Organopónico Vivero Alamar.” A man directed me toward an expanse of crop fields to wait for Raúl, a farmer who would show me around. 

Raúl and I talked under the thatched roof of a cafe. He fiddled with a sprig of yerba buena as he explained the disconnect I had observed between organic agriculture and food consumption in Cuba. Raul had been working at Vivero Alamar for the past few years and took pride in the farm’s international reputation and impact on the local food economy. As the largest organic urban farm in Cuba, Vivero Alamar spreads over 25 acres and grows everything from peppers and plantain trees to medicinal mushrooms and ornamental mariposa lilies. They sell 80 percent of their harvest directly to the local community through farm stands. The rest ends up in hotels and restaurants in Havana. To improve output without pesticides, they practice companion planting. This method involves the pairing of two plants to maintain soil quality and prevent erosion. For example, marigolds are planted to repel insects and nematodes that would otherwise destroy root systems. Vivero Alamar improves the soil quality of their land, while helping to feed the greater Havana community. And these methods are not unique to Vivero Alamar. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and oil-powered agricultural machinery are entirely absent from any of Havana’s urban farms. 

Raúl’s overview of the farm left me speechless and giddy: here, there is no produce that’s weeks old and shipped from hundreds of miles away. Ninety percent of vegetables eaten in Havana are grown locally, and all are grown organically. Environmentalist farm geeks eat that shit up. But when I expressed my admiration, Raul laughed incredulously. “Sure, we take pride in the fact that it’s all natural, but it wasn’t a choice,” he told me. “When there was a lack of teachers, an education initiative was created; when there was a lack of food and fuel, people began to farm. Simple.” 

“Sure, we take pride in the fact that it’s all natural, but it wasn’t a choice,” he told me. “When there was a lack of teachers, an education initiative was created; when there was a lack of food and fuel, people began to farm. Simple.” 

Raul was referring to the Special Period. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 propelled Cuba into an economic crisis. Cuba had relied on the Soviets for petroleum, gas, medicine, and food. After the collapse, Cuba remained hostile toward the global capitalist economy, and the U.S. refused to trade with the island nation just 90 miles off the coast, so Cuba faced severe shortages. The average Cuban lost 12 pounds. The Special Period forced Cubans to be extremely resourceful, which led to the development of sustainable agriculture. Due to the lack of imported oil to fuel tractors and chemicals to spray on crops, Cuba resorted to using a system of organopónicos, urban farms like Vivero Alamar that use companion planting, crop rotation, integrated pest management, and human labor. Now, these organic farms are nestled between bustling Havana city blocks.

From my perch as an affluent American foodie, I had fetishized the natural cultivation techniques, while remaining oblivious to the circumstances that forced Cuba to adopt these food production methods. Unlike activist-minded consumers from the U.S., Cubans never had the privilege to say “no” to Roundup or “yes” to fair trade. In the U.S., organic food is a highly politicized dietary trend—by eating organic, you alter personal consumption in support of alleviating global problems. We have adopted organic farming as a form of protest. But in Cuba, organic agriculture was born of necessity. People needed food, and they didn’t have access to expensive pesticides and machinery; they couldn’t afford to be worry about ethical concern for the quality of the land or, say, the lifestyle of their pigs. 

Cuban farmers are government employees, subject to the will of the Castros. What the government says goes. For now, their mandate is, “Live simply, don’t use oil.” But if the Cuban government were able to increase their profits from export-oriented production by welcoming Monsanto or artificial pesticides, then the farmers at Vivero Alamar would have no choice but to abandon their small-scale agroecological practices. 

As I left Vivero Alamar, I noticed a painted sign that advertised “all-organic,” which struck me as ironic considering that this was by no means a selling point in an all-organic country. I started thinking back on my time so far in Cuba: the few times I had eaten food that was labeled as organic and local were in chic cafes that catered more to tourists than locals. After visiting the farm, I ate those veggie-stuffed crepes beneath tropical plants, surrounded by rustic wooden décor, with the sour taste of disillusionment on my tongue, knowing that the average Cuban couldn’t even afford food like this. 

I realized that I could not equate my backyard garden (even the one in my hippy town) with the hardships Cubans have faced in figuring out how to grow food the “old-fashioned” way. Nor did I find ethnic validation by reveling in Cuba’s eco-socialist agenda or discovering the harmonious way that healthy, organic produce has flourished in Havana. Instead, I realized that going to Cuba does not make me more Cuban. I may have the heritage, but I haven’t suffered from unreliable access to food, antiquated technology, or lack of social mobility. 

I had a new sense of a country I had previously regarded as an idyllic leftist’s paradise. I had so revered Cuba’s iconic communitarian spirit but had ignored the scarcity and isolation that has been Cuba’s reality. The U.S. might well have to contend with a similar situation—Cuba has already experienced a world that’s coming down the pipeline due to climate change; a world in which oil is no longer a viable fuel option and water is even more scarce than it is now. We too might be forced into a future where resource shortages abound. 

But as much as Vivero Alamar had initially inspired me with its sustainable practices, it dashed my hope that communities in the U.S. would be able to follow its example. The U.S. can’t model a shift to sustainable agriculture after a country that never had the choice to be anything but that—we can’t look to Cuba for a set of values that will change our food system. Cuba didn’t arrive at its system by means of a social movement, but rather by necessity. 

The Other Minimum Wage

When a sheepherder named Alejandro saw me approaching his tiny trailer in the mountains of western Colorado, he stepped out and greeted me warily in Spanish: “Hola. Perdon, pero…como me encontraste?” “Hi. Sorry, but…how did you find me?”

Not a typical greeting, but Alejandro rarely greets visitors—or anyone else, for that matter. His trailer sat among a thousand grazing sheep, as close to the middle of nowhere as one can get. We were a mile off a dirt road that splits off of County Road 16, which begins about 10 miles outside of Loma, CO, which is about 20 miles outside of Grand Junction, CO, all of which is pretty far away from any place most Americans have ever heard of. “Binoculars,” I replied.

Once I had convinced Alejandro (whose last name has been omitted to protect his anonymity) that I wasn’t working for the government or his boss, he welcomed me into his trailer, which he called a campito. He closed the door and said, “I would offer you a place to sit, but the only places are my bed or the stove.” So we stood, and Alejandro recounted his routine: he gets up with the sun, eats some oatmeal, and heads out to round up the sheep that have wandered off overnight. He spends the day checking the sheep for diseases, hauling water for them to drink, herding them to grazing areas, and protecting them from dangers, which he listed, raising a finger for each one: “coyotes, mountain lions, poisonous plants, foxes, and wolves.”

Alejandro is one of roughly 2,000 sheepherders working in the United States on an H-2A visa. The H-2A visa, which was created primarily for seasonal agricultural work, allows foreigners to come to the U.S. for temporary employment if there are not enough domestic workers to meet employers’ needs. Most recipients of H-2A visas are in fact seasonal farmworkers, but sheepherders usually work year-round, for three years at a time. They make somewhere from $3 to $7.25 per hour (depending on who you ask), and they spend the vast majority of each year living alone in small trailers, usually many miles from other people. They’re on call 24 hours per day, seven days per week, for almost the entire year.

I told Alejandro I was doing research on sheepherding in Colorado and he asked, “Why? It’s not a pretty job.” (That much had been clear to me from the outset.) I asked, what the ugliest part of the job is, and I expected him to mention one of the grievances other herders had raised with me: the winter weather, the low wage, the tiny living quarters, the lack of a toilet, the 80-hour workweek, mistreatment from the boss, or, as another sheepherder put it, “lots of other shit.”

But without hesitation, Alejandro said “the loneliness.” He paused and clarified, slowing his Spanish down for me, “You cannot imagine the loneliness.” Until then, no herder I had spoken with had mentioned loneliness aloud, but nearly all of them had implied that it was difficult. They do, after all, live alone almost all year. They’re rarely allowed to leave the land on which they work, and they’re often not allowed to have visitors. When a herder does have human contact, it’s almost always with his boss and, even then, rarely more than once every few days.

Alejandro did go on to describe the other difficulties of his job, echoing the claims made in a 2010 report by Colorado Legal Services (CLS), an organization that provides free legal assistance to migrant agricultural workers and their families. The report, called “Overworked and Underpaid: H-2A Herders in Colorado,” relies on a survey of 93 herders in Colorado. The survey was conducted by Thomas Acker, a Spanish professor at Colorado Mesa University, and Ignacio Alvarado, a former H-2A sheepherder.

The findings of the report are striking enough to repeat verbatim: About 73 percent of the herders reported having zero days off over the course of a year. More than 80 percent were not permitted to leave their ranch. 85 percent were not allowed to have visitors who were not ranch employees. Roughly 70 percent reported never having access to a functioning toilet. 85 percent were never permitted to engage in social activities. Almost 50 percent reported not having the opportunity or ability to read their employment contracts.

Ignacio Alvarado spent months driving around western Colorado interviewing herders for to get the results published in this report. He hoped the report could be used in the court cases about herders that have sprung up in recent years. Alvarado, who came to the U.S. from Chile about 20 years ago on an H-2A visa, worked as a sheepherder for six years himself. Since then, he’s advocated for herders through local legal aid organizations.

I met Alvarado at his house near Loma, and he recounted his career as a sheepherder: Twenty years ago, when he arrived at his job and was taken to his campito, Alvarado asked his boss, “Excuse me, I’m going to live in this thing?” His boss replied, “Yeah, and for three years, buddy.” Alvarado told me he remembers thinking, “In Chile, a dog would live in this thing.” When he asked his boss how he would shower, his boss said, “You don’t shower anymore.”

Not only were the conditions rough (and rougher than they are now), but the pay at the time was also only $650 per month, or, in Alvarado’s estimation, 29 cents per hour. But the wage was still better than it was for sheepherders in Chile, so Alvarado renewed his visa after three years. Toward the end of the second visa period, though, he caught a disease from a tick. He went to the ranch to ask his boss to take him to the hospital, but his boss had left on a trip. Over the phone, his boss said he would send his wife to take him. He waited for days, but she never came. So Alvarado used the ranch’s phone to call a friend of his, who took him to a hospital. At the time, it was written into most herders’ contracts that they could not leave the ranch or grazing lands. “So,” Alvarado said, “technically, it was a crime to save my own life.”

All this occurred not far from Loma, where Alvarado still lives, fourteen years after leaving the sheepherding industry. I asked if he had ever considered moving somewhere else, and he said he’s only stuck around in Loma this long in order help out other herders. Aside from his legal aid and advocacy work, Alvarado often drives into the hills outside Loma to find herders and bring them back to his house to give them a good meal and a shower. “Then,” he said, “I drive them back before anyone notices they were gone.” The herders in the area clearly appreciate what he does: one of them referred to him as, “el otro Santo Ignacio'“—the other Saint Ignatius.


It was with Alvarado in mind that I began to talk to the ranchers who employ H-2A sheepherders. The industry they describe bears almost no relation to the world Alejandro and Alvarado recounted. Warren Roberts, a rancher working near New Castle, CO, said that what seem at first to be rough conditions are actually part of what he called a “great exchange” between ranchers and herders. In fact, Roberts said of his herders, “We treat them probably as good, maybe even better, than family members.”

Roberts stressed that the men who come to work as sheepherders on the H-2A program are “making tremendous money for their lifestyle.” He recounted a conversation he had with Department of Labor (DOL) employees who came to audit his ranch a few years ago: “You all have no idea how good it is for these guys, how much it improves their families’ situations because of being able to work up here,” he told them. Roberts also pointed to the fact that wages have increased “like crazy” in the past decade. And wages have in fact doubled since 2010. The government-determined wage floor was $750 per month in 2010 and, after a 2015 ruling, is now at roughly $1,500 per month.

And herders are, as Roberts said, using their salaries to improve their families’ lives. One herder I spoke to said that he used his salary to provide his two daughters with an education, which they would never have had otherwise. Other herders are able to get a parent a new set of teeth or a sibling sorely needed medical care. Alejandro, for example, is slowly sending back money for, in his words, “a real house” for his family. At this rate, though, he won’t get to live in it for another decade.

Wages aside, ranchers seem to think that the working conditions are far from brutal, especially compared to how they claim the herders live in their home countries. Angelo “Butch” Theos, whose ranch is near Meeker, CO, said, “These guys come from Peru, where they lived in a hovel. They dig a hole, they have three or four pieces of tin. That’s their roof, and that’s where they stay. And they bring their families, too, and they burn cow dung for fire.” Theos went on: “A lot of them won’t even send pictures back to their wives of where they stay because it’s so nice! It’s way different than Peru, and these guys obviously wouldn’t be here if they didn’t like it.”

Although living conditions in herders’ home countries are often shocking, the herders’ own accounts complicate Theos’ view. Alvarado told me, “In Chile, I worked from Monday to Saturday, but I had Sunday off, and I was with my family on the ranch, and, well, I cleaned myself. But [the ranchers] think that because we come from over there—from whatever country they don’t know about—we must have lived in a hut under the trees, or something.”

Theos, Roberts, and other ranchers tend to highlight essential cultural (or, as they say, “natural”) differences between Peruvians and Americans to explain why a job that no Americans want is not only desirable, but also suitable for Peruvians. The point is, as Roberts put it, “They’re not Americans. They don’t think the same way.” Or, as Theos put it, “They’re well-suited to the job in a way that Americans just aren’t.” 

Claims like these imply a stereotype we ought to be wary of, but the ranchers are right that Americans don’t want these jobs: There are, according to ranchers and herders alike, zero American sheepherders working in Colorado, and very few even in the United States as a whole. Ranchers and herders also both agree that sheepherders from Latin America tend to work much harder and be more appreciative than their American counterparts. The herders I spoke to myself were sometimes exceedingly grateful for their wages, and it’s undeniable that they work hard under conditions no American would tolerate.

But whereas ranchers say these qualities are somehow inherent in the herders, herders themselves point out that they don’t work 80-hour weeks because it suits them. They do it because they need to. One herder, who requested anonymity because he feared repercussions from his boss, said that herders “come out of desperation.” Alejandro said, “There is no culture, no personality, that is fitting for this job.” He paused, then gestured around his trailer: “Nobody prefers to live alone, without their family, in a box like this.”


Butch Theos was one of the few ranchers who let me speak to one of his herders (most refused, saying their employees couldn’t be interrupted). We drove down a county road “trailing” sheep to protect them from oncoming traffic as they moved to new grazing land, and when we arrived, Theos pointed out a herder named Orlando and whistled him over. Orlando didn’t hear, so Theos shouted “Veni!” Orlando, who isn’t much more than five feet tall, jumped off his horse and waded through the sheep. Theos put a thick hand on Orlando’s shoulder and said, “This guy wants to ask some questions. You understand?” Orlando nodded. While we talked, Theos stood about ten feet behind me on the road, just close enough that he might be within earshot. After every question I asked, Orlando looked over my shoulder at his boss.

“How are the working conditions?” I asked.

“Good,” he said, and looked at his feet.

“It’s better than Peru?” Orlando said nothing, and shuffled his work belt around.

“The salary is much higher?”

“Yes.”

“Is it hard?”

“…sometimes. But I’m very grateful.”

“The boss is good?”

“The boss is good.”

After a few more curt answers, I asked whether or not he felt it was safe for us to be talking here. Orlando looked directly at me for the first time and said, “No.” To clarify, I asked again, “Do you feel like you can talk about the job without being punished for what you say?” He shook his head and said that he should go tend to the sheep. I had nearly identical interactions with three other herders, each under a rancher’s wary gaze.

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since ranchers have an unusually high degree of control over their herders. Under the rules of the H-2A program, a rancher can fire a herder (which amounts to deportation) whenever a herder “has not performed his job in a satisfactory manner.” So in addition to controlling the herder’s food, water, and housing, the rancher also controls his status in the U.S.

If Roberts and Theos make it sound like the herders are hardworking, well-suited to the work, and grateful for every penny, it’s because in front of their bosses, they are. And they’re especially grateful in comparison to the few Americans who have tried sheepherding. But whereas ranchers pin it on cultural differences, herders uphold these stereotypes because they know they’ll face dire consequences if they don’t.


Although it’s an oversimplification, people in the know tend to have one of two general views on the herding industry: One group sees it as “a great exchange,” the other as an industry rife with exploitation. In the past decade, these two views have become so polarized that they’ve sparked a number of legal cases, some of which have risen fairly in high in the federal court system.

Hispanic Affairs Project v. Acosta (Alexander Acosta is the Secretary of the Department of Labor) is a case brought on behalf of herders against the federal government. The plaintiffs in the case contend that the DOL, which sets the herders’ minimum wage, underestimated the average number of hours herders work per week. In 2015, the DOL proposed that sheepherders should be paid based on a 44-hour workweek, which was an average of estimates from a few different sources.

One side of the average was based on an estimate the Western Range Association (WRA) and Mountain Plains Agricultural Service (MPAS)—two ranchers’ associations that act as middlemen between herders, ranchers, and the government. They both proposed a 40-hour workweek, which is what herders had already been paid for. 

The other side of the average was a 48-hour week calculation, submitted by Edward Tuddenham, an attorney representing workers in a court case that set the herders’ hours previously. Tuddenham relied on data from a form that ranchers fill out. Ranchers, however, usually fill out those forms in accordance with the hours that MPAS and WRA tell them to write. So the supposed average used two similar numbers that can both be traced back to the ranchers’ associations. The voices that were left out of this “average” are, of course, those of the herders.

In order to find what they considered a genuine compromise, the herders’ attorneys pointed the DOL to the Colorado Legal Services report on which Ignacio Alvarado worked. The study finds that 62 percent of herders “actively worked” at least 81 hours per week and that 35 percent worked at least 91 hours per week, so if herders were to be employed according to these numbers, their salary would double. Unfortunately for the herders, according to the court’s opinion from July 2017, the DOL “recognized the results of the Colorado Study but also that ‘two individual employers expressly disputed the methodology in the Colorado Study, stating that it was not a reliable source and was based on biased [interview] questions.’”

The DOL said the study was “informative, but very limited,” because it pertained only to Colorado and was therefore “not representative of the industry as a whole.” But as Dermot Lynch, an attorney for the plaintiffs, pointed out to me, herders cross state borders into Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah all the time, and the hours that herders work in Colorado don’t differ significantly in other states. According to Lynch, the CLS report also abided by all the necessary standards. It surveyed enough herders to be statistically significant, and it recorded and explained its questions.

Nevertheless, the DOL ultimately trusted Tuddenham’s assessment that “the 48-hour estimate...is based on the most comprehensive and detailed data...” That data was from the forms that ranchers fill out, and those forms might have been comprehensive and detailed—but they also might have been entirely wrong.

The herders’ baseline salary (and that of other migrant workers) is determined by a tool that the DOL uses called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR). The rate is based on the average hourly wage for similarly employed workers in a particular region. Although it seems like one more innocuous government acronym, the AEWR is ultimately what determines how much money the herders are able to send home to their families. Strangely, the AEWR purports to determine a salary that would make the job “competitive” in America. In other words, it’s supposed to determine a salary high enough that, if there weren’t a labor shortage, American workers would want the job.

Herders I’ve spoken to have actually laughed when I suggested that, in the eyes of the government, their wage was competitive for American workers. To its credit, the DOL is aware that the AEWR is laughably dysfunctional. The DOL recognized, for example, that in any survey of current wages, “The presence of undocumented workers in a given industry depresses wages for the industry.” The agricultural industry is comprised of somewhere between 46 and 70 percent undocumented workers, so the wage depression is significant: On average, undocumented agricultural workers make roughly $7 per hour and work about 40 hours per week. Because herders are working 80-hour workweeks but only getting paid for half of it, they’re making legally roughly the same amount that undocumented workers are making illegally—and doing more work for the money.

Nominally, the H-2A program is supposed to end the illegal exploitation of migrant worker. But if the program is leaving workers with conditions equivalent to those of undocumented workers and paying them less per hour, then it’s just legalizing an illegal workforce and leaving the exploitation in place. On a cynical reading, that’s the point of the H-2A program.

Ranchers’ defense here is that shortage of American sheepherders is simply inevitable in the herding industry, given how brutal the job is. But in the natural gas industry (among others) American workers have recently flocked to dangerous but relatively high-paying jobs. Perhaps U.S. workers, then, could become “suited” to the job of an H-2A worker. Employers would simply have to offer higher wages. But because they all want to stay competitive in the market, ranchers won’t raise wages unless the baseline for the entire industry is raised. Raising the baseline would be the job of the DOL, which, unfortunately for herders, doesn’t seem to trust herders’ own accounts of their jobs.

Jennifer Lee, a professor of law at Temple University, describes all this in a paper published in the Stanford Law & Policy Review. Lee writes that the legal framework of programs like the H-2A, “delegates substantial power to employers to essentially price-fix depressed wages and transform jobs into ones that require backbreaking productivity. By degrading the wages and working conditions of these low wage jobs, employers ensure that they can only be filled by highly compliant and productive guest workers.” So, according to Lee, what seem on the surface to be genuine domestic labor shortages are actually manufactured by the government and ranchers associations, which work together to keep wages so low and conditions so poor that Americans won’t take the jobs.

Employers getting together and fixing wages is hardly a new story. But wage-fixing usually happens in the absence of government regulation, and leads to calls for more regulation. In the case of H-2A herders, however, rancher associations are deciding on a fixed wage with the government. This leaves workers and legal advocates in a situation which, as Alvarado said, is “very not good. At all.”


Guest worker programs like the H-2A began in 1917, when thousands of American farm workers went to fight in World War I and left the DOL flooded with ranchers’ complaints about labor shortages. To solve the problem, the government could have granted legal immigration status to thousands of Mexicans who were willing to work in the U.S. for a low wage, but widespread racism made it impossible to garner congressional support. So instead, the government devised a guest worker program as a way to provide cheap labor to the U.S. without allowing immigrants to claim government benefits or civil rights granted to citizens. The U.S. gained the benefit of cheap immigrant labor without the alleged problems of integrating immigrants into American society.

Although parts of the program were shut down after World War I, the agricultural portion continued to operate until the onset of the Great Depression. The 1930s ushered in a labor surplus, a wave of xenophobia, and the consequent mass deportation of predominantly Mexican guest workers.

When World War II rolled around, American laborers were again leaving farms for the armed forces (or the defense industry), creating another genuine worker shortage in agriculture. In response, President Roosevelt authorized the Bracero Program in 1942. Much like the earlier guest worker program, the Bracero Program allowed the government to import temporary workers from Mexico, extract their labor, and send them back home.

When the war ended, there was again a labor surplus and corresponding public pressure to deport not only the guest workers, but also a new undocumented workforce (ranchers and farmers often hired undocumented workers because they found the Bracero paperwork tedious). In 1954, the U.S. Attorney General announced a crackdown on illegal immigration, called “Operation Wetback,” which was to be implemented through the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). (“Wetback” is a derogatory term for Mexican laborers who were alleged to have swum across the Rio Grande river.) The INS, which was responsible for overseeing the Bracero Program, now found itself in a bind: farmers and ranchers were demanding cheap labor, and they were glad to get it from illegal immigrants. Much of the public, meanwhile, wanted illegal immigrants (and most immigrants) out of the U.S. 

The INS’ solution was not to demand that ranchers pay higher salaries, but instead to push for the Bracero Program to be expanded and made into federal law. That way, the farmers could have their cheap labor legally. The agency then proceeded to track down thousands of undocumented workers, drive them just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, “recruit” them as Braceros, and drive them back to the farms on which they had already been working without changing their wages or working conditions. That way, the government could legalize the workers, keep them separate from the lives and privileges of the American public, and provide farmers with cheap labor. In the first three years of the newly enlarged Bracero Program, the number of Braceros more than doubled, from 201,380 to 445,197.

Even aside from the low wages and poor conditions, there was a flaw in this system from the beginning. Although ranchers and farmers had to prove that there were no Americans willing to do the work they needed done, they only had to prove that no Americans were willing to do the work at the wages they were offering and in the conditions they were offering. In a free market, farmers would have had to improve wages and conditions until people signed up. Instead, farmers were able to deflate wages and conditions, complain that no Americans wanted the jobs, and then, with the help of the government, import foreign workers so desperate that they would work for less than half of the minimum wage. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the H-2A program replicates this structure under a more bureaucratic name.

The Bracero Program continued for another decade, until mounting pressure from farmworker advocates like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta pushed Congress to end the program in 1964. The country was left with only the H-2 program, a comparatively small guest worker program that had been created in 1952 but had never been widely used. In 1986, Congress split the H-2 program into the H-2A and H-2B programs, for agricultural and non-agricultural sectors respectively. Twenty-two years later, H-2A workers comprise 10 percent of the country’s farmworkers. 

If this history shows us anything, it’s that ranchers have long used guest worker programs to acquire cheap labor, and that the government has, for nearly as long, used the program to legalize an otherwise illegal workforce without improving conditions.

Given this history, it should come as no surprise that in 2016 the Trump Winery in Charlottesville, VA sought 29 H-2A workers to help prune its vineyards. (Over the past decade, Trump and his associated business have also hired hundreds of workers on the H-2B program.) The Washington Post, reporting on the H-2A applications, wrote, “When news of these applications first broke, the outrage expressed by those who remembered the president’s pledge to ‘hire American’ was predictable.”

But Trump’s decision to hire H-2A workers was as predictable as the outrage that followed it. While hiring H-2A workers might have seemed like a broken promise, it was actually in line with his anti-immigrant sentiments. Although the H-2A program appears to contradict the language of “the wall,” it actually isolates workers from society so thoroughly that it serves as a sort of wall itself—not between Mexico and America, but between Mexicans and Americans.

All this is apparently clear to the people running and enforcing the H-2A program, and they make no effort to hide it. The Washington Post cites Kerry Scott, program manager for Mid Atlantic Solutions, the nation’s largest private provider of H2 workers. Scott says, “In our minds, the best [border] wall is a functional guest worker program...We’re certain our program will be one of those that survives and thrives.’”


Although H-2 workers are the ones being directly exploited, American workers are also being deprived of potential jobs: in a competitive market, sheepherding jobs would be paying much more than the minimum wage. So Americans are, at least indirectly, also being harmed by guest worker programs. That, coupled with the fact that wages and conditions for guest workers are inhumane, would seem to indicate that the guest worker programs should be shut down. And there are plenty of legal scholars, most of them politically liberal, who argue against guest worker programs. Lee herself argues as much toward the end of her paper.

But guest workers themselves don’t want the program shut down—they want it improved. Every sheepherder I spoke to really way grateful to have a job at all. So there’s a discrepancy between what herders want and what their supposed advocates often argue for. It’s easy for outsiders to ignore a somewhat nauseating truth: other parts of the world are so destitute that their citizens hope to work in conditions most Americans find inhumane.

Still, as Alvarado said to me more than a few times, “I’m working in America, not in Chile or Peru.” That is, workers in America deserve to be held to America’s standards. The minimum wage is called the minimum wage for a reason. That’s part of why organizations like Hispanic Affairs Project and Towards Justice are trying to better conditions and wages without shutting down the whole program. But, as you might expect, this strategy too sparks outcry from ranchers.

The question ranchers ask in response to demands for better conditions and wages is, “What would happen if we raise wages any more?” The answer, they claim, is clear: the industry would collapse. “The government,” Theos told me, “raised [herders’] salary enormously overnight…But we need them, so we bit the bullet. A lot of my friends… couldn’t afford to keep all their men.”

The 2017 court opinion in the DOL case paints a similar picture. The court cites a sheepherder employer called FIM Corporation, which explains, “For the period 2006 to 2013, our gross income from sales of wool, lambs, sheep, and hay averaged about $1,100,000 per year. After our operative expenses our net income averaged about...$35,000 per year. This proposed tripling of sheepherder wages will require approximately $250,000 per year in additional wage payments, [and] that much money is simply not available.”

It remains unclear whether a budget this tight is the exception or the rule: are most ranchers (and the government) fighting to keep wages low because they don’t care enough to pay the men any more, or because they’re barely scraping by in a failing industry, unable to pay their men anymore? Then again, as Jennifer Lee told me, “Either way, why is the answer to that question, ‘Well, let’s just continue to exploit foreign workers?’”

That answer persists because what looks like exploitation to a worker or a liberal-minded outsider often looks like a long, thriving tradition to a rancher. The old history of the H-2A program—and the even older myth of the “well-suited” farmworker—begin to explain how herders like Ignacio Alvarado and ranchers like Warren Roberts end up on opposite sides of a long, entrenched battle.

If Roberts and Alvarado weren’t in the positions they’re in, you could imagine them being friendly with each other. Both, to begin with, are weathered old guys who seem to have an endless collection of remarkable western stories. Both of them also tend to assert what’s right and wrong with all the charm and conviction of a seasoned salesman.

Roberts, just after singing the praises of free enterprise, explained his approach to doing business: “What I’ve always tried to do is, if I’m dealing with you, I want it to be good for both of us, I don’t just want it to be just good for me. And if everybody operated that way, we wouldn’t need all these rules and regulations. We could all be free.” 

Alvarado practically mirrored his sentiment: “What I’ve always wanted is for it to be fair. Just as fair for the ranchers as it is for the herders. Nothing more. And if everyone could just be fair, we wouldn’t need all these government rules. Those aren’t the real solution.”

Still, in case there was any danger of slipping in to the old “everyone’s the same on the inside” adage, Roberts and Alvarado are not without their differences: Roberts believes that, “If you do something wrong, you’ll pay the price, guaranteed, every time.” Alvarado, responding to my question about how conditions might improve in the future, said, “I don’t see any solution. Good people get wronged over and over again. That’s just how it is.” Roberts is looking at the industry from a position in which it’s possible to believe that those who are good get what’s good, but Alvarado has evidently seen too many good people mistreated to believe that.

If there’s a fundamental difference between herders and ranchers, it’s not that one is “culturally suited” to physical labor and the other isn’t. It’s that ranchers have faith in the moral order of things. They’re just angry that the government is getting in the way of it. Herders, on the other hand, have been trying to work toward a moral order for a long time, and now they’re beginning to lose faith.

At the end of it all, one herder’s exasperation might have captured the industry better than any analysis could. Toward the end of our interview, I asked him if I could use his name in the story. He said, “No, man, this industry is intense… the whole thing is fucked.” 

“The whole thing?” I asked. 

“The whole thing.” 

Laugh With Me

In the week after my stepfather’s funeral, my mother, brother, and I ate nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches. We had to finish the massive platter of mediocre cheese slices left over from the reception. It was hard not to laugh while choking down my 15th grilled cheese in six days.

When I bring up my stepfather’s suicide, it’s usually to joke about it. My jokes get one of two reactions: vaguely uncomfortable but well-intended sympathy, or (less often) the laughter I’m going for. The awkward sympathy is certainly reasonable, but it’s not what I needed when Chris died a year ago, nor what I need now. In my experience with death, most things were just absurd.

My mother paused at the door of our apartment. She stepped back inside, walked to the Christmas tree, and reached behind it to turn on the lights. “I’ll be back soon. Make sure Hudson’s asleep by nine.” I nodded and watched her close the door behind her.

My stepfather had been missing for two nights, and up until this point my mother hadn’t tried to figure out where he was. Her apathy confused me: “Shouldn’t you be worried about Chris?” She finally must have realized that she should be, and so she decided to file a missing person’s report. She was on her way to the precinct now, leaving me to care for my eight-year-old brother. I don’t blame her for her initial hesitation. At the beginning, I think we were all relieved by the absence of Chris’ overbearing energy in the house. 

Now alone, my brother and I shared a tub of Bagel Bites. I called my friend Amory and invited him over to keep me company. “Bring wine if you can.”

After Hudson fell asleep, Amory and I started sleuthing. Amory became engrossed in the case—our amateur detective work probably provided a welcome distraction from his recent college rejection. We called the garage where Chris kept his car, wondering if it was still there. The man on the other end seemed suspicious and quickly hung up. When we found ourselves digging through Chris’ desk drawers, we realized that we had gone a step too far. We stopped meddling. 

I don’t remember what time I fell asleep, but I remember waking up on the sofa to my mother standing above me, her short frame looming over the couch. The ceiling light illuminated her head from behind, leaving her face in the shadow. Her head was circled perfectly by that yellow light, and I was reminded of the way Renaissance painters created halos.

“Chris killed himself.”

“Oh.”

I could tell that she had been crying. She had cleaned herself up before coming to meet me, but a few missed spots of melted mascara under her eyes gave her away.

My mother shrugged. “Well, you know the saying: ‘too bad, so sad!’”

Suddenly I was winded, less by the news of the death than by my mother’s use of the childish phrase. I started to sob, more out of shock than anything else. Then, still crying, I began to laugh.

“Jesus Christ, Mom!”

She laughed with me. I sat up to face her.

We began to sort through the initial strangeness that comes from learning about someone’s death. “It’s weird how the last time I saw him, I thought he was just going to work,” she said. She referred to him in the present tense, but mostly to say, “Fuck him.” We said every terrible, spiteful thing we could think of without saying “good riddance.”

Later, somewhere between night and morning, I found myself crying again. I forced myself to stop. Why would I cry over the death of someone I’d always disliked? 

Too bad, so sad, I wrote in my journal.

Early on Sunday morning, the doorbell rang. I waited for my mother to answer the door. It rang again, more urgently. Stumbling, nearly blind without my contacts, I opened the door to find an impatient UPS delivery person. She handed me a cardboard box.

“Wow, this is a heavy one! I wonder what it is,” I said, trying to make small talk as I squinted and sloppily signed for the package. She gave me a concerned look that I didn’t understand.

Shutting the door, I tossed the box onto the kitchen counter, put in my contacts, and came back to the kitchen to investigate.

Bold, blue stickers on every side of the parcel declared, “CREMATED REMAINS.” 

“Oh, shit.”

For whatever reason, I felt compelled to peel off one of the stickers and paste it to the back of my phone. I still don’t know why I decided to do that. I might have just thought it looked cool, not quite processing the meaning of displaying my family member’s cremation label.

The absurdity of the situation escalated when my mother came home. She saw the box, laughed at my story of the awkward interaction with the UPS person, and stuffed the parcel into the kitchen cabinet. It—he—still lives there in the corner of our house, with the pots and pans.

A few weeks later, I stood on the upper level of the house where Chris had died. It was an old lodge upstate where we had spent weekends, before I got older and refused to go. The house was darker and dustier than I remembered, and the curtains and furniture had faded over the years. It felt like a tomb. And it was his tomb, really—it was the place he’d bought with the thought that it could somehow make him happy, where he used to try to paint. He’d taken the time to decorate it, all by himself. He’d died alone in a castle of his own conception, a crypt he had spent his life creating.

I looked out through the wide windows into the driveway, waiting to leave. The cab we had called passed the house, and my mother sprinted out after it. The driver didn’t see her. She waved her arms, running down the tree-lined path, and fell to her knees at the road. From far away, I saw that she was crying. It struck me that I hadn’t seen her cry since Chris died. 

From that distance, she was no longer my mother—she was a tiny woman with nothing but a thin black sweater between her body and the January cold, on her knees in the dusty pavement at the edge of the road, the edge of this haunted property. (Could a house still be haunted if neither of us believed in ghosts?)

She walked back. I heard the door creak. For a moment we stood in silence in the middle of the tomb. 

“Are you sad?” I asked.

“Tragedy is for men. We women survive.”

I turned to his suit jacket, so carefully draped over the back of a wire chair, as if he were sitting down to a meal, his pink tie folded on the table. We left his clothes there—a headstone of his own creation, a static still life to which we never returned.

Despite our longtime vegetarianism, we asked the cab driver to take us to his favorite nearby steakhouse. We wound up at an empty roadside restaurant and split a 16-ounce hunk of meat.

On the first snow day of the new year I sat at my desk with my ink and needle, poking the small bone on my left wrist. Slowly, the number appeared on my skin: 968.

It’s my mother’s birth month and year. Why I chose something so abstract to symbolize her, I can’t say. I had already decided that “too bad, so sad,” would be too morbid—instead I opted for something that no one would be able to immediately decipher, something that could be my own.

The stick-and-poke became a kind of talisman, something to touch and meditate on when I needed to access the power and anger that my mother had mastered. It was an amulet, an icon of her and the way she used her aggression for the sake of self-preservation after Chris’s death. I saw it constantly—I used her virulence constantly.

I came to the dinner table to find my brother at the head, crying quietly. My mother was sitting to his right, and I sat beside her. She clanged the tongs against her plate as she served herself arugula. Hudson cried, “I love you, Mom.” She salted her plate so vigorously that stray grains flew all the way across the table.

“I’m going to stop making dinner. Who am I making dinner for.”

“I love your dinner, Mommy,” said my brother.

“Who am I doing this for,” said my mother.

She drowned her salad in dressing.

“Daddy is eating your dinner in heaven.” 

I winced.

“I’m making you ramen tomorrow,” she said, maybe to Hudson, maybe to Chris. She acknowledged me for the first time since I’d sat down and told me that I could leave if I wanted to. I told her I was fine, I didn’t mind.

She spilled the wine and it flowed across the table, reaching every empty seat. She might as well have stabbed someone for all the red there was. Hudson cried louder—and then my mother, her hands folded neatly behind her plate, said, almost inaudibly, “It’s okay, it’s just that things are different now.”

When Chris was alive, dinner had to be on the table at six o’clock each evening. The rule was never declared directly, and if my mother failed to serve the food on time there was no consequence. But we all had a general understanding that this ritual needed to be completed.

There always had to be three parts to the meal: a main dish of meat (that my mom and I would skip), a starchy side, and a vegetable. We—my mother, brother, myself, and Chris—would gather at six to serve ourselves each item and eat while we made tense, smiling small talk. Chris would say his day was good. I would say my day was good.

Every night after dinner, religiously, until I finished middle school, Chris and I would sit on the sofa together. With a comfortable space between us, we would watch one episode of “The Simpsons.” This was the closest I ever got to him—three feet and a simple shared experience. For my emotionally stunted childhood self, this closeness was extreme. Years of sitting next to him during one of my favorite parts of each day eventually made for some strange semblance of a warm relationship.

Several years after the end of the daily “Simpsons” ritual, and almost a year after Chris’ death, I got a tattoo of an undead, grinning Bart Simpson—it was $13 as part of a sale, and I laughed when I saw it on the sheet of model tattoos. On the way home, I joked to a friend that it was my macabre homage to the late Chris, and to that long-gone space of tenderness. 

A year later, I am distant enough from the experience to wonder whether my mother’s and my manic humor was a constructive mechanism to process the suicide.

The jokes served as a kind of balm, a source of palliative denial that allowed us to pretend that we weren’t in any pain. Of course we were sad, somewhere within ourselves, but humor allowed us to avoid acknowledging it.

At the same time, though, our jokes gave us a means of talking about the death. Both my mother and I are emotionally guarded people who don’t easily admit to suffering. As she said, “We women survive.” Through humor, we could communicate our feelings and acknowledge the reality of the death without the pain of vulnerability.

Our long-standing inside jokes were also a source of bonding. After a long day of enduring endless, uncomfortable sympathy, we could come home and laugh together. We were always eager to share whatever grim comedy the day brought us. “My teacher yelled at me about a late assignment but then I told her about Chris and she just went stark pale! Looks like I can hand it in whenever I want to.” She would smirk and tell me about how her boss insisted that she take a few days off from work. “An extra week of paid vacation! I’m going to the spa tomorrow.” 

­—

Months later, back at home for break, I noticed a photo hanging on the living room wall that I didn’t remember seeing before. In the photo, I’m a small child, I’m walking towards the photographer, not smiling, my neatly curled hair and pink satin dress wet.

I remember the moment the photo was taken—I was five, and I had been out in the misty twilit courtyard after my mother’s second wedding. I had been standing alone in the same place for 20 minutes, quickly dampened by the drizzle. On the ground before me was a bird, recently dead, oily black feathers still intact. I couldn’t figure out how it had died, so I kept staring. I wasn’t alarmed or disturbed, only curious.

After a while, Chris, only recently my stepfather, came looking for me. He gasped at the bird and grabbed my small shoulder, ushering me back into the candlelit ballroom where the wedding reception had just begun. “Death is a part of life,” he said, “but there are other things we have to do.”

I wonder if he remembered that.

Back at the wedding venue, the photographer took photos of the family, of the couple, and of me, hair still wet from the rain. I thought of the body, the first of more to come.

Even in that photo, five years old and fresh from my first brush with death, I don’t look upset, exactly. If anything, my little face looks peeved, lips pursed and eyes a bit narrowed. Maybe I was mad about being torn from the bird, this object of my intense fascination. Maybe I was annoyed that Chris was so dismissive of my reaction. I’m relieved that my mother wasn’t the same way—that, when Chris’ time came, I had someone who would stare and laugh at the absurdity with me.

The Nine Types of People

"You’re a Five,” my mom told me. This was, obviously, a weird thing for a mother to say to her child. “What does that mean?” I asked. 

“It means you like thinking,” she said. “You want to figure everything out, right? That’s why you do so well in school.”

This barrage of compliments sent 10-year-old me sobbing into the snow-covered woods. I don’t remember why we were having this conversation somewhere near the woods in the middle of winter. Nor am I entirely certain that this is the way it happened. But I do know why I took my mom’s remark as an insult: I interpreted it to mean that “overthinking” was my defining characteristic. I’ve since learned that the truth is a bit more complex than that. But after much self-conscious, anxiety-ridden overthinking, I know another thing: I am, indeed, a Five. 

My mother was referring to the Enneagram. A paragon of New Age spirituality, the Enneagram is a personality type system that maps nine types onto a mystical symbol. The lines of the Enneagram allegedly indicate the directions of your spiritual growth and decay, offering invaluable insight into your development as a person. My mom learned of the Enneagram from her sister, my Aunt Theresa, the bringer of all things New-Agey into our otherwise spiritually-averse family. My mom and Theresa went through a stage in which they obsessively “typed” all the members of our family, often to our chagrin. “He could be a Six, but I could also see him as a Two with a strong Three wing,” they would gossip. (That’s the way the Enneagram gets you talking.)

This strange spiritual vernacular surrounding the Enneagram is confusing, so here’s the basic gist of the Enneagram: it categorizes people into nine primary types, which are distinguished most importantly by a set of basic fears and basic desires. The full description of each type includes a combination of general attitude, sets of behaviors, patterns of thinking, and life problems that the type tends to experience. But with the incorporation of “wings” (secondary types), instinctual variants, levels of development, directions of growth and disintegration, and triadic centers, the system gets so complicated that there are diagrams of the Enneagram entitled with such jargon as, “The Hornevian Groups with the Motivational Aims of the Triads.” 

According to Riso and Hudson, each person has one primary type that does not change throughout life. The types are organized not by behavioral traits or characteristics, but by what primarily motivates each one. You won’t experience all aspects of your type all the time, and you will probably identify with all nine motivations to some degree. Although “typing” estranged family members and figures of popular culture is a common, strangely addicting pastime, the best person to determine one’s type is oneself. The types are grouped by “triadic centers”: thinking, feeling, and intuition. If you are in the thinking center, for example, you experience an imbalance that distorts the way the thinking part of your brain interacts with your feelings and intuition. 

If that’s not enough variation, most schools of Enneagram thought also propose that you have at least one dominant “wing”: one of the types adjacent to your own that also affects the way you exhibit their personality. You also have one dominant and one secondary “instinctual variant” (self-preservation, social, or sexual). Any type can have any instinctual variant. Furthermore, each type can “move” under stress or growth to embody characteristics of a different type, following the lines on the Enneagram polygon. Each type also has nine levels of development, which are grouped into healthy, average, and unhealthy stages. 

This diagram is my attempt to distill the many facets of the Enneagram system onto a single page. Most Enneagram followers would balk at this oversimplification, though, so if you actually want to know about it straight from the source, visit enneagraminstitute.com, the website published by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson. Riso and Hudson are the “most reputable” Enneagram teachers alive today, according to Aunt Theresa. This is where I should probably issue a disclaimer: the Enneagram would not be taken seriously by most American psychology professors. Nor is it widely used as a psychological tool by therapists, at least in the U.S. So the Enneagram is not a hot-button topic that deserves a good dose of hard-hitting journalism. Rather, it was a personal conundrum. 

The Enneagram differs from other well-known personality type systems like Myers-Briggs in that it doesn’t just claim to formulate a system for understanding differences between people’s psychological experience and behavior. It also claims to address the deep roots of our “spiritual essences.” According to the gurus of the Enneagram, the self-destructive habits of your personality inhibit your spiritual essence from properly guiding  your life—you are prevented by yourself from being who you most fully are. At its core, the Enneagram aims to tell you what you’re really seeking from life and identify the primordial fear that drives your personality. Consider, for example, this frank statement from the Riso-Hudson type Five description: 

“Independent, innovative, and inventive, [Fives] can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation…but rather than engage directly with activities that might bolster their confidence, Fives ‘take a step back’ into their minds, where they feel more capable. Their belief is that from the safety of their minds they will eventually figure out how to do things—and one day rejoin the world.” 

If you cringe at how accurately this describes you, thinking of times when you’ve become isolated from the real world due to your obsessive fixation on a certain pattern of thinking, increasingly panicked at your all-too-clear awareness of your own isolation, yet too afraid of the possibility of failure to really do anything about it, thus trapping yourself in a cycle of over-analysis and self-deprecation—well, you too might be a Five.

This sometimes startling accuracy can provoke hostile reactions. To provide a juvenile personal example, after I was informed of what I then interpreted as my sadly limited essential being, I spent a while lingering in the woods, contemplating like a typical Five-child. I came back out and accepted a pat on the back from my elders, successfully suppressing my feelings and avoiding confrontation. Like a good, investigative, neurotic Five, I then briefly joined my mom and my aunt in the Enneagram obsession, attempting to discover all I could about the inner workings of other human beings. But my interest waned when we lost the guidance book, “The Wisdom of the Enneagram,” and I found other debatably legitimate ways of understanding the world. An evangelical religious stage devolved into a radical devotion to the power of Nature, until my skepticism finally culminated in my college philosophy major.

I rediscovered the Enneagram only last semester, after a stressful summer job as an adventure camp counselor in which I rescued preteen girls from falling trees and cliquey drama, followed by a traumatic breakup and a subsequent pervading sense of meaninglessness in both my everyday activities and my life’s direction. Neither therapists, nor well-meaning friends, nor books of political theory seemed to give me what the Enneagram did: a startlingly accurate picture of the patterns of thought that were trapping me, and also, maybe, a path to liberation. But while the Enneagram held high promise, it also seemed ridiculous. I wanted to save myself with the Enneagram. But first I had to figure out if I actually believed in it.

In order to better understand my Enneagram revelation, I purchased the long-lost “The Wisdom of the Enneagram,” 389 pages of Riso and Hudson’s invaluable wisdom. The book is bounded like an SAT test prep book (but for your soul). Its blue cover gradually fades into spiritual shades of gray, and it features an illustration of a majestic eagle transposed upon ethereal clouds, rising above a dark and stormy ocean. The book is dedicated to “The Ground of all Being, the One from Whom we have come, and to Whom we shall return” (capitalized exactly like that).

No dedication could better reflect the vague and disputed spiritual roots of the Enneagram. The book’s short chapter entitled “Ancient Roots, Modern Insights” makes the incredibly ambiguous claim that “the origins of the Enneagram symbol have been lost to history.” The chapter then somehow ties the basis of Enneagramic “triadic thought” to all three Abrahamic traditions, in addition to ancient Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. 

Wherever its roots truly lie, the Enneagram symbol was apparently “rediscovered” in 1875 by a young Greek-Armenian traveling through the Middle East in search of his true soul. In the 1950s, a Bolivian named Óscar Ichazo encountered the Enneagram and, in what the book describes as a “flash of genius,” he placed a wealth of spiritual and psychological knowledge onto the Enneagram symbol “in the right sequence” to develop the basic nine types. If you read this with a cynical, scientific perspective, yes, this means that the entire typology was thrown together randomly by an esoteric dude in the fits of some kind of transcendental frenzy. 

Ichazo would later introduce the Enneagram to a Chilean psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo, who noted that the nine types seemed to correlate surprisingly well with identifiable psychiatric categories. Naranjo then gathered panels of people to type them according to their psychiatric difficulties. He went on to teach the Enneagram to Jesuits in California, where it was picked up by Riso and Hudson themselves. Today, the Enneagram attracts not people who subscribe to the love, light, and undefined Oneness of New Age spirituality, but also Catholic priests (although with pushback from an unpublished Bishops’ council report that, ironically, discouraged its use because it wasn’t scientifically proven). Businesses looking for insight into employee dynamics have also picked it up. It is most popular in Spanish-speaking countries, but there are “Enneagram societies” all over the world.

Reading the Enneagram book as a perennial skeptic of the Enneagram system produced constant bewilderment. Every time I started to slide into cynicism about the whole thing, I would read a sentence that described me or someone I knew so precisely that I could almost feel the unnamed mystical power that the Enneagram bequeaths upon us. For example, upon reading that Don Richard Riso considered himself a Four with a Three wing, my first thought was, “That explains why he had the audacity to publish so much wacky, unfounded bullshit.” But this very insult validated Riso’s own teaching that “Fours” exist in the first place, and that Fours’ creative side is spurred by their desire to be unique, and that his Three wing motivated him to promote himself as an image of success.

Every time I had experiences like that, I’d start worrying: what if I really start buying into this? Am I going to start seeing people as walking, talking Twos and Fours? Am I going to lose the ability to think of myself and my social relationships in any other way? Or worse, will that awful Five pattern of isolation become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it’s the way I think I’m naturally inclined to deal with things? An Enneagram devotee would instantly peg this as the typical frustrated, withdrawn indecision of a Five. This is a common defense of the Enneagram: anyone who challenges its legitimacy must be doing so because of a quirk of their type. For example, a few months ago, Aunt Theresa and I sat in the kitchen, gossiping about the dynamics of toxic relationships between Fives and Sevens.

My dad, always an Enneagram skeptic, scoffed. “I just think human beings are more complex than that. You can’t lump people into categories.” 

“What a classic Nine thing to say,” Theresa responded, rolling her eyes in my direction.

 I laughed along with my aunt, but secretly wondered if my dad was right. I was still obsessed whether the Enneagram was “real,” and what it meant if it was. I was drawn to the mythical possibility that the Enneagram was both the key to better self-understanding and the metric by which I could finally solve all of my personal problems. But I was also terrified and repulsed by my own attraction to it. Because if I was wrong, it was just a system of stereotypes about people, organized to give the illusion of true enlightenment.

I decided to put the Enneagram to the test—specifically, by putting myself to the test. One of the potential flaws in the Enneagram is that it’s all based on self-reporting. Maybe, because of the way the Enneagram describes the nine types, a person would type themselves not according to what they are, but as the type that they want to be, or even as the type they’re afraid of being. Plus, the types might only seem to be specific. I reread the description of a Five with a Sexual instinct. “They are always experiencing some degree of tension between pursuing those they are attracted to and lacking confidence in their social skills.” Yes, this described me perfectly. But doesn’t that describe everyone, to some degree? (I hope so.) Maybe, looking back on the description, it was reductive and self-centered to think that this was the perfect description of me. There had to be proof that the specificity of the system was grounded—something to confirm my type from an objective standpoint.

But most Enneagram-oriented personality tests I found online completely mistyped me. (There was no way I am a Six with a Seven wing and a Social variant, as a website called “Eclectic Energies” told me.) I decided these must be faulty sources, so I turned to the real deal: the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI). Because you have to pay $12, I delayed taking it until Cipher agreed to reimburse me for it as “research.” (One of the characteristics of a Five is stinginess.)

The long-awaited test seemed frighteningly oversimplified. I fumed, trying to decide if I had been, in general, “a bit cynical and skeptical” or “a bit mushy and sentimental,” and whether anyone was actually just one or the other. As I finished the test, I was sure I had answered so many poorly-worded questions so inconsistently that it would also mistype me. But it didn’t: I was rechristened as the same thing—a Five with a Four wing.

Still, I wasn’t satisfied. I soon found myself in the bowels of a fairly active Reddit thread called “The Enneagram of Personality,” where internet users obsess about typing themselves and random people they’ve encountered. (“4 w 5 wing having problems getting out of myself?” and “suuuuuchhhh a two” were typical-sounding posts.) I found Pinterest boards filled with the speculative typology of public figures and favorite fictional characters. Donald Trump is an unhealthy Eight; Harry Potter is the epitome of a One.

 Perplexed and unsure of where to turn next, I called an Enneagram coach, hoping that someone who worked constantly with the Enneagram could explain my skepticism away. Alvaro Cortes, who lives in Spain, discovered the Enneagram through my very own Aunt Theresa, whom he befriended years before I was born. He found it so compelling that he entered a three-year course of study at the Enneagram Institute in Madrid, and now uses the Enneagram as a tool for his coaching and teachings on cross-cultural connection. 

Though I had never met Alvaro, he already knew a lot about me because Theresa had told him the typology of my parents. Other than his eerily accurate descriptions of my dad’s tendency to avoid making hard decisions, our conversation was reassuring. 

Alvaro, a peace-driven Nine like my father, didn’t seem to wrestle with the same deep doubts about the Enneagram that I did. “You should move away from being too obsessed with the theory and focus on using it as a tool that is going to help you move forward,” he told me. In Spain, the Enneagram is more widely accepted—it’s used by therapists and taught in psychology courses in major universities. Alvaro described patterns of confusion that people face in typing themselves. Women, for example, often want to believe that they are Twos because society teaches us that women should be focused on love and caring for the needs of others. But Alvaro didn’t share my suspicion that this frequent confusion indicated a flaw in the Enneagram system. He warned against obscure Enneagram blogs created by “everybody and his aunt,” but he didn’t see the Enneagram itself as dangerous or misleading. (Still, I was tempted to remind him that we both literally found out about the Enneagram from my aunt.)

Up until this point, all of my swirling questions and doubts about the Enneagram had been distilled into a single worry: was I the type of person that believed in the Enneagram, or not? But maybe this was the wrong question. I asked Alvaro: “Do you think the Enneagram is something that one believes in?”

He said, “To be honest, I don’t. The Enneagram isn’t going to resolve your life. It can help you deal with life, so you don’t fall into the same potholes. But this is not a religion.”

That perspective suddenly made sense to me. Yes, it seems that the Enneagram only holds together as a coherent system for describing human interaction if you make constant modifications to the type descriptions, allowing for such a wide range of behaviors that the typology ceases to mean much. But maybe it doesn’t matter that the Enneagram isn’t capital-T true, and isn’t backed up with either the proof of science or the logical rigor of philosophy. It might still be a better alternative for figuring ourselves out than being left to our own devices.

If anything, the Enneagram at least gives its adherents a shared way of understanding ourselves and other people—a set system to tell you why others might react to a situation in a different way, hurt you, or fail to treat you how you’d want to be treated. Often, when reading the material and taking the test, I had to look up the words used to describe people. What exactly does it mean to be earnest, standoffish, brooding? I had never talked about people like that before. Our culture doesn’t give us a common language through which to talk about other people. Instead we just call them “bitches” and go about our days.

My Aunt Theresa advised me that this understanding of the Enneagram would serve a much deeper purpose. “I have exited the place where typing justifies my criticism of someone,” she wrote in an email. “This Enneagram understanding has made me more compassionate and forgiving to myself and others. I see it as a guide out of personal pain, because we have a way to name that pain.” 

The hope within the Enneagram is that we do have the power to address our own pain. According to the Enneagram, I’m not living up to my full potential, but maybe there is a way of being where I could feel okay, and be okay to others, too. If you don’t believe me, identify your type and read the description of the highest level of type development. It describes you at your spiritual stride, where you are able to shed the confining aspects of your personality and embody the positive ones. This was always the awe-inspiring aspect I returned to amidst my Enneagram cynicism.

Or maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it. I am, after all, a Five with a Four wing and a Sexual instinctual variant. Only that type would write this article. 

DIY - Letter From the Editor

Dear Reader,

There is a reason why students at Colorado College love smothering their laptops and water bottles in stickers, knitting their own scarves, and brewing their own kombucha. It’s also why homemade cookies are always better, why handwritten letters hold more meaning, and why you can’t seem to let go of that mediocre paint-by-numbers you did in middle school. Doing something yourself makes it special. Because in a world where everyone is trying so hard to be different while somehow simultaneously being exactly the same, at least I can snuggle up in the blanket I wove for myself (see this issue’s covers) and feel some sense of comfort. No overpriced, pre-distressed jeans and flower-crown-wearing “hippie” or #vanlife poser can take that from me. That’s why I, a replacement art editor who was never officially hired for this job, put my foot down and fought for this theme when no one else did. Somehow, it worked.

Unfortunately, I’m not particularly good at telling stories with words. (I prefer slapping paint around on a canvas.) Lucky for you, the magazine you’re holding is full of stories like mine but much larger, much stronger, and much sexier. Callie Zucker’s piece on masturbation and the pleasure gap (pg. 12) is one of them. Nathan Makela’s interview of an anti-capitalist curator who challenges societal norms with her collaborative projects (pg. 16) is another. I urge you to find love in the dying genre of “prog rock,” as Mira Fisher did (pg. 8), or go a step further and join a DIY art troupe like Kat Snoddy did (pg. 28). And if the stories don’t convince you, let Jules Olliff’s weaving of unconventional materials (pg. 26) and Alyssa Miller’s prints (inside covers and pg. 38) show you what you’re missing in life. 

My favorite part about this job I somehow got roped into is that I ended up falling in love with *drumroll*—the people. Who would’ve thunk that a group of idiosyncratic, story-hunting, dry joke-telling, surprisingly sentimental, pajama-wearing grammar nerds could be so much fun to work with? Seriously though, there is debatably no classroom in which I have learned more important values than I have in CC’s publication house. Part of that is because we try to incorporate the collaborative, self-empowering practices of DIY culture into our work process.

This is the last issue that we will be publishing in 2017, but more importantly, this also marks the last issue of our very own Catherine Sinow’s Cipher career. In her time here, Catherine has been an integral part of this magazine’s development as both a contributor and a staff member. She wrote her first article for Cipher four years ago. Eighteen articles later, she bids us a bittersweet farewell in her last Cipher story ever (pg. 44). A strong, zine-making, overall-dress-wearing, passionate enameler, I consider Catherine to be one of the most “DIY” people I know. If you have the chance, I highly recommend that you revisit some of her stories that she wrote throughout the past few years.

So that’s my letter from the editor (or “lettitor,” as I like to call it). It’s not particularly witty or profound, but when supplemented with the work of this issue’s contributors, it might provide a better understanding of what we’re trying to do at Cipher. 

In a world where Spotify tells us what to listen to, Instagram tells us what to wear, and Facebook events tell us what to do, having full autonomy over something is a rarity. So, grab a warm beverage, find a quiet spot devoid of consumerist propaganda, and let us show you the importance of doing something yourself every once in a while.

It's been a pleasure,

Caroline Li and the Cipher Editors

 

 

 

An Art of Crisis

 

Sitting on the Canal St. Martin lends itself to a kind of loitering that only takes place in the public eye of Paris, where the noun flâneur—meaning “lounger” or “idler”—comes to life. It’s summer, and I have reading to do for my class, so I pick a not-so-grimy bit of concrete along the canal and settle into my book. A man approaches me, speaking French. It’s clear that he is trying to sell me something. I politely listen, picking up words here and there, trying not to make it terribly obvious that I’m an American tourist. 

He struggles to express what he is selling, so I eventually cave and speak in English. We fumble in English before a friend begins translating in Spanish, and we awkwardly navigate the three languages. Wary of being pick-pocketed, I draw my tote bag nearer to me.

He pulls out a book and my concerns begin to dissipate. My interest now outweighs any concerns about pickpocketing—I’ve devoted most of my free time to making books and studying their history. 

His book is a collection of poetry, written in Spanish. It is printed on recycled paper, bound in a cardboard cover that was collaged by hand and sewn with (probably recycled) string. Books like these are called cartoneras, and they are DIY in every sense of the word. 

The word cartonera refers both to the books themselves and to the larger movement of cartonera publishers and their nontraditional publishing houses. The movement began in Argentina in 2003, following the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, when the peso’s value plummeted by two-thirds. Within a week, the unemployed population quadrupled. People seeking income began searching the streets for cardboard to resell to recycling plants. These people became known as cartoneros—the term comes from cartón, the Spanish word for cardboard. 

By purchasing cardboard from cartoneros, cartonera publishing houses provided economic opportunity in a time of dire economic instability. But more than this, they took book production out of the commercial publishing industry and into the streets. Most cartonera publishing consists of informal workshops made up of editors, cardboard collectors, local artists, and volunteers from the community, all working together to fold pages, paint covers, and bind books.

As the cartonera movement has spread across Latin America, it has adapted to the varying circumstances of each region’s market and population. A few components tend to remain the same: the use of cardboard as cover material, digitally printed writing and photos, and community publishing workshops. But the formula for cartonera publishing is constantly evolving. Sometimes, as in the case of Julio, the same person completes the whole process: making the cover, writing the book, and selling it on the street. 

When I met Julio, he had just moved to Paris, and was living near Republique, a politically active neighborhood fitting for a cartonera publisher. He had recently published a second printing of his latest cartonera, “la nouvelle poésie.” Not all cartoneras are filled with poetry, as Julio’s are. Some are photobooks, others cookbooks, and many are also made for children.

After fumbling through French and back to English again, Julio and I eventually exchanged information, and would meet a few times afterwards to continue discussing cartoneras. The last time we talked, he brought several cartoneras to show me—even gifting me a copy of “la nouvelle poésie.” My copy is number 42. To date, Julio has printed over 700 copies, each handbound, each cover hand-designed. 

Julio is from Uruguay, but travels between France and Spain to share his cartoneras and promote DIY book-making communities—while cartoneras are pervasive in South American countries, only a handful of cartonera publishers live in Europe. Before France, Julio lived in Argentina, the hub of cartonera publishing. He first learned about cartoneras at the “Feria del Libro de Buenos Aires” (“Buenos Aires Book Fair”), which began in 2011, the same year Argentina was named UNESCO World Book Capital. At that time, Julio’s poetry was being published by an independent publisher, which publishes industrially printed books that are often only sold at book fairs. 

Although Julio had already found success in commercially publishing his poetry, he was drawn to cartoneras for the freedom they provided. Cartoneras work without the copyrights on which traditional commercial publishers depend—they’re often called “copyleft.” So they give self-publishers like Julio a chance to break the publishing rules to which they would ordinarily be bound. The cartonera is, in effect, not owned by anyone; it belongs to the community. The liberty of publishing without license grants anyone the ability to be a publisher. 

Since cartoneras circumvent the traditional publishing scene, they grant access to literature—a leisure normally reserved for the educated elite—to people who ordinarily do not have the time or money to read. This is how the cartonera has become a democratizing agent for social and political change. Because the books cater to the specific communities they are made in (often lower-class) and made with the help of that community, they close the gap between creator and consumer. However, despite its remarkable adaptability, the cartonera’s ability to enact social change has varied by region.

It was highly successful in Peru, taking a more direct and community-based approach than the Peruvian government had. According to the Peruvian Book Chamber, Peruvians read an average of only one book per year. The Peruvian Law of Book Democratization and Promotion of Reading attempts to improve literacy by expanding the market availability of books. At Sarita Cartonera, a publishing house fittingly named after the Peruvian patron saint of outcasts, the publishers teach the cartoneras supplying the cardboard how to read. The cartoneras are also trained in binding and painting the books, giving them a more prominent and active role in the process of book-making.

The collaborative nature of cartonera-making encouraged Julio to write a new kind of poetry: his first cartonera was filled with collaborative poems, adapted from a game in which one person writes a few words and then another person writes a few words, and together they stumble on something like poetry.

Julio moved to France last spring after the changing political climate in Argentina compelled him to leave. These days, he spends his time publishing work for his editorial group, Sin Licencia, meaning, “without a license.” He makes between 30 and 100 book copies at a time during weekend workshops, selling them with his friends at poetry readings in cafes. 

When he isn’t sharing cartoneras on the streets of Paris, he’s organizing gatherings reminiscent of early French Salons. He and a few friends meet at Parisian bistros, where they talk and write over coffee or beer. These gatherings generate content for future cartonera workshops.

While listening to Julio’s story, I found myself wondering how effective the cartonera, an “art of crisis,” born of the economic instability in Latin America, could be in Paris. In places like Argentina and Peru, it was a powerful tool for improving literacy and giving social agency to the poor. Here, as physically beautiful as the book was, it was difficult to see Julio’s cartonera as much more than a recycled cardboard book. What place could cartoneras have as agents of social change in Europe?

Julio believes that no matter where it travels, the cartonera brings a much-needed sense of material connection to readers. He complains of a lack of diversity, color, and personality in the book covers in Europe, saying that they have a “plastic appearance,” not even featuring relevant cover art. Julio is confident that handmade books provide a sense of ownership that is often lost as a result of mass production.

 Hearing this, I was brought back to the day Julio first handed me a copy of “la nouvelle poésie,” fashioned from cardboard and printer paper. Even without the context of crisis, or a sense of need for the book, holding an intentionally crafted object made of humble materials challenged my own assumptions about bookmaking. I had always assumed that the most beautiful books would have to be made with the finest, most expensive materials available. But there I was, looking at a little strung-together thing made of cardboard, thinking it was one of the more beautiful, carefully crafted books I’d ever seen.

"I literally go here"

 

Hey. It’s me, Catherine Sinow. If you read this magazine, you might recognize my name, as this is my 19th Cipher article (and probably last, since I’m graduating on December 17th). So I figured I have the right to do something that Cipher’s militant editing team would otherwise totally shut down: tell a highly irrelevant personal anecdote about something that happened four years ago.

I need to start by saying that my college counselor pitched college to me as the most utopian place in the known universe. In his vision, every college student is joyful, social, involved, and studious at all times. Oh—and diverse. Don’t forget the diversity. His words: “If you are a black lesbian amputee, you can go hang out with other black lesbian amputees—at the wonderful place known as College!™” 

So I applied and got into Colorado College, packed my bags and went. But by the time I finished my first block, things had pretty much gone to hell. My experiences ranged from dull to terrifying. I was in the middle of a mind-numbing beginning Spanish FYE, during which I went to the Baca campus and got food poisoning and had to listen to my classmates tell rape jokes. Back at campus, a peeping tom snuck into Loomis and took over-the-stall pics of girls showering—in the very bathroom I used regularly. He went to prison. And then this happened:

Friday night of my first block break, I decided to celebrate the completion of my very first block. I had made one decent friend so far: my hallmate Tiffany (fake name), a soft-spoken physics major who lived in a highly organized dorm room with someone else named Tiffany (fake name, but they had the same name). We ate dinner downtown at the Melting Pot, where I learned that mediocrity and luxury can and do coexist. We sat in a tiny couple’s booth and boiled our own meat skewers in the pots glued to the table. We were both paleo at the time (the last I heard, she continues to be paleo), so we skipped the chocolate fondue. The waiter was awkward-cute and had a tattoo sleeve. He snapped our picture before we departed (see below).

Tiffany and I were a little afraid of walking home downtown after midnight, but our fears were soothed when we saw how bustling Tejon Street was. It was so bustling that, as I remember it, we strutted down the street in our high heels. But in reality, we were only wearing sneakers.

catherine map.jpg

 

Campus was dark and empty when we got back. At this point, things get a little complicated logistically, so please refer to the diagram. We entered campus via the Armstrong parking lot (A), with plans to walk back to our dorm, Loomis (B). All of a sudden, a grey compact SUV pulled up behind us on Cache La Poudre Street (C). Two chubby dudes in their 30s or 40s sat in the front seat, windows rolled down. The driver yelled at us in a sleazy voice:

“Hey ladies! You want a ride somewhere, or you just gonna walk home?” I deduced that this was a standard catcaller, probably typical of Colorado Springs.

“No,” stammered Tiffany, the more timid of the two of us. But I, fresh out of a crazy gap year in which I had to flee from stalkers in Ecuadorian marketplaces, was feeling a little more aggressive.

“Fuck off!” I yelled.

They drove away. On edge, Tiffany and I continued our walk to Loomis. “Don’t worry. I’ve got my pepper spray and mountain safety whistle,” said Tiffany. She was a very prepared individual.

We began to walk along the Armstrong sidewalk (D) toward Loomis (B), nervous but still pretty confident that we would get home alive. Within a minute, though, we spotted a car creeping down Cascade (E), its headlights like two cat eyes.

“Is that…them?” she said.

“No, that would be ridiculous,” I said. But five seconds later, we realized the cold, savage truth: “It’s them.”

Suddenly, the car turned up onto the curb and zoomed down the Armstrong sidewalk (D), straight toward us. Tiffany screamed, “Run to Slocum (F)!” So we ran. It felt slow and surreal, like trying to run through water. I learned what an adrenaline surge felt like in that moment, but after ten seconds I learned that it can only get you so far, since my lungs were getting parched fast. Maybe my body wasn’t fully convinced that this was life-threatening, and it was saving the ultimate adrenaline experience for running into a mountain lion while camping (this has not yet happened, as I hate camping).

As we were running for our lives, Tiffany started blowing on her mountain whistle. This was not your ordinary safety whistle that people get in handouts during student orientation. It was about as loud as a fire alarm. All over Slocum, darkened windows flicked into brightness and we glimpsed confused residents in their underwear.

After 30 seconds of running (it felt way longer), we finally burst into the Slocum anteroom (G). I turned around and saw the two men from the car rush toward the anteroom from outside. And that’s when it became clear. They had little radios on their pockets. Their beige-collared shirts had patches that read “Campus Safety.” The guys chasing us in a car were actually Campus Safety the entire time.

Now here’s the tricky part. Tiffany and I, being new to the school, didn’t know that a Loomis resident couldn’t swipe into Slocum after 10pm. As I was realizing the true identities of the men who had been chasing us, Tiffany, who hadn’t yet turned around to see who they were, was desperately trying and failing to swipe her card against the sensor box. 

One of the guys was short and pudgy with brown stubble. I don’t remember what the other one looked like. Pudgy opened his mouth and said this sentence:

“My name is Richard Newman [fake name], and you don’t tell me to fuck off!”

“Dude,” I said. “We literally thought you were rapists.” Tiffany hid behind me, just now realizing it had been Campus Safety the entire time.

“You don’t belong here!” he spat back. “I knew when you said ‘fuck off’ that you weren’t CC students!”

I took my Gold Card out of my pocket and stuck it in his face. “I literally go here,” I said.

Before she had realized that it was Campus Safety, Tiffany had called 911. I grabbed her wrist and tugged it a bit to encourage her to walk back home with me. She followed me, phone still to her ear. I have no clue where the officers went. I think they probably just hung out in the anteroom and talked about how stupid millennials yell “fuck off” to mighty superiors like Richard Newman.

Tiffany and I walked into the night, past the parked SUV that had just made us run for our lives (I). It was only then I could see the dim, forest green letters printed on the side of the car: “Campus Safety.” I twitched my eyebrows. We went back to Loomis (B) and went to bed in our respective rooms.

The next morning I woke up to a phone call from then-head of Campus Safety, Oliver Holt (fake name), who I later found out had also called my mom. That’s how serious it was. I have no clue how he found out about the incident. Oliver wanted to meet with me ASAP.

He apologized, but it was clear that he was just trying to do damage control. Oliver made excuses for Richard Newman, claiming that he was just trying to be friendly (he did admit that Richard Newman had failed at this endeavor). He also promised that everyone was about to undergo excellent staff training. I suggested that they change the color of the Campus Safety car so that people could actually see that it was the Campus Safety car. They finally did this about three years later.

The next week, I got a follow-up email from Oliver Holt. An excerpt:

“We also called a mandatory meeting with all Safety staff last Thursday morning to discuss a number of issues related to making sure that our focus remains at all times on the welfare of our students, on providing excellent customer service, on the importance of language in our interactions with others, and the importance of making good decisions…although we did not discuss your incident in particular, we spent quite a bit of time talking about what good customer service looks like.”

This didn’t do much to assure me; the damage was done. I only realized how destroyed my relationship with Campus Safety was three years later, at a dorm hall meeting. My RA asked everyone if they had Campus Safety in their phones; I was the only one in the room who didn’t. Whenever people mention “Campus Safety,” I only hear “Campus Danger.”

So yes. This happened. To an innocent freshman, here at the luxurious institution known as Colorado College. Richard Newman got demoted and had to ride a bike. Neither he, nor Oliver Holt, work here anymore.

The thing is, I don’t mean to diss Campus Safety. I’m sure they’ve done a lot of great things for people over the years (although I have no clue what these things are, since I never used Campus Safety’s services due to my aforementioned incident). 

What I’m really saying is: no, college isn’t the diverse, studious, blissful knowledge utopia that my college counselor sold me on. But he was right about one thing: college is eventful. Though I may have not experienced the “hall bowling” he described (I forget what he said it was, but I think it involved using humans as bowling balls), I have experienced a lot of chaotic events. There was the time a friend and I bought “gas and bloating relief tea” at Mountain Mama and snuck packets into the tea box in Rastall throughout an entire semester. There was the time another friend and I broadcasted our SOCC show through a fire drill, not even bothering to plug our ears. And then there was the time that my coworkers hacked into a suspicious email account and tried to frame me for sending weird emails because the account had Google searched the name of my high school. (It’s a long story—you can email me for the whole thing.) And of course, there was that time that Campus Safety made me run for my life. 

I don’t regret any of this. I’ve come to love it. College may not be the wonderland I was promised, but I think chaos is the next best thing. Now, though, I must say goodbye to this strange life. I will soon leave CC and walk into the horizon of adulthood, a sterile purgatory where everyone works at a desk and has to remember to take out their trash in the evening. Or so I’m told.

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

 

 

On the Netflix show “The Fall,” Stella is a gritty British detective whose dry loathing of men is nearly palpable. She is tasked with catching a serial killer named Paul Spector, who has almost every aspect of privilege imaginable: white, male, straight, attractive, and upper-middle class. Aside from his troubled childhood in foster care, he’s practically impervious to large-scale systems of oppression, which makes him the perfect candidate to be a serial murderer of young, powerful white women. 

“The Fall,” a gripping three-season saga, reveals just how creepy and grotesque serial killers can be. But there’s something that sets this show apart from your average serial killer show. 

As the scene I’m watching stiffens, Stella’s co-detective, Jim, enters the room. Jim and Stella have a history: they had an affair, and Stella eventually moved on and advanced in her career. Now, coincidentally, she and Jim are working together on a case. Stella has made her standing with Jim very clear—strictly professional—but Jim doesn’t know how to take “no” for an answer. In the previous episode, he had showed up at Stella’s door in a drunken rage and tried to coerce her into having sex. So now we’re 32 minutes into season two, episode six, and Stella and Jim are preparing to interrogate Paul, when Jim provides a stern proverb of caution to Stella. Jim says Stella is about to come “face to face with pure evil.” According to Jim, Paul Spector “is not a human being; he’s a monster.” 

Stella responds, “Stop, Jim, just stop. You can choose to see the world like that, but you know that it makes no sense to me. Men like Spector are all too human, too understandable. He’s not a monster; he’s just a man.” 

Jim retorts, “Well I’m a man, and I hope to God I’m nothing like him.” 

Stella claps back with a feminist ass-whooping and says, “No Jim, you’re not, but you still came to my room uninvited and mounted some sort of drunken attack on me...What did you want? To fuck me, nail me, bang me, screw me?” 

Jim stands there, looking pitiful, pasty, and teary-eyed, while I sit in awe, shocked that this actually happened on national television. Stella had forced Jim to recognize the link between his own masculinity and the killer’s.  

Stella has made a striking connection that many people are too privileged, ignorant, oblivious, or cowardly to grapple with or even acknowledge: no one is separate from the large-scale systems of oppression that silence and marginalize certain identities. To alienate yourself from this truth means you are embedding yourself deeper in complicity, blind to the fact that you are part of the problem. 

In this specific context, Stella is distilling what is called the Continuum of Violence (COV). This is a concept used to illustrate how facets of rape culture contribute to systemic violence against women. The COV can also be applied to other oppressive systems regarding race, class, sexuality, religion, and ability. Now, I realize that this is a daunting concept to reconcile, which is why when Jim had his ass handed to him by Stella, you could truly see his masculinity shrivel up and retreat into his testicles. But that’s why I’m trying to parse this out. Frankly, recognizing where we fall on the COV is an emotional process, particularly for people who consider themselves liberal or progressive, because these value systems supposedly support the liberation of marginalized identities. Moreover, the COV requires us to examine the more tedious, minute, and intimate parts our lives and ourselves. When liberals look at the COV, we have to figure out ways to actually live our theoretical progressive discourse. 

 

Toward a Better Understanding of Violence 

The COV is an illustrative conceptual tool that allows us to classify and connect acts of violence in order to recognize them on a systemic level. The Continuum of Violence Against Women was the first and most widely accepted rendering of the COV, but the COV can be applied to many systems of domination and power. 

If you Google the Continuum of Violence, the images that appear address violence against children, women, the disabled, racial groups, and other marginalized communities. The COV was coined by Liz Kelly in her acclaimed book “Surviving Sexual Violence,” in which she clarified that violence against women was not merely episodic behavior that arose from crimes of passion, but rather a symptom, and even a function of, an oppressive, gendered system. The COV does not create a hierarchy of severity. Rather, it shows how violence manifests in different forms: verbal, emotional, psychological, and physical acts. The continuum is meant to show how each of these forms of violence connect on both a small (daily, passive, inadvertent) and large (historical, active, purposeful) scale. (See Figure 1).

The COV describes a system of power and control that perpetuates the normativity of identity-based violence—violence that is perpetrated against a person or group due to their race, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, age, nationality, or political affiliation. Figure 2 is a telling graphic created by the Washington Coalition for Sexual Assault Programs. The bubble in the middle that says “oppression”  denotes the importance of recognizing intersectionality as a context for Continuums of Violence.

The most important thing to understand about the COV is that often the acts of violence on the more insidious, micro-aggressive end of the scale are what allow the acts on the more overtly hellacious end of the scale to persist. According to the COV, identity-based violence works much like a sickness. The symptoms often show up gradually, but if left untreated, even a slight cough or an occasional sniffle can turn into pneumonia. The same applies to seemingly harmless norms like catcalling. If these behaviors are left untreated, they develop into a disease like rape. Unfortunately, we are all carriers of the disease, and the symptoms are so common that we forget that they’re products of a sickness at all. This is why the COV is important for processing how mundane microaggressions can eventually accumulate, escalate, and normalize violence. 

To be clear, the COV does not rank acts of violence. This does not mean that more “minor” misogynistic practices are always equally traumatic as rape and murder, but that these actions  are equally relevant in perpetuating identity-based violence. Moreover, disrupting misogynistic practices matters just as much as disrupting rape and murder because the permission of the former is what allows the latter to thrive. Everything on the continuum is deeply linked. The COV serves to complicate the notion that violence is a cut-and-dried hierarchy. 

Let’s transport this into context. You are standing in the kitchen at a party and you make a joke about how all black women have big asses. This joke plays into the stereotype that all black women are sexually deviant and aggressive, thus reducing them to sexual objects. A bystanding man overhears this joke, laughs, and continues to the dance floor, where he spots a black woman wearing a tight dress. He grabs her ass without asking, as a joke, and no one says anything. A bystanding straight man watches this interaction, and it turns out he has a black girl fetish. He goes home that night with a black woman. When they get back to his place, she kisses him goodnight, and tries to go home, but he wants black ass. Despite her repeated attempts to say “no” to his sexual advances, he says, “I know you want it.” He forces himself on her. Don’t all black women love to have sex anyway? 

This is obviously an accelerated version of the way that social norms escalate violence, but there are three lessons to glean from this scenario. First, the links between each act of violence aren’t always conscious. The man who overheard your joke may not have actively recognized that your words influenced his actions. Second, whether you like it or not, your joke catalyzed identity-based violence. On an individual level, the joke itself does not inflict the same amount of harm as rape, but it is just as harmful in contributing to a grand scheme of violence. Lastly, your actions and inactions have consequences, and they can harm others actively and passively. Your joke about black women signaled to others that it was okay to inflict harm. I’ve heard people argue, “Well, people with violent urges to rape are always going to rape,” and that may be true, but your joke gave others a get-out-of-jail-free card—a sign that says, “You won’t be vilified for your actions.” 

I’ll complicate the hierarchy notion even further by providing some personal context. I am a queer black woman who has spent most of my life in predominantly white, liberal spaces. I have experienced racism of all kinds, but the kind that has caused me the most harm has been at the hands of people who claim to be my friends, lovers, and partners. I have had conservative strangers and peers violently threaten me as they call me a “fat ass ugly nigger.” I have had men physically intimidate me while they make transphobic comments. On the other hand, I’ve also had close friends tell me I would be prettier if I had “normal” (white) hair, and I have had lovers fetishize me until I didn’t know myself anymore. While those overtly bigoted, physical altercations left me literally wounded, they didn’t leave lasting harm on my dignity in the way that my experiences with those close to me did. One would assume that my physical altercations would outrank the seemingly non-violent moments in my life, but that’s not the case. Using a continuum, rather than a hierarchy, allows survivors of all types of violence to claim and understand their pain in the way they choose. And it forces everyone to recognize the violence within their actions, even if they aren’t rape and murder.

 

The Illusion of Distance

What I’ve noticed about progressive and liberal spaces is that we are often so obsessed with “moving forward” and heralding our affinity for change that we create a false moral gulf between ourselves and conservatives. In other words, by believing we are the arbiters of “progress,” we tend to think less critically about our own actions, as if only bigots, racists, sexists, homophobes, and serial killers can commit these acts. As if violence only manifests through KKK hoods and pussy grabs.

However, our “high-horse” is more like a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”—toxic social norms posing as progress. The moral confidence of liberalism reminds me of the fable of the tortoise and the hare: the liberal is the overly confident, forward-moving hare whose speed and intellect blinds him from recognizing his flaws. The COV allows us to close the false moral gulf we’ve constructed, and grasp the fact that acts of violence can occur in any space, to anyone, regardless of the moral high ground we think we have. The COV complicates hierarchies of violence and forces everyone to understand the ways that their actions contribute to identity-based violence, regardless of how much harm they are inflicting in the immediate moment. It clearly illustrates that we are all functioning as part of a system that has specific violent outcomes, and under this notion, liberals cannot claim to be separate from these problems. What’s more, we are participating in the problem just as much as anyone else. 

Ask yourself this question: how is it that liberals manage to commit acts of identity-based violence against the very groups they are trying to liberate?

How is it that my white male classmate can theorize about the black feminist bell hooks, and interrupt me in the process? How is it that my black male friend can march for black lives, but call trans women deceitful? How is it that my white female co-worker can work at a non-profit for racial equity, and then say that my (black) opinions are unprofessional? 

The recent sexual assault scandals including liberal public figures like Bill Cosby, Nate Parker, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, and Louis C.K. have baffled many in the progressive camp (men in particular). But I believe that the phenomenon of identity-based violence within liberal spaces has everything to do with our failure to acknowledge the importance of seemingly small acts of violence. Moreover, our failure to incorporate this notion into our politics and daily lives has given birth to a brand of morality that holds hypocrisy at its center. 

Anne Thériault, a prominent Canadian feminist, wrote an article about the ways that men infiltrate feminist spaces in order to commit acts of sexual violence. She notes that their ability to commit sexual misconduct hinges upon their feminism because “they get to enjoy a special status as one of the good guys fighting the good fight, they have access to vulnerable women who think they are a safe person, and finally they have a large group of women willing to vouch for them if allegations ever do surface.” 

So yes, there are people who use their liberalism to enact identity-based violence. And yes, it’s a counterintuitive notion, but it makes sense if you understand the COV. Even if you are liberal and you aren’t committing heinous acts of sexual violence in the same manner as Louis C.K. or Kevin Spacey, I urge you to remember the central tenet of the COV: all scales of violence matter. There is no hierarchy. The misogyny enacted by your peers, friends, and classmates should be addressed as urgently as Bill Cosby’s 49 rape cases, not because the amount of individual harm is necessarily equal, but because all acts of identity-based violence uphold a system of oppression that inevitably lead to harm, regardless of whether or not you are the person to enact it. Acts of identity-based violence are perpetuated by sociocultural norms that we all unfortunately inherit, regardless of our political affiliation. Everything on the continuum of violence is epidemic, and none of us are immune.  

 

This Sucks, But There’s Hope

I’m sure my previous sentence just made you feel a bit queasy about the state of society. Trust me, it gives me a sort of existential nausea too. But the goal of this article is to reflect deeply enough to shake our conscious ground, but eventually resolve with steps to move forward. So I’ll end with four main points:

First, the COV can be used as a template for understanding many systems of domination. For example, the racism scale (see Figure 3) is another conceptual representation of the COV. The COV transcends power structures, and you can use it to continuously identify violent symptoms, and unlearn them.

Second, you can try to embed the concept of the COV into your daily life. Granted, this has the potential to consume you until you start seeing tiny acts of violence everywhere, which is neither productive nor healthy. But understanding that these behaviors are happening everywhere, by everyone, is important. The COV can be empowering. Our most mundane actions and interactions have power and purpose, especially if you are someone who gains power from identity-based violence.

Third, your ability to recognize the impact of interrupting daily acts of violence holds more power than showing up to one or two protests. Identity-based violence is not episodic, but systematic. So if you can make your activism more systematic and less episodic, you have more agency for change than you think. With the ideas behind the COV in mind, you can examine power dynamics in your significant relationships and friendships. Ask the people in your life if they’ve ever felt unheard, belittled, or undignified because of their identity. You can be more critical and mindful of the images you post on social media. Do they serve to normalize violence against a certain identity group? Do you co-opt imagery and identities from people who suffer from identity-based violence? You can engage more critically in classroom settings and collaborative spaces. Are you silencing individuals who are threatened by identity-based violence? 

Finally, we’re all in this together. Chances are, you are part of the problem, and so am I. While there are certainly individuals who contribute to identity-based violence more than others, we each have to continuously hold each other accountable for actions every day. We can actually get shit done if we all come together and do it consistently. Don’t just rely on the most marginalized people in your life to do it. And don’t just do it for a week after you read this. Do it all the time. Set a reminder on your phone. Write it on a sticky note and post it on your bathroom mirror. Bottom line is: do better. Don’t just say it. Do it. 

 

A version of this article was originally published on Abram’s blog, “Living Discourse.”

 

Michael Sawyer's New Canon

 

I walked into the first class I took with Michael Sawyer thinking that I would escape the traditional Western “canon” and read authors other than dead white guys for once. The class was about Ralph Ellison’s novel reflecting on blackness, “Invisible Man.” But somehow, I also found myself reading a novel by Herman Melville and watching the sci-fi film “Ex Machina.” The purpose of these assignments was to connect the philosophy of black subjectivity to artificial intelligence. It might sound absurd, but Sawyer weaved it all together seamlessly. This is a typical Michael Sawyer experience.

Sawyer is able to tie together countless disciplines in part because he has an almost alarming number of degrees: a bachelor’s degree in political science and aerospace engineering from the Naval Academy, a master of arts from the University of Chicago’s Committee of International Relations and International Security Policy, a master’s in French and German comparative literature from Brown University, and a PhD in Africana studies from Brown University. Now, Sawyer is a Professor of Race, Ethnicity and Migration Studies at Colorado College—and unsurprisingly, uses ideas from nearly every other academic discipline. Last spring, he was awarded CC’s Lloyd E. Worner teaching award.

Here, Sawyer gives us a look into how exactly he got here, and what it all means. 

 

Maya Day: You’ve had quite an unconventional career and academic path. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? 

Michael Sawyer: Yeah. I have a hard time holding down a job. I went to the Naval Academy, so the requirement is just like it is at the Air Force, where you have to be a naval officer for a period of time. I was a cryptologist in the Navy, and I worked in counter-terrorism, primarily. And then I worked at the National Security Agency for a little while—while I was still in the Navy. When I got out, I came back home to Chicago and I started working at Bear Sterns at the fixed income department. 

I spent almost a decade and a half working at Bear Sterns, then JP Morgan, and then I was running the sovereign fund for the President of the Gabonese Republic. That all came to a halt when President Bongo passed. Working at Wall Street, I was in an emerging market, so I got to see a lot of things. I spent a lot of time traveling in Africa and the Middle East and these kinds of places, so I was able to see many things up close that interest me from a perspective of revolutionary thought and its relationship to capital and social justice. Then I went back to school. Somehow, I got accepted into this PhD program at Brown. I wanted to work at a small liberal arts college, so that was the goal of coming back. 

To other people it seems pretty strange. But to me, it all fits together; it all makes sense in this weird kind of way. 

MD: Did you have any ethical qualms with being in finance, or the military? 

MS: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a profoundly unethical business—both places. I was in the Navy during the First Gulf War, in Somalia, and these kinds of places. Being someone who was curious about the role of the United States as an imperial and colonial power, I got to see that up close and personal—and from a perspective of being this representative of “the Other.” I’m from inner-city Chicago, so seeing both the environment and the people who were typically in the Navy were all very different experiences for me.

Then Wall Street—what I knew about the way most people who work on Wall Street was zero from the way I grew up. In any profession, there should be ethical concerns, but Wall Street is particularly difficult—just like being in the armed forces was particularly difficult—because what Wall Street is about is producing money. That’s what the job is. You can do that ethically, but the environment around you is very difficult to find your way around and be comfortable in, socially and intellectually and ethically. 

MD: What was your reasoning behind switching from finance to academia? 

MS: I went to a Jesuit high school, and I had a couple of teachers that were really important to me when I look back on it. They seemed like pains in the neck at the time. Brother McKaid was this Dominican monk. He was a Kantian. He studied Kant really closely. My first track coach in high school was a Jesuit priest who had two PhDs—one in physics and one in philosophy. This is what Jesuits do. This is when I was a teenager, so we would have these conversations; they would ask me these questions, and then send me off to read stuff, and I would read it, so I never really stopped reading philosophy and theory, my entire life. I would be sitting around reading Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” and I didn’t have to. No one was forcing me to do it. 

Coming from the Naval Academy, where I studied engineering and political science, I didn’t really know there was such a thing as philosophy. I wasn’t really aware where professors came from until relatively long after I got out of college. So I never really thought about it like that. But I was reading and thinking about these things anyway, so when I decided to go to graduate school, it was more of a realization of the spaces and places where other people were doing the same kind of thing. It was a comfortable environment for me.

There was a time, I remember specifically, when I read nothing but Wall Street documents for a couple of years. I went back and tried to read “Macbeth,” which I really enjoy, and I was having a really difficult time. I was like, this has to stop. I had to go back to reading because I had become stupid in particular ways, because I was only reading documents in a particular way, not exercising my mental capacity. 

So, long story short, I never had a job that seemed like work to me. I’m never like “Oh, man gotta go to work.” When I was in the Navy it didn’t happen and when I was at Wall Street it didn’t happen. I’ve been fortunate to be able to move from one thing to the next without there being these difficult points of transition, so that’s really been a blessing. That’s really been based upon what my parents did by sending me and my brother to that private school, because in the place we grew up, the schools were awful. So that’s attributable to them, more than any kind of my own aptitude.

MD: What’s the craziest thing you’ve had to deal with in each of your jobs? 

MS: Let’s think. Wow. When I was in the Navy I was a cryptologist, so my job was collecting signals intelligence from the ground, so I’ve ended up in some very weird places. I was in Mauritania a couple times, which was like, “What am I doing?” Somalia was particularly difficult because it’s this state that’s falling apart and there’s this presence of warlords and this poorly designed relationship with American imperial power—trying to “assist” these people to establish a nation-state is crazy in a lot of ways. I was ready to go home. 

Then, working on Wall Street it’s just every day. You look back and just can’t believe what was going on because, you know, a lot of this stuff is a culture in itself. So once you introduce yourself to it at a particular place and time, you see and hear things you can’t imagine, being a person who is self-consciously and self-referentially black. I was in a meeting with the people who run the largest hedge funds on earth, before the mortgage crisis, and literally the CEO did not know that mortgages under $250,000 were anything except investment vehicles. Like, he literally believed people were only getting mortgages for a quarter of a million dollars as some type of investment stunt because they just didn’t want to spend their cash on the house. I was sitting there… like I can’t believe I’m listening to this person who thinks there’s a 0% chance of default from mortgages under $250,000 because he thinks everybody’s got at least $250,000 in their bank account. I just found that to be completely insane. That was kind of wild. 

And every day at CC is crazy. The thing at CC is that you never know what’s going to happen once you start a block. 

MD: I’ve noticed that in your classes, you often use “traditional” canonical thinkers such as Hegel and Melville, but you often use them to build upon radical ideas that fracture the canon in which they exist. What is your stance on having students read traditional texts, especially in a time in academia that is against reading “dead white guys”? 

MS: You make it sound like taking medicine, right? I have this conversation a lot, because every block or so, a student comes to me from some other department and they’re like, “I’m tired of reading dead white people. I wanna focus on African American literature.” And I’ll say, “That’s great, but you’re going to have to have that canon under your belt in order to understand what someone like Toni Morrison is doing.” Morrison is a classicist, and I don’t have to say it, she’s said it herself. I mean, she can’t live without Melville, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. This is one of the mysteries of the African diaspora. Those similarly situated are always working in an oppositional environment, so when we develop literature or philosophy or theory or art, it’s within a context and, to an extent, that context is a particular mélange of social forces that has been pushed onto these bodies. 

So if you’re a person who’s pushing on the canon to transgress it, you probably ought know what its four corners are. I don’t want to be running around thinking that I’m saying something innovative when I’m like, “Democracy is a way to subjugate people,” and think that I’m saying that, when Plato said it. So out of Rousseau’s “The Social Contract,” we’re able to understand where oppression comes from, and then we can understand the ways in which to develop technologies or thinking to push against this

So I’m completely resistant to “dismantle the canon.” My question is more how to expand the canon. There’s no reason why Fanon shouldn’t be read in philosophy departments, political theory departments, psychology departments, and not just in a race and ethnicity department. I don’t think you can read Fanon and not understand his close reading of Hegel or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty or Sartre or Kant or Freud. To the extent that you don’t know that, your reading is going to be deprived in certain ways. It’s almost as if reading these “dead white people” is framed as this kind of Vulcan mind control, as if then you’re not able to think about yourself in any other way. I think we’re smarter than that. 

MD: Going off that, do you think that your role here as a professor is different due to you being black and from an underrepresented background? 

MS: Absolutely. Anybody who pretends that’s not true is not telling you the truth. It’s a complex thing, because at the same time that the demographics of students have been changing at Colorado College, the demographics of faculty, administration, and staff are also altering. So many of the struggles and points of discomfort that students feel, faculty feel at the same time. 

I view myself as being in the position of protecting students, academically and socially, as best I can. I’m not here to be the counselling department, but I am here to kind of introduce them to a particular type of education: what does it mean to exist in this world in this way, embodied in the way that you are? Whether it’s race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or gender, there are going to be forces that you’re going to have to learn how to resolve, and some of that comes from reading things and learning what they are, but you also have to develop a way to protect yourself at the same time. So these are very complex conversations, and as a black male professor at a predominately white institution, you have a particular role. The same would go for any professor that represents an underrepresented group. 

MD: I heard that you’re working on something with H. Rap Brown [a former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when it was allied with the Black Panther Party].

MS: Yeah. When I was in grad school, I was working on my dissertation, and I got to this point where I was thinking carefully about black radical thought post-Malcolm X, as it relates to Fanon. H. Rap Brown—he’s changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin—is a theorist of radical black thought, so I wrote him a letter while he was in federal prison and he wrote back. So we’ve been doing this long conversation talking back and forth. Then I got this call one night. It was like, “it’s H. Rap Brown on the phone,” so we just talked for a little while. You can’t call him, so you write and wait to hear back. It’s difficult because he’s doing life in prison for the attempted murder of two police officers in Georgia.

What we’ve been working on together is a series of reflections on Malcolm X. I’m trying to be careful to preserve his access to his rights because he’s ill—he’s terminally ill with cancer—so I don’t want him to lose his last relationship he has to speak to people outside of prison by asking questions that could have him censored or thrown off. The only reason he’s in federal prison as opposed to state prison in Georgia is because the Georgia prison official determined that he would be—at 70 or 80 years old—too controversial for the states. Only the federal government could potentially keep control over what he’s doing. So, it’s an interesting interaction. 

The working title of the project is “The Book of the New School (H.) Rap Brown Game.” Chuck D [a rapper who created political music in the ‘80s] uses that in one of the “Public Enemy” records, where he talks about H. Rap Brown as this type of radical. I’ve really learned a lot from talking to him, once I got past being struck by having him on the phone. 

MD: You’ve also brought a lot of interesting people to CC. Can you speak on that? Who have been particular favorites that you’ve brought here? 

MS: Yeah. It was really interesting to have Flores Forbes here, who was the youngest of the Black Panther executive committee. His book “Will You Die with Me?” talks about his days as an enforcer and literal assassin for Huey Newton for that period of the Black Panther Party. Flores Forbes is somebody that speaks with a certain authority, as opposed to being an academic talking about it. Percival Everett, a novelist, has been here a couple times. His books are important in approaching questions of black subjectivity, intersubjectivity, interdisciplinary thought. His book “Erasure” is basically about a black novelist who is writing about Aeschylus and classical literature and is disallowed from doing that, and how that individual has to then write basically a stereotypical “hood” novel in order to get money and be paid attention to. I brought my friend Kahil El’Zabar and his trio to visit last year. We’ve been friends for a long time. He’s been Downbeat Magazine’s percussionist of the year several times, and he’s worked with Pharaoh Sanders and those kinds of people in the span of his career. I grew up on the 112th street of Chicago, so I grew up on the same block as Malik Yusef, the poet. He’s won a couple Grammys, he wrote some stuff on Beyonce’s “Lemonade,” for Common, and those kinds of people, like Kanye West. So Malik Skyped into our class and talked about his relationship to hip hop and spoken word. 

I’m just fortunate to have all these people as friends. The thing about these people is that they are more interested in talking to students than you think they are. There’s one way where you’d be like, “Oh, this person would never want to be bothered…” but it’s fascinating how much they get from that energy. The ability to talk to smart people who are from a different generation keeps ideas fresh for everybody. I’ll try to keep doing that. 

MD: What was the hardest part of your academic career journey?

MS: It’s the balance. Balancing thinking transgressively with the canon. I don’t speak traditional African languages. I didn’t study at the University of Timbuktu. I’m a very traditionally educated person: Jesuits, the Naval Academy, University of Chicago, and Brown. These are not outside the mainstream institutions.

Like, I like reading St. Augustine, I really enjoy it. I enjoy what St. Augustine was saying back in the 300s when he wrote “City of God.” So the question is, “how do we then use that in our contemporary moment to create a type of transgressive political project for transgressive ways of thinking? That’s probably the hardest thing—not even the hardest thing. That’s the thing when you really get down to it. That’s what we’re up to. 

So it kind of performs itself in certain ways. That’s always been the biggest challenge. Even intellectually, when I was in grad school, I was lucky being able to go to Brown, where they didn’t have disciplinary boundaries. So when I finished my basic courses in Africana studies, I was never over there anymore. I was in comp lit, I was in philosophy, in the German studies department, I was taking religious studies classes, so I was trying to absorb this information to create a particular type of intellectual genealogy that then I could use to think about things differently. Understanding the roles of cultural limitations and the limitations of the ideas that have been introduced to me: that’s the challenge.

 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Performing for Ourselves

 

I am walking down the hill, out of the bubble of Horace Mann Ivy League Preparatory School and into the rest of the world. I have just enough time between classes to walk to David’s house, smoke a spliff, and listen to whatever new music he’ll make me listen to. His grimy Bronx apartment is a welcome reverie after my high school’s pit of anxiety. I open the unlocked door of his apartment and creep into his room. He’s sitting where he always is, legs crossed at his desk, hammering at his Korg keyboard. The sound coming out of his headphones is audible from five feet away. At four hundred dollars, the keyboard is by far the most expensive thing he owns, and more precious to him than anything. He’s hunched over, barefoot, his hair and hoodie unwashed. As always, it takes him a few moments to notice me. I wait, not wanting to break his musical trance, and sit on the edge of his bed.

Suddenly, he turns around. “Kat! Listen to this shit.” Still half-entranced, he rips out his headphones and lets the beat bump through the speakers. It’s mediocre.

“Dude! Fucking sick,” I say, “who are you writing this for?” 

“Akilah wrote something last night, needs a beat. I’m trying to get it on SoundCloud before the show this weekend.”

I almost flinch—I’d entirely forgotten that we were going to perform. 

I feign excitement: “Oh sick, yeah, I’ve been working on some poems, I’ll send them to you.” David doesn’t need any more negativity surrounding the performance.

At the biggest show we ever played, only twelve people were in the audience. We had been practicing for weeks. My piece was by far the easiest—I read a couple of old poems and helped the musicians move their equipment. David’s jobs were far harder. He was the one responsible for organizing group practice. It took place in the Sweatshop, a twenty-dollar-per-hour studio in Bushwick, away from the ears of complaining neighbors. He was the one who had to fight with venue managers over the money we had to scrounge up to use the space. Most importantly, he had to keep us from turning our anxiety and anger against each other. FreeThe was a hotheaded DIY group, a collection of artists desperate for success. Bickering was inevitable, just another part of the operation.

It took me a while to comprehend why he put so much effort and suffering into what would end up being a mediocre, unpopulated show. As a side performer—primarily just a friend who was invited to participate—I always felt distant from the group’s drama. From my perspective, it was almost depressing to watch. It was pretty clear that no one in FreeThe was about to make it big.

Recently, I asked Jake, a fellow former FreeThe musician and longtime friend, why he thought David worked so hard for the group. “No idea,” he replied. Jake, like me, left the intensity of New York for the quiet emptiness of Colorado. I think he still harbors some resentment for the city and its people. 

“It’s like, when we performed,” he continued, “it would just be going terribly and we knew it was going terribly but we just had to pretend it was all okay. We just had sit there and cringe.” I was surprised to hear him speak so negatively of FreeThe. “Why didn’t you quit earlier?” I asked. “They’re good people and I need good people to practice with,” Jake said, before changing the subject. 

After David and I finished our spliff, the initial edge of pre-show anxiety disappeared, and my excitement was a bit less forced. He continued to work on the beat as I leaned back and listened, willing it to be better, desperately hoping for him to succeed. Perhaps it was just my affection for him and my own wishful thinking, but after fifteen more minutes of work, the beat sounded halfway decent. I lay back on the bed, soaking up a bit more of David’s ardor before trudging back to class.

Jake’s answer to my question was unsatisfying, so I’ve been searching for a better one. Why did David work so hard for what he must have known wouldn’t succeed?

Only recently, now that I’m more than halfway across the country and dearly missing FreeThe, have I begun to realize that the question of “why” never even entered anyone’s head. We only wondered “how.” The group’s need to make art was not up for question. Our only focus was finding a way to do what we needed to do. 

That’s why we put on shows: It gave us a deadline, a tangible reason to get together and practice. Though most FreeThe members would deny this (they’re as haughty as most artists are), the show didn’t matter nearly as much as the practice. We did it for the process, for the actual production of art. The show itself was only a byproduct.

In David’s case, there is another factor that can’t be overlooked. Before FreeThe, back when I only knew him as an older guy with a slightly predatory reputation, he was a weed, cocaine, and acid dealer. He’s only told me the story of his downfall in various hesitant, drunk fragments—it’s a touchy subject for him. Essentially, he was robbed of a few thousand dollars’ worth of drugs and needed to get the money back fast. After making some bad decisions to get money quickly, he wound up at Rikers Island prison for a brief period of time. Since getting out, he’s remained relatively clean and has only worked legal jobs. 

FreeThe was partially a distraction, something to fill David’s time so that he didn’t feel as compelled to return to the drug scene. I also believe, though, that being responsible for something made him feel better about himself. Like a parent raising a child, David could focus on the successes and failures of FreeThe to distract from his own. 

The next Saturday, I was back at David’s house, clumsily taking apart a drum kit and preparing it for the nearly two-hour long subway journey to the Lower East Side. Most of FreeThe was also at David’s house, leaving little room to move around the tiny apartment. An air of excitement filled the small space as everyone hyped each other up.

I kept to the side, alone with the cumbersome drum kit—I didn’t want to bring down their energy with my anxiety. Performing has always been tough for me, though not for the reasons that Jake expressed. Once I begin to read my poetry, my fear dissipates. Every moment until then, though, is painful. 

Swallowing my stress, I began hauling the drums past the broken elevator and down the stairs, allowing myself a moment alone before the inevitable ordeal of performing. 

As bad as my anxiety in that moment was, it was far from the worst it’s been. In seventh grade, I shared a piece of writing with a large group of people for the first time, and became so overwhelmed with fear that I cried. I ended up having to leave the dingy public library auditorium. Years later, after winning a competition for a piece I wrote, I was so anxious about reading it publicly that at the last minute I backed out of my opportunity to perform at Carnegie Hall. Instead of going to the ceremony, I watched a live stream of it with my parents. I remember staring at the screen, still dressed up in preparation to perform, filled with regret. I decided to never let it happen again.

Like me, David and the rest of FreeThe were kids on the cusp of being “real artists,” willing to put in whatever amount of pain and effort required to make something beautiful. Also like me, they often failed to actually do so. Either way, they were there to force me to continue to try, and I was there to force them. They gave me the tough love I needed. Once or twice, Jake angrily yelled at me to “stop being a little bitch, Kat” when I tried to get out of performing. At the time, I hated him for it. His aggression felt cruel, and amidst the group’s usual bickering, I took his insults personally. But I realize now how much that anger helped me. Nothing but the bitter desire to prove him wrong could have made me get up and perform. 

The subway ride from David’s house in the Bronx to the lower Manhattan venue must have taken an hour and a half, and with a drum kit, keyboard, guitar, and pedalboard in hand, it was a hellish excursion. Some of the other passengers smiled at us, though I’m not sure if they smiled because of the absurdity of the scene or out of warmth and respect for visibly struggling musicians. Either way, their joy was a welcome sight. Most people were far ruder, disregarding the preciousness of our equipment and callously kicking or bumping into it. I’m sure that for people like David, whose keyboard was his pride and joy, their behavior was heinous. 

Finally making it to the venue was barely a relief. Moments after we got there, David was already arguing with the manager.
By 8 p.m., the drama had peaked. The issue of the venue fee had led David and the bar manager into a near-physical screaming match. Money was often the root of our fights with venues. Usually, a band will pay a certain amount of money to play at a venue, and the money is returned after ticket sales. At this particular show, the venue refused to return the hundred dollars that we had barely managed to scrape together from painful extra working hours. We couldn’t afford to lose that money.

Not all of New York’s teenage performance groups go through this struggle. Certain groups whose families have the money to support their music can easily afford to spare a hundred dollars. Often, they can spare even more, which gives them the option to play at bigger venues with better advertisement and regular crowds. Money isn’t the only key to success in DIY, but it certainly helps, and our lack of money certainly put us at a disadvantage in the harsh competition of the New York music scene.

New York is overcrowded with talented people trying to make it, to stand out against the masses of equally talented performers. The city is simply too physically dense to accommodate us all. Because of this, performers are forced to appeal to the economic interests of venues, which, as much as they want to help the art scene, also need to sustain themselves financially. 

For the most part, we made an effort to resist the atmosphere of tension and remain supportive towards each other. But sometimes we would slip up and let the stress get the best of us. Someone would give five dollars less than another person would, and bickering would ensue.

David left the bar in a huff. Half the group left with him to offer comfort and solutions, while the other half, including myself, stayed inside with the equipment. None of the people who left were allowed back inside. The bouncer became a barrier between the two halves of FreeThe. 

When an hour passed, no solution had been reached and we were halfway into our time slot. Out of boredom and the unavoidable urge to continue making art, we began our show unplugged, with only half of the group, and without an audience. We played for each other and for ourselves, channeling the frustration right back into the work. We improvised. A guy with minimal drum experience played a box drum. I recalled my childhood ballet classes and danced. I read poems over a girl’s singing. People picked up instruments they’d never used before. Ultimately, we just messed around, giving in to the chaos of our failed show, relishing the freedom it granted us.

Half out of tradition, half out of an attempt to console ourselves for the objective failure of our show, we decided to leave the venue and get drunk. With money we didn’t make from the gig, we bought pizza and beer and migrated to our usual corner of Tompkins Square Park. It was a bit too cold and late to be hanging outside, so the park was deserted apart from our group and our equipment. Our little caravan, dwarfed by all the gear, huddled in the slight shelter that the drum kit and guitar cases provided.

No one was talking. After our moment of failure, each of us was deeply involved in our own internal debate. Why do I do this? Why am I wasting so much money? So much effort?

“I still think I should have socked that guy,” said David.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Jake. There was a pause before we all started to laugh. For the first time, I realized the comedy in the scene. I saw my underdressed and shivering friends hugging their instruments, sitting in a circle on the pavement for no real reason, pouting like children.

David mentioned something about an open venue in a couple weeks but was quickly cut off by a communal groan. 

“Ok, fine. I’ll shut up.”

Our Lady of Mercy

TJ Larsen’s ears had so much earwax in them. It was all caked up in there, yellow-orange. He was a new student in the first grade and I sat next to him and stared into the clogged tubes of his ears. Everyone knew it. Someone, please, just tell him to use a q-tip. I wanted to stick one right up his ear. It would pop! through his ear drum and burrow till the cotton tip nudged his coiled brains. When I suctioned it out I’d be able to see straight into TJ Larsen’s head. 

Apparently in high school TJ Larsen fucked a girl in a Macy’s changing stall. I’ve never had sex while standing up. I assume that’s how they did it. TJ hadn’t been earwaxy since sometime in fourth grade. 

Laura Baumhauer had a waspy presence. Nobody really liked her. When people sat down for lunch they would always sit on the side where she wasn’t. So she’d be sitting on the end with the empty bench beside her and everyone piled up on the other side. In sixth grade, Margaret Bruge whispered that Laura stuffed tissues or maybe even socks into her bra. Margaret knew because she saw something fall out while we were changing for gym class.

Laura had acne and large pores that made her face look like a strawberry. In line at our sixth-grade classroom door I heard her boasting, “my parents have never had sex.” I told her that they must have had sex at least twice, because she and her sister existed. 

Laura wore a East High T-shirt in her eighth-grade yearbook photo. She kept talking about high school. It would be a fresh start. Laura made friends at first and I think people liked her for a time before they realized she wasn’t cool. 

Jess Adamson was my best friend. We walked the three blocks to Lady of Mercy together every morning and back home every afternoon. 

Parents gushed over how small and polite Jess was. I felt too large. Jess had anxiety and bladder spasms. When a spasm came on, maybe on the walk to school or in the hall, Jess would crouch down on one knee. I’d crouch down next to her, and we’d pretend to tie our shoes. 

Jess and I talked in the Quiet Area about how neither of our families went to church and we didn’t think God existed. Maybe there were spirits, though. 

Jack—not Jack Strotman, the other Jack—Brezicki—he was pudgy and gluten-free. He threw up in front of the take-home folders in first grade. I thought he had just spilled some soup. He, Jess, and I were voted “sweetest personality” in the eighth grade yearbook. 

Katherine Strauss was one of my secondary best friends. She taught me long division in third grade, which was the year her parents got divorced. She had nearly a hundred Littlest Pet Shop animals and a half-dozen Webkinz, which all went to her dad’s house. Her mom fed us carrot slices and had us make crafts such as hair-tie rugs or mosaic bowling balls. Katherine invented several languages that included code names for our classmates so we could gossip while they were still in earshot.

Sometimes Natasha Sangsorn’s father would be sleeping on the couch when I came over for a play date. Natasha had a ginormous house with a trampoline in the backyard and a walk-in snack pantry. Stuffed animals crowded her canopy bed. Natasha’s mother was overweight. Natasha went vegetarian and ate nothing but Greek yogurt at lunch and said she was too fat, but she wasn’t fat at all. 

Natasha wanted us to be close friends but I didn’t like her. Once, she shunned me for a whole recess because I chose to sit next to Katherine instead of her at lunch. She had a sleepover for her golden birthday and ordered everyone not to be too loud. She created a system of strikes for our girly squeals. Natasha wanted to go trick-or-treating with Jess, Katherine, and I, but I didn’t want her to come. I made up excuses but later pretended it was all a misunderstanding when she called me on my flip phone and told me she was struggling with depression.

Emily Hagley locked herself in her room and wouldn’t come out. It was her birthday party and her mom pleaded at the door while we sat around the table staring at our uneaten slices of cake. Emily locked herself in there because she didn’t get to eat the first bite. I avoided eye contact with the other girls, my stomach tight. I was the one who had snuck the bite of cake.

When Emily came over to my house that one time she had us play Dog Show. She coaxed poor Luna up and down the stairs and pushed her through the hula-hoop. Emily sat next to me in U.S. History and kept stealing my colored highlighters. I wondered, is this bullying? 

In sixth grade, Nick Nell’s hair was a blonde Justin Bieber swoosh. Every few minutes he’d twitch his neck sideways to toss the hair from his eyes. Freshman year he dated a senior and gave her a concussion against the back windshield of his car while having sex. He constantly flirted with Ms. Roderick in Western Civ sophomore year. That summer, he got into cocaine and went to rehab and came back hollow-looking. 

Miranda Bellthorne annoyed me when we were paired up for badminton. She couldn’t hit the birdie. She was small, obsessed with Disney, and had her future planned out in detail. Jess liked her, though. They went to the mall together and talked about their crushes. Jess and I had never gone to the mall together because I didn’t like trying on clothes. Jess wasn’t supposed to like that stuff either. But a part of me wanted to go, too. Jess never asked me to come. I felt like she thought of me as a boy.

Oliver Raffburg was small but athletic and charismatic. He sang the song, “Build Me Up Buttercup” in front of our music class. He said that Miranda had the perfect face and body. Perfect proportions and symmetry. A long neck. 

Story Walters’ desk was in front of mine in the third grade. She was absent for a week. When she came back, I saw the gauze on the back of her skull replacing clumps of her tightly curled hair. Story had a brain tumor. She was in a wheelchair at the end of fourth grade. Her face and body looked all bloated from the chemo. She died in fifth grade. 

At recess once, I found a clay frog magnet in the woodchips and Story wanted to have it. She kept asking me for it, but since I had found it, I didn’t give it to her. I felt guilty about it and buried the magnet under the swings after she died. 

A counselor lady came to our classroom once Story had moved to hospice. She asked us if we had any questions. “Is Story going to die?” Oliver Raffburg asked, timidly. The lady paused, then clasped Oliver’s shoulder. “Everybody dies,” she answered.

Mr. Paulson, the principal of Our Lady of Mercy, got a brain tumor a few months later and died. Mr. Paulson had a bald head and was a Bears fan and started a “walk around the world” thing where he’d walk around the neighborhood with a herd of students at lunch. If you went, you got a little plastic foot that you could put on a keychain. The feet came in all the colors of the rainbow plus brown, grey, black, and white. Some were transparent and some opaque and a few were even sparkly. He died before I could collect them all. 

Caroline Lund was my other secondary best friend. She gave Jess a stuffed animal otter because “it’s a special day” (it wasn’t) and gave me an old wine bottle. I eyed the otter on the walk home. Freshman year, Caroline explained to us what masturbation was. She had discovered it for the first time with the showerhead. 

Caroline got really into baking. Her cookies were the best. People would always comment on how slender Caroline’s older sister Ellie was—she could be a model! In eighth-grade she lent me a book about a girl with bulimia. I got bored and never finished it, but when I gave the book back I told her it was a good story. Years later I learned she had been making herself throw up. 

During kindergarten playtime, Olivia Harris always took the role of Mother. I felt cute in my overalls until she told me in the stairwell that they made me look like a cowboy. Olivia’s older brother Tommy hung himself in his closet the night she starred in the eighth-grade play. 

The next week the teachers gave us pamphlets on the signs of depression. Olivia still came on our pre-graduation field trip to Navy Pier. “Pirates of the Caribbean” played on the little TV bus screens. Mrs. Myler shut it off when the scene of the pirates hanging from seaside gallows came on.

Mrs. Firton liked having Garrett Teeler do the banana dance. He stood at the front of the class, gyrating his seventh-grade hips. At any one time, at least five girls had a crush on Garrett. When we all piled into the girls’ gym changing room for a tornado drill, Garrett pointed to the tampon dispenser and asked, “what are tampoons?”

Eva Peters was gone for a day in the sixth grade. Apparently her mom had a “girls’ day” with her because she’d gotten her period. I didn’t get my period until eighth grade. It was the night before picture day and I went to my mom’s bedroom and asked her what the brown stuff in my underwear was, even though I knew what it was. I wore a navy blue button-up shirt and khaki pants and a big pad in my underwear that felt like a diaper because tampons freaked me out and I didn’t understand exactly where my vagina was. While waiting in line for pictures, I felt the blood soak up the pad and through my khaki pants. I escaped to a bathroom stall and lined my underwear with toilet paper but I knew people had seen. I kept pulling my shirt down throughout the rest of the day. I wanted to tell Jess about it on the walk home and I knew she knew, but I never mentioned it and neither did she. Jess didn’t get her period until sophomore year. 

When we dissected worms in seventh grade science class TJ made some joke about sex that offended Mrs. Myler. She scolded TJ’s offensiveness in front of the class and told us that sex wasn’t that great, anyways. 

I remember when we got to that page in our science textbook with the diagram of the male and female reproductive systems. The book sat spread open on my desk and I didn’t want to seem like I wanted to look at it so I looked at the walls instead. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the little penises in the room pressing against their pants. 

Zoe Windoza said she was goth and that Story had been the only one who had understood her because she had been goth, too. Zoe was tall and pretty and wore black arm sleeves and dyed her hair and later got gages. 

There were problems with gossiping and girl bullying in seventh grade. Sherie Roane, the Youth Ministry Coordinator, took all the girls into the church and gathered us in a circle. She pressed an unlit candle into everyone’s hands and instructed us to share a special prayer as we transferred the flame from one candle to the next. Sherie lit her candle with a lighter first. “For Story,” she announced. Margaret started crying and then Natasha cried and then Laura cried and then more girls cried. The boys stayed in the classroom and held a paper airplane competition. 

My dad got leukemia the summer after fifth grade. Everyone prayed for us. He died at the end of sixth grade. I came back to school after a week and caught up on most of my homework.

Kevin Jr.’s last name was Maloney so I associated his face with bologna. He came up to me in the back of the church at my father’s memorial service. He was standing behind square-shaped Kevin Sr., who I knew was making Kevin Jr. say it. “I’m sorry for your loss, Paige,” he mumbled, looking at the carpet. His face looked especially like bologna then.

Junior year, Katherine got pregnant and decided to keep the baby. She named him Evan. A year later, she gave him up. She moved to Florida with some drug dealer. Now she’s with another guy. Katherine’s mom, Susan, took me out to lunch last summer. We drove to Pizza Brutta and sat on the stools facing out the window to the street. We chatted for a while before I asked about Katherine. Susan had joined a support group for the family members of drug addicts. She still got to visit Evan. She hadn’t heard from Katherine in over a month. She started crying but quickly dabbed away the tears.

Jess’s home phone number was the only one I had memorized. We would always count down from three at the end of a call so that we’d hang up at the same time. Sometimes neither of us would hang up and we’d have to count down over and over again. At some point near the end of middle school, Jess stopped the counting. I kept up with it for a while, counting down even after she’d hung up. Eventually I stopped, too.

The Accidental Anarchist

 

In early 2009, Erin Elder found herself at a land auction in northern New Mexico, handing over only $1,200 for an acre and a quarter in Tres Piedras, right near the Colorado border. 

For years, Elder had talked about buying land. “We should start a commune!” she would say. “We should start a farm! A school! A laboratory!” The ideas were there, but she had never owned property, let alone purchased it herself. She didn’t even know how to purchase land. But she brought her enthusiasm with her wherever she went. The idea of owning land intrigued Elder because she could do whatever she wanted with it—she could share it and create a community removed from the pitfalls of living as an artist and curator in conventional contexts. She hoped it would provide a space in which people could create for themselves and each other, not for money or because somebody told them to. 

Finally, a friend confronted her. “At some point, you’re going to have the chance to pull the trigger. Are you going to be ready?”

Born in 1979, Elder is a native of Colorado Springs—she has a “classic Colorado Springs genealogy,” as she puts it. Her mother is a Colorado College graduate, and her father was in the Air Force. As a child, she attended the Bemis School of Art. As an undergraduate, she attended Prescott College. She double-majored in studio art and “peace studies.” Her senior project combined the two, creating the most public kind of art project—two billboards that featured art from over 40 artists around the world. 

“It was my first time working as a collaborative organizer,” says Elder. The process catalyzed her desire to make cooperative, political art. It was then that she realized she wanted to work with artists rather than as the artist. With the conclusion of her senior project, she moved to New York City to work with Creative Time, a public arts organization. There, she worked on what she calls “mega, mega big public art projects.” 

After New York, Elder worked at an art center and a gallery in Albuquerque, then in California as a curator and teaching assistant. She eventually decided to pursue a graduate degree at the California School of Arts, where she received an M.A. in curatorial practice in 2007. After graduation, she started working as an independent curator, curating collaborative projects and workshops for other artists. 

When Elder began pursuing the path of an artist and curator, she found herself having to hold back on some of her aspirations due to the restrictive nature of museums and academic institutions—or, less euphemistically, due to working under people rather than with people. This is when her interest in communes took hold. In 2008, she curated an exhibition about an experimental Bay Area commune featuring 29 international artists. That same year, she worked with the Institute for Social Research and the Discovery of Art God, another commune, in Stuttgart, Germany. These communes gave her a taste of anarchy, and her ideology began to take shape. 

Now, Elder calls herself “an accidental anarchist.” To most of us, anarchy connotes little more than chaos, but to Elder, anarchy is a change in order, not a destruction of order. Anarchy is community-based order, a “Do-It-Yourself” mentality, where power is flattened. Elder feels that capitalism establishes a spectrum of winners and losers, and that it’s possible to escape some of that influence. 

“I don’t believe the world should be anarchist in every way,” says Elder, “but I think it’s a great model for small-scale projects to explore an art. And for community organizing. But I absolutely think power should be decentralized.”

It’s true that, Elder doesn’t believe in complete anarchy. Although she claims that her personality “isn’t institutional,” her career has often led her to work with institutions. If you’re trying to make a name for yourself, or just trying to achieve some level of financial security, it’s hard to work outside of the system. But in such contexts, the freedom to create without the restrictions of hierarchy and other influences of capitalism can’t exist. Thus, Elder looked for opportunities outside these contexts—or created her own.

“Capitalism,” explains Elder, “wants us to work harder, to make more, to be productive. In capitalism, we get busy. It’s this escalating growth and people are running themselves ragged just trying to keep up. When you’re stressed out and busy, you aren’t noticing the color of the sky. Or how the air feels against your skin. You aren’t noticing the simple things in life. It’s hard to make art if you aren’t being exposed to the elemental.”

So naturally, it didn’t take long for Elder to jump on the opportunity to create a commune herself. Less than a year after her time in Frankfurt, she purchased the land in New Mexico. Lucky for her, she wasn’t alone—her sister Nina and her close friend, Nancy Zastudil, purchased the land with her. Elder had always been looking for a space free of all institutional influence, and now, she had it.

As would be any anarchist, even an “accidental” one, Elder was conflicted over purchasing property at all. “I’m really skeptical of ownership,” she says, a little ironically. She had always wanted to buy the land, but she was more concerned about how she would use the land than about being a landowner herself. She needed to share the land because for her, the concept of owning land is inextricably tied to domination. Who can own the land? And what can be owned? 

In her own words, Elder is trying to “understand the land as mother. That it’s not an ownable thing that can be cut up into pieces and sold off.” But of course, Elder herself bought a “cut-up” piece of land. Paradoxically, she uded it to challenge the very principles that allowed her to own it in the first place. 

578554_10151293405102167_1271942706_n.jpg

 

Elder describes the property in Tres Piedras as entirely desolate: “Undeveloped. Expansive views. No trees, no water. Just sagebrush.” But that was the point, and it wasn’t so much about what the land was like as where it was. Tres Piedras is an “unincorporated community” 30 minutes outside of Taos with no electricity, no running water, and no cellphone service. Completely removed from society, it was exactly what Elder, her sister, and Zastudil wanted. Their little plot of land would become what Elder had talked about for so many years: not just a commune, but also an art residency program. They called it PLAND—Practicing Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation.

In Elder’s words, the commune was a “hands-on, exploratory approach to Do-It-Yourself, alternative living,” an escape from the constant rush of capitalism. The lot rested just over the Rio Grande Gorge, a snaking canyon running 50 miles through northern New Mexico. Elder recalls the view of the mountains, the huge sky shows: the clouds, stars, and the rainbows.

“I remember when I first realized the moon actually does shift seasonally,” she says. “I could watch it move throughout the year. And that was deeply educational.” 

The plan for PLAND was, in the beginning, simple: It would only be open from June to September, due to intense winter weather in the region. Residents would stay for one month at a time and receive a stipend of anywhere between $400 to $1,200. The program was originally funded by the Idea Fund, an early-stage venture investor, then through a Kickstarter campaign and dozens of local sponsors. Once she created a website for PLAND, Elder held an open “casting call” for resident artists. 

The residents worked for themselves and for the community, building on and shaping the land around them. The “Main House,” a 24-by-16 foot post-and-beam structure, underwent constant renovation. The artists built a sauna, a water filtration system to make the rain water drinkable, a structure for shade. The constraints of the environment forced artists to create out of necessity what they never would have made otherwise. But they weren’t making actual paintings, Elder says. “They are now, but [back then] they were really just responding to the situation at hand.” 

You might wonder whether or not the artists in this artist-residency program were even making art. For Elder, what people usually mean by “is it art?” is “does it mean anything?” And what matters to meaning is not the definition of art, but what the artist is responding to: “If you’re not exposing yourself to anything interesting or unusual,” says Elder, “you’re probably not going to make anything interesting or unusual.” 

“If you are an artist and you’re figuring out how to bathe with a cup of water in the middle of nowhere, it becomes an opportunity to make meaning,” she explains. “To make a meaningful bath. A beautiful bath. To think constructively about it. It’s not a task to be done, but an opportunity to engage with in a certain way. And what I love about artists is their ability to put on the ‘art goggles’ and have more interesting moments. To have inspiration to happen at any time, from anything.”

Ask yourself: When was the last time you had a meaningful bath? Actually, when was the last time you had a bath at all? Can you make a list of everything you did today? Then think about what you remember about those things. Were they memorable? Enjoyable? 

The goal of a place like PLAND wasn’t to force artists to suffer. The idea was that by limiting your experience to radical simplicity, you may find yourself in situations so detached from habit that new, inspiring meanings can arise. PLAND offered this to some, though the experience was only temporary. The goal was not to live there forever, but to change artists’ perspectives once they returned to where they came from. 

It wasn’t just the radical simplicity that changed artists’ perspectives. PLAND also stripped away the endless lists of to-dos, the daily responsibilities, and most importantly, the necessity to make money. Working as an artist under capitalism, your contributions to society are inevitably monetized. Monetization can muddle the inspiration for a piece of art by requiring that it be attractive on the market.

At PLAND, artists no longer had to sell art in order to make rent, so they no longer had to make art for anyone at all. The property Elder purchased provided the “Necessary Dislocation” from monetization. “Liberating Art” was the consequence.

From 2009 to 2014, PLAND had 14 residents from all over the country. One even came from France, and one from Mexico. Elder developed an international network to which she is still connected. The residents have all returned to the “real world,” but they have taken those lessons about art and power back with them. 

Some residents are now building their own homes; one even started her own successful chicken coop-building business. Before PLAND, that resident had never built anything, Elder says. After leaving, the residents all kept creating—though maybe not in the same way they created before.

***

One of Elder’s early mentors said to her, “You won’t get rich working the arts, but you’ll have a very rich life.” That’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, it’s nice to have more than a cup of water for a bath. And PLAND was never supposed to last forever.

“It was very challenging to make money,” she says, and “to work 30 minutes off-site but live outside of town without electricity and water.” Originally, Elder was splitting her time between Tres Piedras and Taos, where she was 

working. And though she was living outside of civilization, paradoxically, her reputation continued to grow. She kept working as an independent curator and eventually had to move into Taos for work, while still spending as much time at PLAND as she could. 

In 2012, the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe offered Elder the position of Visual Arts Director. “It was a ‘real world job,’” she says. And she couldn’t pass it up. But then the commute became two hours, and the distance between her and PLAND grew even larger. At the same time, prospects away from Tres Piedras also opened up for Nina Elder and Zastudil. 

“We started [PLAND] because we wanted to make something for ourselves,” Elder says. “And then it became known, and we started getting all these other opportunities that started pulling us away. It became complicated. We had this lessening relationship to the land, and that’s one of the reasons we decided to close [PLAND]. We were losing our connectivity. And that was what the whole thing was about.” 

Elder, her sister, and Zastudil decided to dissolve PLAND at the end of 2014, eventually selling the lot two years after that. Elder left the Center for Contemporary Art in 2015, the same year she founded her own business, Gibbous, a consulting service for other artists. She now has about 40 clients with Gibbous, consulting across the world: giving career advice, helping to write grants, and offering “general therapy” (because being an artist “isn’t always easy,” she laughs). 

Now that she’s sending invoices and charging by the hour, Elder is still conflicted about how money plays into her career and the art world. But it’s different. She’s learning to “value herself,” which she says is a necessary evolution. “I’d rather make up my own thing and learn how to monetize it than work at Starbucks,” she explains. Back in society, certain sacrifices are inevitable. Projects cost money, and the artist has to navigate that restriction, whether with grants or working for a paycheck.

“Outside of any political agenda,” Elder says, “I just want things to happen. I want people to do things.” With Gibbous, she is able to help people “do things,” support herself, and still stay true to what she believes in. Sure, she’s sacrificing some ethical purity to work within the system. But Elder’s more recent success indicates that her current projects might be working toward more widespread, systematic change. She’s just finished teaching her first course at Colorado College—Museum Studies. She says she had complete freedom to teach the class in whatever way she wanted.

“If I can brag a little bit, I’m finally getting to a point where I’m getting paid to be myself.” Elder says. “I’m not having to make my own realms; I’m being invited into other people’s playgrounds. I’m finally getting to the point where I don’t have to fundraise for every damn thing that I do. Somebody else is doing the fundraising and giving me a budget. That just means I can be more creative; I can express myself more deeply.”  She taps her knuckles on the table mid-conversation. “That’s fake wood,” she smirks, “but I really hope it continues.” 

Elder has lived hand-to-mouth for 20 years, but that’s not the case any longer. She’s now the “anti-institutionalist” working within the institution. “There are people throughout my life that have told me ‘Get a job! Climb the ladder!’ And I just haven’t done that.”

 

I finish my interview with Elder as the sun sets over Pikes Peak, back in Colorado Springs. It isn’t quite Tres Piedras, but it still has some of the mountains, the huge clouds, the sky show. We take a moment to enjoy it.

I think back to what Elder said earlier. Art is about making meaning. 

“Are we making art right now?” I ask her, only half sarcastically.

Again, she smiles and hits the question right back at me. “I don’t know, are we?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I laugh. 

“Well, you’re just getting started,” she says with another excited smile, looking at me right in the eye, almost mischievously. When she was my age, she was already working with 40 different artists across the world for her senior project. I’m glad she doesn’t ask whether I have some kind of large-scale, collaborative project in the works (I don’t).

Instead, I ask her if she has any advice for an aspiring artist like me. 

“Don’t wait for somebody to invite you,” Elder says. “Don’t wait for somebody to pick you up. Don’t wait for the gallery to seek you out. Do stuff, and find the people who are interested in doing things too. And just get going.” 

Elder leaves, and I spend a few more minutes watching the sunset, thinking.

I open up my laptop and type, “Taos Land Auction” into Google. I click on the first result. 

1.25 acres. Tres Piedras, Taos County, NM. $7,000.

 

Come as You Are

 

I am in seventh grade. My new LG Touch lights up with a message from my latest crush, Brendan Supple. We are playing the “question game,” which is basically preteen sexting. It’s intense in that “haha, and then what” kind of way.

do u masterbate? Brendan texts me. He’s the pinnacle of eloquence. 

no haha :) I type back in a panic.

I’m not one to lie, but at twelve I’m wracked with guilt over masturbation. It would be at least four years before I realized that other girls masturbate, too. But by twelve, it was already common knowledge that boys masturbated. A lot. 

We talk about guys masturbating all the time. There are so many nicknames for the act of cisgender men masturbating that basically anything you say could be a euphemism for a dude jacking off. The equation for creating an alternative saying for “masturbate” is verb-ing the noun: Beating the meat. Tugging the slug. Pulling the rope. 

Some of them sound incredibly violent and not at all like something I would want to do to my hypothetical penis: bleeding the weed? Flogging the egg man? (I sincerely hope no one has ever, ever, said this in reference to masturbation.) The thing is, there are hundreds of generally accepted ways to say you’re going to flog your egg man. Fixation on cis-male sexual pleasure has been a constant in the human sexual landscape for the past, oh, forever. I flounder to find a good way to refer to masturbating if you have a vagina, other than saying “masturbate.” (I have yet to find a single person who can say “flick the bean” without cringing or laughing.) This lack of colloquialisms for female masturbation is about more than a lack of creativity. It’s indicative of the disparity in attention to male and female pleasure. 

Curiously enough, a fix of sorts did come about, but only when doctors started diagnosing women with “hysteria” when their husbands couldn’t make them come. The “percussor,” more popularly known as the vibrator, bearer of multiple orgasms, was initially invented to aid doctors in administering “pelvic massages” to their patients in order to calm hysteria and cure “frigid woman syndrome,” (also known as, “you-can’t-come-and-it’s-you-fault syndrome”). That’s right, making your girl come was a duty delegated to medical professionals in the late nineteenth century. Percussors disappeared off of the popular market somewhere around the 1920s, returning to the black hole of female sexuality. (Freud literally called female sexuality the “dark continent” of psychology. But let’s be honest, Freud couldn’t make a girl come.) 

But if doctors aren’t making people come any more, then who is? Because, according to over thirty studies regarding the female orgasm, women aren’t coming during sex. Dame Products CEO Alexandra Fine explains that women are four times more likely than men to refer to heterosexual intercourse as “not pleasurable at all.” This phenomenon is referred to as the “pleasure gap” in sex. In one survey of individuals ages 18-65, 62 percent of women reported regularly orgasming from sex, compared to 85 percent of men. 

Studies aside, this is something I witness and experience all the time. The whole idea of “faking it” is preposterous when you actually think about it: women are more concerned with men’s egos than their actual sexual pleasure. When I asked a female CC student why she faked orgasms, her response was that she “got bored and wanted it to be over.” She told me, “‘Jackhammering’ only feels good for one person.” If your sexual style is compared to a power tool, it’s a safe bet that you’re not making anyone come. 

Another female student noted, “Everyone acts as if the path to pleasure is the same for men and women, when it’s drastically different.” Why are women so reluctant to instruct men how to make them come? Why are men so offended by women not coming when it’s pretty unequivocally their fault? Even as I ask myself these questions, I know the answer: Throughout our entire lives, women are taught to protect fragile masculinity at all costs. Because if we don’t, the price we pay could literally be deadly. How many stories have I read in the past month about women being beaten to death or stabbed or shot for rejecting a man’s advances? I recall the high school-era drama surrounding “blue balls,” a phenomenon experienced and whined about by men, often used to coerce women into sexual acts they weren’t comfortable with. 

I was curious as to what cisgender men had to say about the pleasure gap. Were they aware of it? Did they give a shit? Naturally, I decided to ask the men I’ve had sex with. The interviews were a lot like the sex I’ve had—nothing extraordinary, but they got the job done. 

One man I interviewed fumbled uncomfortably when I asked him if he thought he made girls come, saying, “I don’t know, I have no idea. I feel like, honestly, maybe? I mean, people make different movements and noises and whatnot? And afterwards I’m not gonna like, I mean I don’t…ask.” I watched the realization settle into his face. He continued, “maybe that’s really… rude of me?” This Don John Doe wasn’t aware of the pleasure gap but was able to guess at it quickly, comparing it to the “wage gap, in that men orgasm way more often than women do.” What frustrated me about talking to these guys is that even if they were aware, or they acknowledged their own problems, they just didn’t seem to care that much. It’s almost as if making someone with a vagina orgasm has become an exceptional accomplishment—those who can do it are special and rare, and those who can’t are just fine, too. So the burden of both people’s orgasms falls on the femme. 

How, then, do we reclaim pleasure in sex? Some sex shop curators, such as former dominatrix Amy Boyajian of Wild Flower, a sex shop in New York, are working to reform the discourse around sex. Most importantly, Boyajian is trying to change the popular view of sex toys. Re-enter the great “percussor” of the 19th century! Boyajian wants to resist the idea of “sex toys and the stores that [sell] them…as lurid and sinister places that only creepy men in trench coats [visit].” 

She says that with the rise of feminist sex stores, which base their ideology around education and pleasure, the market of the sex store shopper expanded to include women and gay people. She’s now working to include trans and nonbinary people as well. Wild Flower’s products are not categorized not by gender, like many sex toys are, but by the body parts to which the sex toy applies—vaginas, penises, butts (oh my!), as well as categories for BDSM and nipple play. The store, along with her popular Instagram page, @wildflowersex, features numerous educational articles and videos with titles like “Oral Tips With A Giant Vulva” (if you want to know what an enormous paper mache vulva looks like, then this one is right up your alley!) and “What’s The Deal With Cock Rings?” There’s an entire page dedicated to the varying purposes of crystal dildos and yoni eggs (dumbbells for your vagina). 

Boyajian’s unthreatening mannerisms and no-nonsense approach to sex education puts her miles away from mainstream sex education in this country, which is more reproductive education than anything else. We’re taught more about fallopian tubes than about consent. I knew the function of the vas deferens before I knew the word “orgasm.” How is anyone supposed to figure out what they like if they learn about pleasure through the lens of salacity or obscenity? Pleasure is not obscene—it’s essential.

When I asked Boyajian what she thought about the pleasure gap and why it exists, she brought up the important effect that societal norms have on sex and sex toys today: “Sex toys are seen as competition to partners in the bedroom, when they are simply aids to women who find it hard to orgasm via penetrative sex. Any woman who talks about sexuality is deemed a slut. Sexual wellness is bigger than penetrative sex, like period sex and vaginal health, but these are too ‘icky’ to be part of the mainstream narrative.” 

There are dangerous ramifications of the common notion that some aspects of sex are icky while others are acceptable. More movies are rated NC-17 for cunnilingus scenes than for scenes with graphic portrayals of sexual assault. Sexual violence is deemed safer for audiences than seeing a vagina being pleasured. No wonder my best friend in high school confided to me that she had never been eaten out “because vaginas are so gross and I don’t want to anyone to see that.” Clearly, there’s something horrifically wrong with the narrative surrounding pleasure. It’s a sobering reality, but not an immutable one.

If we’re going to talk about women’s pleasure during sex, then women’s comfort also has to be discussed. If your male partner can’t say the word “tampon” without lowering his voice or giggling—if your period is denigrated as something “gross” or “unspeakable”—then what the hell is that dude doing near your vagina anyway? Sexual pleasure comes with feeling comfortable that your body, no matter what it looks like or how it functions, is not wrong. Amy’s advice for anyone struggling to feel comfortable in their sexuality is to, “Create an ongoing romance with yourself, explore your body, and get to know what feels good via masturbation. Treat yourself to a vibrator. Make your pleasure a priority…Explore your fantasies and do it a way that is non-judgmental. Be gentle and kind to yourself.” 

I swear to God, I’m going to get “Be gentle and kind to yourself” tattooed on my ass as a reminder because I think it’s the single greatest piece of advice I’ve ever received. But it’s also important to be gentle and kind to others. Whether you’re having Sting-esque tantric sex for hours with your fiancée or a Craiglist-organized orgy, the golden rule still applies. Every Sunday I hear (okay, overhear) a story about a sexual encounter. The story is always centered around the fact that it happened, not about whether it was enjoyed. We talk about sex as if pleasure were inherently part of the act, which only serves to push the pleasure gap under the rug. And as I’ve encountered countless times, femmes often recount their sexual exploits with a level of bashfulness that just isn’t present in male discussion. One of these days I’m going to stand on a table in the dining hall and just scream, “It is okay to come!” 

Discovering what pleases you isn’t exactly a linear journey. What’s often forgotten in conversations about pleasure is that pleasure is different for everyone. Don’t let shame or discomfort dictate your sex life, and don’t feel pressured to feel good all the time. It’s okay not to know what you like, and it’s also okay to take your time to figure it out. The most important thing is to feel comfortable, whether that’s figuring out sex for yourself (or with yourself) or initiating a potentially uncomfortable conversation with your partner. Set your vibrator on high (or low, or whatever setting you damn well please) and get to it. Don’t settle for anything less than shaky legs, flushed cheeks, and arched backs. Men? It’s a clit, not the Strait of Magellan. I’ve always hated that romantic aphorism about having to “love yourself before anyone else can love you,” but I’ve realized it has a granule of truth.

In a recent sexual encounter, my partner asked me if I had come. Resisting the familiar urge to lie, I told him I hadn’t. In the anxious theatre that is my mind, I imagined the various ways this guy would be angry at me, ranked by levels of violence. I remembered fights with my high school boyfriend, who told me that I should see a doctor if I couldn’t come because he had done everything that he could. I remembered the first time I had sex in college, lying in my bed like shit, maybe that really is all there is. I remembered my first multiple orgasm experience and how elated I was that I wasn’t broken in some deep down, physical way. I nervously awaited his angry answer.

Grabbing the soft pouch of my tummy, he told me, “Damn, I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.”

And with those gentle and kind words, we went to sleep and I waited for that promised “next time” to come.

 

The Endless Death of Prog Rock

 

This is a story about one of the most difficult love affairs of my life. 

I lived next door to a music student while living abroad last year, which meant that music was often the subject of our conversations. “I’ve been listening to a bit of prog rock recently,” I said one day, as casually as I could manage. At this point I was deeply immersed in the bands Yes, Jethro Tull, and Gentle Giant, and consequently also immersed in the feeling of being exiled from my own generation. I would have loved to have found a fellow progressive sympathizer under the age of forty. Instead, my neighbor laughed in my face. The chat came to a swift close. (Later that night, I heard him alone in his room, playing “Beauty and the Beast” on the piano while singing operatically.)

My isolation only grew. Earlier this year, I decided to email nearly every professor in Colorado College’s music department to ask if they could give their insights on the “progressive rock” genre. Only two replied, each in their own way admitting that progressive rock was the one genre that they never bothered with. On a separate occasion, I showed my piano teacher Yes’ “Heart of the Sunrise,” and he sat there shaking his head, chuckling. I’ll never forget (or forgive) that he skipped ahead in the YouTube video when the beginning got too tedious for him.

Progressive rock is one of the most ridiculed music genres of all time. It began in the late ‘60s in England, where its biggest monsters were born: Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, are just a few. Although each band had their own sound and style, they were united by their 20-minute songs, top-tier virtuosity, complex time signatures, and concept albums whose concepts were often unclear. 

I wasn’t insulted when people cringed at my enthusiasm for the genre. I myself cringed for years. Ever since about the age of one—when I came to the conclusion that life was a sham, adults could not be trusted, and most people knew nothing—I have shielded myself with a sarcastic approach to the world. Not taking anything entirely seriously was a reliable way to avoid getting pummeled daily by letdowns. That is why, when I first found prog rock, much of which really does fall deep into the realm of pointless virtuosic excess, I thought I’d found the perfect joke.

The term “progressive” itself was where I’d thought the joke began. By the late ‘60s, rock had growing pains, phasing out its peppy and danceable three-minute songs and instead experimenting with as many musical influences as rock artists did drugs. “Progressive” was an especially strange term because musicians were turning to long-dead classical composers for guidance. Classical music’s technical structures allowed for intricate compositions in more drawn-out pieces. More importantly, it also allowed these musicians, most of whom were as English as mince pie, to borrow from their home tradition rather than emulate American rock styles. 

Accordingly, many of prog’s greatest hits were composed and performed with the kind of sober seriousness required to write a symphony. But it was also the ‘70s, so there was a predilection for sci-fi, cerebral fantasies, spiritual journeys, and other elements so new and random that they barely held up well enough to be categorized. Past meshed with future to make for a weird present. Often the prog sound wasn’t just a challenge to play, but also to listen to, with the goofy whines of a then-new Moog synthesizer and Mellotron, melodramatic flute and/or chime interludes, seemingly endless keyboard solos consisting of an explosion of arbitrary notes, and time signatures that could cause seizures. (I discovered that in Genesis’ “Firth of Fifth,” certain bars are in the rare time signatures of 13/16 and 15/16, alternating with bars of 2/4). Typical prog songs were about alien invasions, the perpetual rebirth of life, or an astronaut getting sucked into a black hole (all real examples). If all of those were to be in one song, that would be fine, too.

Everything was a hoot—random and colorful and free. During live shows, Peter Gabriel of Genesis wore outlandish costumes of his own creation to accompany the stories of the songs. His most famous costume was the “Slipperman,” which covered his entire body with mustard-yellow gourd-shaped lumps. It looked like an artistic glob of phlegm, or perhaps a diseased penis. 

What other genre—or for that matter, what other anything—was as silly, and all the sillier for not realizing how silly it was? Prog, to me, had soon become an object of both humor and fascination. The most ostentatious bits of prog rock sound like a group of music academy boys trying to outplay each other, all of them reading from a Bach concerto written backwards. The better part of me hated this. It would have been easy, and maybe wise, to actively limit my knowledge of prog. After all, legendary radio DJ John Peel once called it “a waste of electricity.” I myself once called it, “that one genre that dads would get protective about via YouTube comments.” (In the comment feed of a Gentle Giant youtube video, one “Ezra Nixon” remarked: “I live in a world of madness, All i listen to is ‘70s prog, And no one else can hear what it is im hearing, they’re too busy listening to wank like artic [sic] monkeys and all shite like that.”) Alas, instead of ignoring prog, I chose to test the waters. Little did I know, prog is not just music—it is another dimension entirely, and I was about to get lost in it.

Confusion began to settle in, now not toward the music so much as toward the question of how much of a joke I was taking prog to be. I began to mistrust my own cynicism, feeling that it wasn’t me, really, but rather some flimsy inheritance of my generation. To help me with my quandary, I tracked down several middle-aged folks who had witnessed prog’s great rise and fall. One of them was Peter Economy, a friend of my friend’s dad. He attended Stanford in the ‘70s—the right time and place for him to fall into drugged nerd-rock. “Concerts were theatrical experiences,” he said. “At the time it seemed normal to us to have a spectacle.” Peter Gabriel’s especially abnormal costumes were no exception. “You wouldn’t laugh, just like you wouldn’t laugh about going to a play where people are wearing weird costumes...Gabriel was telling stories through the words, and the costumes he wore reflected the meaning behind them.”

It was refreshing to hear such earnest respect for a band with Phil Collins in it. In all seriousness, Economy’s description affirmed what I was beginning to get out of the music: it was a portal into absurd musical optimism and elaborate imagination. Another middle-aged interviewee, this one a friend I made in Manchester, England, said something similar: “The color and fantasy art were a big part of the attraction. Those were the days when so much was put into it. It got slagged off as being over-the-top and unnecessary, but it made the whole thing more of a spectacle and helped you get lost in the other world. Music for reality-escapers, I guess.”

Intrigued, I gave special focus to the band Yes, as I found that nearly everything that could be said of prog in general could be said of them in particular. White English men, well-educated, classically trained, late ‘60s. The king of prog may well be Yes’ lead singer Jon Anderson, who was also essentially its conductor and spiritual mastermind. Even today, Anderson’s ambition radiates from his 5’5” frame. He has a pure, high-pitched voice and the demeanor of a gentle woodland creature. What he sings is often incredibly cryptic riddle-gibberish, but it’s sung with such persuasion that you don’t even think to question whether he knows exactly what it’s all about. 

In fact, “knowing exactly what it’s all about” was exactly what Yes was all about. Their songs were meticulously composed and played. Minute technical effects changed constantly (the changes even became the cause of rising tensions within the band). In a YouTube video of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant talking about prog, Plant recalled that, instead of celebrating after a gig, Yes would go back to their hotel and listen to the hours-long set they had just performed, taking note of nuances and discussing possible improvements. Understandably baffled, Robert Plant then asked, “What the fuck’s the point of that?” 

Yes was as big and bold in their mistakes as they were in their ambition. “Spinal Tap,” perhaps the best parody of bands like Yes, was brilliantly accurate because of Yes’ determination for grandeur in both their music and their stage sets. In 1973, Yes entered their most far-gone chapter, recording their double-album, “Tales from Topographic Oceans.” The concept was inspired by a single footnote from the famous Autobiography of a Yogi. The album consisted of only four songs and was nearly one and a half hours long. And that was just from a footnote.

Anderson adamantly believed that creating the album in a pastoral environment would help musical creativity flow. Recording logistics, however, posed a challenge. They had to stay in London, so Anderson ended up redecorating their recording studio into an elaborate barnyard scene: potted flowers perched on equipment and bales of hay scattered throughout. Some loose hay littered the floor and got into technical equipment. Yes’ keyboardist, Rick Wakeman, recalls having to navigate a maze of electrically powered cut-out cows just to get to his keyboard. If you had to guess which of Yes’ albums was recorded among fake cows, you’d likely guess “Tales.” It’s by far the most tedious album of the lot. 

“Tales” appeared to mark the beginning of the end for Yes. As if sensing this, they didn’t want to go with a whimper, but with a bang. In live performances of the album, drummer Alan White sat with his kit in a giant seashell, which opened electronically upon his entrance. One night the shell failed to open, leaving him desperate for air. The stage crew hacked away at it with axes while feeding White oxygen tubes. He eventually got out, staggering and gasping for breath. Much of the audience saw what happened but didn’t realize until later that it was not a highly profound physical interpretation of the music, but in fact a near-fatal mishap.

When I imagine this scene, the words of CC English Professor Steve Hayward, another interviewee, echo in my head: “We made fun of prog in the day...there wasn’t a moment when you didn’t wonder, is this just a little too much?” Not even seashell mishaps and surreal stage sets were enough to hold the attention of Rick Wakeman himself. Wakeman was always known as being the lone lumbering carnivore and beer guzzler among the group of intensely skinny and spiritual vegetarians. But by the time the band was working on “Tales,” his patience had truly expired, this time onstage. During a long keyboardless section of a song, Wakeman had Indian takeout delivered and ate it onstage while the others played. He was visible to thousands. 

A few musicians didn’t take the hint, and instead took their music further. Their ambition was manic. The music became miserable. The tragedy was that many of these bands just couldn’t bring themselves to see their own decline. It was as if the music was getting botox operation after botox operation to fight against the natural flow of the universe, thinking it appeared okay, when really it looked uglier than if it had just let time pass. Meanwhile, younger people tried to hasten prog’s death with their ridicule and their support of punk, an explicitly anti-prog genre. It was a sad time for all of us prog lovers (except me because I hadn’t been born yet).

The band blunders and near-sighted idiocy are more than comedy gold; they’re also windows into a kind of ambitious optimism that doesn’t appear often in the music world. While most music surrenders to the samples, trends, and guaranteed-hit formulas, the best of progressive rock abandoned security for total devotion to craft and to the possibly-childish belief that there were completely untouched musical frontiers to be met. It was unabashed freedom. They were determined to get this freedom by any means necessary, even if it meant looking like idiots.

The sound of Yes, and Genesis, and Rush is the sound of a dreamer getting so lost in a fantastic new dimension that they forget they even have an audience. It is music free of cynicism, apathy, and coolness, whatever that entails, and that’s what makes it not just music to listen to, but also music to inhabit, and even take as a friend. (Sorry, Rush reference: “Take a Friend.”)

That prog is largely dismissed today is an indication—albeit an unfortunate one—that it remained loyal to its early intentions. It was to be a “an ever-extending idea,” as Anderson once put it, which is a difficult one for most to digest. It was music to be “music created with honest and open attitudes.” And despite legal battles and numerous band member changes, Yes’ members were so dedicated that there are now two Yes bands, for confusing reasons concerning rights to the band name and logo. One is “Yes,” clean and simple, and the other is “Yes: featuring Anderson, Rabin, and Wakeman.” Goes to show that they’re as dorky as ever, and thank goodness for it.

Under a shell-pink sky in early September, I found myself at a “Yes: featuring Anderson, Rabin, and Wakeman” concert, bobbing in a sea of grey hair and beer.

“Look a little young to be here,” one man told me (a variation on a theme I was to hear throughout the evening). He looked doubtful, as if he took me for a yellow journalist from some hotshot hipster dubstep magazine. His doubt melted immediately when we both said we were hoping the band would play “Heart of the Sunrise.” Later on, our wish came true. We watched with our hands in our pockets. He, like me, must have been in awe that these raisins of men sounded nearly as polished as they did in the 1971 official recorded version.  After decades of criticism, band conflicts, round-the-clock recording sessions, and deafening Moog synthesizer, the band was still in Neverland; Wakeman still wore his trademark sequin cape, and Anderson swayed with those entranced, perfectly blissed out movements, holding his tambourine atop his personal foot-high platform. What once was so ‘70s suddenly felt timeless. 

I took in the rest of the audience. Most were reclining in their lawn chairs, with some fans standing up and triumphantly punching the air in time with the scattered percussion. I must have been the only one under 40. I thought of Anderson’s words in one interview: “Music is forever, not just for the radio, not just for the business. I think that’s what younger people are getting into and appreciating Yes for.” The fact that there was at least one 21-year old in the audience proved that his optimism wasn’t delusional after all.

Infinite Jawn

Infinite Jawn

Article by Jason Edelstein; art by Wayan Buschman

I fell victim to a linguistic virus during my sophomore year of college. It ate away at my vocabulary and left me and the people I interacted with in a hazy state of ambiguity, never knowing exactly what I was saying. Due to the severity of the virus, my memory of this period in my life is disordered and vague. But, having since recovered, I’ll try my best to describe how this jawn happened.