Category: Culture

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8570 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-05-28 20:43:55 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-28 20:43:55 [post_content] =>

On modern wealth's bland aesthetics, the reopening of the Frick, and the meaning behind our Gilded Age nostalgia.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

In his recent New York Times article, “Beige is the Color of Money,” Guy Trebay explored the prevalence of muted palettes in the homes and playgrounds of the rich around the world, from St. Moritz to the Sun Valley. “In past eras,” Trebay writes, “the wealthy tended to attire themselves in the richest of colors: indigo, crimson, the purple of nobilities and kings. We are no longer in that era. These days, the hue preferred by the richest people on earth is that most bland and mousy of non-colors — beige.” Trebay argues this shift has come to the fore during a populist moment, as the “rich hunker down in khaki camouflage.” He posits that being clad in “the anodyne colors of baby food, tea cookies or screensavers: latte, oatmeal, cream, butterscotch, café au lait” signals the notion of wealth in reserve, not something to be flaunted before the frothing fury of the masses. Trebay quotes Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Ermenegildo Zegna, as saying, “The ultrawealthy don’t want to show off, and beige colors are good in that sense…This class of people is super discreet and doesn’t want to be seen.”

This is bullshit. Rather, I would argue, beige is a marker of how they want to be seen. And unsurprisingly, compared to its colorful predecessors, it’s a hell of a lot less interesting to look at. Aspirational wealth, now the color of barf, is especially barfy. Intriguingly, it also seems to have sparked a bit of unexpected nostalgia for when the rich spent their money on batshit, exhilarating displays of filthy lucre, rather than on a $30,000 Loro Piana cardigan that makes both the wool it is made of and the person wearing it look like a virgin.

After a five-year renovation, a temple of that sort of old-school, jewel-toned ostentation has reopened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the base of the Museum Mile: The Frick Collection. Ever since it reopened to the public on April 17, the museum has been so booked solid that the only way to get in on a given day is to cough up $90 for a membership. The line snaking around the block indicates this is no deterrent whatsoever. Boasting a hundred-foot-long gallery covered in the most sensual green velvet wallpaper the nation of France could produce, illuminated by a skylight that runs the entire length of the room, the Frick is the pinnacle of everything modern wealth is not. I confess I could lose an afternoon staring at its emerald walls alone, never mind the Corots, Turners, Goyas, and El Grecos that line them.

The Frick is a civilized place: There are no cameras or children allowed. Renovation aside, it is also a museum deliberately out of pace with the modern world. True to its namesake, Henry Clay Frick was a top-tier robber baron: coal and coke magnate, business partner to Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, union-buster extraordinaire. His taste reflects it. If money could buy it in 1906, his mansion on the prime corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue probably has it. A gargantuan Rembrandt self-portrait? Check! An entryway made of ten tons of Breccia Aurora Blue marble leading to an indoor fountain? Check! An Aeolian pipe organ? Check! Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More? Check! A Fragonard room and a Boucher room? Check, check! (Randy Baroque artists always travel best in pairs.)

Despite occupying such a rarefied niche, both tourists and locals continue to flock to the Frick in droves, celebrating the extraordinarily beautiful shit one rich person managed to buy and keep in his freakishly expensive piece of real estate. However, in our oligarch-besotted cultural moment, it does make me wonder why this is the kind of blue-blooded wealth we red-blooded Americans seem to be so nostalgic for.

For starters, the blood in America isn’t truly blue. For all one might say about Old New York Society—from Mrs. Astor’s ballroom to Edith Wharton—we can all agree old money isn’t so old on our side of the pond. No; the Frick, then, isn’t a temple of old wealth, but a bastion of what American rich used to be perceived as. Think of Scrooge McDuck back-stroking through his ducats; Daddy Warbucks tap-dancing; Mr. Potter scowling in his boardroom; Prince Akeem before his Randy Watson Brooklyn drag; or, most simply, Donald Trump himself, who, as Fran Lebowitz put it, “is a poor man’s idea of a rich man.”

One need not do a deep read of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to know that ever since a raggedy pack of religious extremists dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock in 1620, this country’s inhabitants have had some fucked up ideas about wealth. Notably, New England’s Calvinist pilgrims subscribed to the doctrine of predestination: they believed God knew from the jump whether you were going to heaven or to hell—free will and the quaint American myth of bootstraps be damned. The Pilgrims also believed that God showed favor by showering wealth and good fortune upon His “elect,” and that God’s elect demonstrated their status through a lifetime of righteousness and upstanding behavior. This has quite certainly set a tone that persists well into 2025: Americans are desperate people who have deluded themselves into thinking they can become respectable. And that, to us, means rich.

To this day, American “blue-bloods” claim descent from Mayflower stock, as did Henry Clay Frick. This tenuous—one might even say aspirational—connection is reflected in his art collection, and his proclivity for the Dutch masters, who painted the Calvinist aristocracy. The Mayflower itself was funded by Dutch Calvinists, the upper class of what was then the richest country in the world. Like the uber wealthy of today, the Calvinist elite showed their wealth in what they thought were subtle ways. They also did not not want to be seen. Rather, they wanted to be perceived as favored by God but in control of themselves—and, undoubtedly, of others (all that Bible study did little to put them off the slave trade). Like the Beige Hordes on the slopes of Courchevel today, they also preferred monotone—albeit darker hues. Simultaneously, they wore the richest fabrics, lace, and stonking pearls, all studiously catalogued in paintings eventually collected by the likes of Henry Clay Frick. Although scholarship speaks to the “restraint” in this era of fashion, I doubt a starving man in 17th-century Amsterdam would have perceived much holding back in the sumptuous, candlelit banquet tables groaning with all manner of fish, fowl, fruit, flower, crystal, and silver depicted in countless Dutch still lifes—and now hung on the Frick’s emerald green walls. Four hundred years later, I wonder if those glorious spreads were allowed to rot or wilt in the studio.

Curiously, given the beige miasma, much ink has also been spilled about the “New Gilded Age,” and how big, loud 80s bling is back—supply-side shoulder pads and caviar. At first blush, this may seem like a contradiction, but one must remember it's a nerd version of such bling of yore, a taste memorably summed up in Rebecca Shaw’s Guardian headline, “I Knew One Day I’d Have to Watch Powerful Men Burn the World Down, I Just Didn’t Expect Them to Be Such Losers.” Yes, Zuck got his MAGA makeover and is sporting chains and Balenciaga—so much for the de rigueur Prius and Uniqlo hoodie from HBO's Silicon Valley. But Zuck’s Maui Ewok-chic hideaway has nothing on Henry Clay Frick's Fifth Avenue digs, and offers nothing new to wealth’s aesthetics but cheap imitation. Henry Clay Frick brought Old World Wealth over to the New to demonstrate his own preeminence. Grandeur and history were entirely the point. For Zuck and his billionaire brethren, there largely isn’t one.

In an interview with comedian Dan Rosen for his Middlebrow podcast, “cyberethnographer” Ruby Thelot discussed why he believes the tech elite don't collect art: “A lot of my friends in tech in SF, besides maybe video games, are not interested in being an audience to culture that is not about them…When I am in front of the painting over there…I need to accept that I am not the center of the activity. I need to understand something else, right? I’m not optimizing myself. When you run you can beat your time. Either I like the painting or I don’t like the painting. There isn’t a clear metric around it.” Of course, Henry Clay Frick is at the center of his art, as long as his museum-mansion bears his name: he bought it and, because of his immense wealth, we get to see it all in one place. (Tellingly, his favorite painting he bought was said to be Goya’s “The Forge” which depicted the metalworking that made him a rich man.) But the Beige Bros lack the ability to see it this way, or with any nuance. Similarly, this framework also explains why the splashiest art commission Zuck has made was a seven-foot sculpture of his wife, a monstrosity brought into this world by Daniel Arsham, famed for luxury brand collaborations and toy cars.

In the same interview, Thelot talks about how the culture is poorer when an audience for the arts is not cultivated from a young age and the world is run by engineers who live to work and order food to their desks on DoorDash. He implies that the striving goals of such a class of workers are simply optimization of the mind, the body, and, of course, the bank account. He sees it as a “tragedy” that they cannot tell a Monet apart from a Manet. He pins the blame on the death of liberal arts education and core curriculums.

Whatever the cause, today’s drip simply isn’t the same. The Old Masters art market has crashed. Dead is the notion of owning old, expensive booty from empires of yore that require knowledge of craft and scholarship to appreciate. The Frick is a jaw-dropping floorshow of exactly that, and a testament to its staying power when compared to the bling of today. After all, what would a Tech Bro museum look like? Would it have its own crypto currency? Would it boast a ketamine-fueled gala on the playa at Burning Man? Or would it simply be a subtly textured, puckered ecru circle of hell underneath Satan’s frozen asshole in the Divine Comedy? (Full disclosure, that is exactly how I imagine the playa at Burning Man.)

Anyone with a smartphone is treated to breathless news coverage of the rich: lavish events and vacations and jewels. But before rockets and megayachts (and make no mistake, Henry Clay Frick owned a steamship and the 19th-century equivalent of a rocket: a private rail car), the rich collected the booty handed down (read: stolen) from one empire to the newly ascendant one. They valued provenance, because they believed it placed them squarely in its lineage. It became their own heritage, like the family trees we Americans are so short on. To own a Roman mosaic or bust was to embody a bit of Caesar. This narrative of empire is today the backbone of most major museums, a correlation that is a pet topic of mine. It is also exactly why the Frick feels so familiar and so august: it’s like a mini museum in which one God-fearing, union-busting man lived, an experience we can microdose ourselves by walking through it.

Of course, the art of the rich still crowds the walls of museums. Just as surely, that art reflects the power of certain dealers, just as it always has. Joseph Duveen, who famously said, "Europe had a great deal of art, and America had a great deal of money," was the famed dealer to the robber barons in the Gilded Age. He maintained four separate accounts for Henry Clay Frick alone. In New York City right now, four major museum retrospectives feature contemporary artists represented by a single blue-chip gallery, Hauser and Wirth. The rich and their servants still do a great deal to shape our notions of culture and refinement. But that 19th-century robber baron wealth is what built US museums and spread the seductive, Calvinist lie that a world where the rich were stewards of nice things was a world where the rich maybe deserved to have those nice things. Sometimes, the rich even shared them with the plebes, usually after they died out of noblesse oblige, or simply hating their kids.

Nostalgia for the Gilded Age is nostalgia for a world order that perhaps kept us down, but at least made a little bit of sense (if you squinted hard enough at the Dutch still life). Today, we have Kaws at every art fair and Katy Perry dismayingly back from space in one piece. TikTok is rife with alleged “home improvements” that destroy historic homes in pursuit of a Kardashian aesthetic that somehow manages to be both spare and maximalist. Rebecca Shaw was right: today’s rich are cringe. Beige, however, is not a matter of seeking inconspicuousness; it is a part of the cultural poverty that plagues our ruling class, whose libraries go no further than A for Ayn Rand. Beige is the color of a desert of ideas, as well as what the earth will look like once the billionaire class has destroyed it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or not one considers the hue ostentatious. Mark Twain, who coined the term “Gilded Age,” once wrote, “The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.” After all, it also doesn’t matter what someone is wearing when you’re under their boot. But that won’t stop me from renewing my Frick membership (or—full disclosure—borrowing my mom’s).

[post_title] => Robber Barons vs. Beige Bros [post_excerpt] => On the reopening of the Frick, modern wealth's bland aesthetics, and the meaning behind our Gilded Age nostalgia. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => frick-collection-reopening-new-york-museum-gallery-art-beige-wealth-aesthetics-calvinists [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-05-30 17:06:24 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-05-30 17:06:24 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8570 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 28, 2025May 30, 2025

Robber Barons vs. Beige Bros

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8363 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-05-20 20:08:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-20 20:08:39 [post_content] =>

One would hope that something that happens so frequently would be discussed. But overwhelmingly, it’s not—until, as I learned, you join the miscarriage club yourself.

For an LA storytelling show in 2009, I wrote and performed an essay called “The Cinderella Instinct,” a piece detailing that cut-and-run gut feeling nearly every woman in her 20s cultivates from continuously escaping predatory men. Easing the audience in with the softball line, “Every man is a potential rapist,” I launched into stories detailing the many times I’d quite literally run away from an uncomfortable situation with a possible predator—from hopping out of a convertible at a rolling stop in Hollywood to sprinting from a shirtless Frenchman through a deserted, deeply unsavory part of Nice.

At the essay’s conclusion, I reflected on how, while I’d escaped potential assault throughout my life so far, 1 in 6 women do not—including some of my best friends, and my sister, whose story I shared with her permission. Perhaps my “luck” was partly because my stories had involved strangers, whereas assault has always been more likely to occur from someone you know, as it had with my loved ones. “So who that I know is the real potential rapist?” I’d written in the original essay. “Is it you?”

Granted, they made me cut that final line in my performance, deeming it a bit too much truth telling for a comedy night. Because of this, it wasn’t until some handful of years later, with the advent of #metoo, that I thought we might finally be ready to address the question—and that things might start to shift.

Reader, we did not cleanse the world of rape culture. But, at least, we began to talk about it, and to me, that felt like progress.

A decade on, I’d survived the end of my twenties, and spent most of my thirties setting the stage for a deeply healthy marriage (pro-tip: couple’s therapy while dating!). Then, I fell face first into yet another hidden gem of womanhood—a very different pile of bullshit our culture has encouraged women to shovel through in silence.

I had a miscarriage.

While there’s been a slow thaw towards openly talking about miscarriage thanks to social media, the word itself still contains an air of old-timey superstition and precious shame in most everyday contexts, something I would quickly learn in the aftermath of my own. Even now, chatting with friends or neighbors, I’ve found the word “miscarriage” invokes an involuntary wince, in both myself and others, because it’s just not something we talk about in a casual way.

Meanwhile, in a medical setting, doctors will bluntly inform you of how wildly common miscarriage is, ending 1 in 4 pregnancies, mostly in the first trimester and often before you’ve even realized you’re pregnant. One would hope that something that happens that frequently would be—I don’t know—discussed? But overwhelmingly, it’s not—until, as I learned, you join the miscarriage club yourself.

I’m not going to get into the public political discourse on pregnancy here—that would require several books, not an article. But with the trend of states legislating a stranglehold on women’s reproductive rights, it feels more important than ever to have open, candid, and clear conversations about the reality of pregnancy—including potential miscarriage. And that means sharing our stories, no matter how uncomfortable, so that we have a realistic, informed, and nuanced view on the many things becoming pregnant can entail.

So, here’s mine.

I’ve never felt the clicking of my biological clock, but after blissfully devoting my 30s to self-producing edgy physical theater with my co-performer-turned-husband, I realized if we wanted to procreate, we’d better get a move on. So, we survived a global pandemic, got married, and had a year’s worth of unprotected sex—until one day, just like I learned, I peed on a stick and found out I was pregnant. Like magic!

As an information-seeking, newly pregnant woman of advanced maternal age, I’d already worked hard to mentally prepare myself for possible miscarriage. I knew the 1-in-4 statistic, how spontaneous miscarriages are very normal, and that they’re often chromosomal and don’t mean anything negative about a couple’s ability to have children. Still, in the early days of my pregnancy, my mind raced, mapping out the ticking 40-week time bomb of our life. To me, my pregnancy was real the minute that pee stick said so; and I took any advice I could find, whether from doctor friends or the internet, avoiding deli meat and sushi, abstaining from alcohol and Advil, and quitting my nighttime melatonin. At the same time, I tried to hold the simultaneous truth that this pregnancy could be nothing—that I could be one of the unlucky ones—trying to temper my own anticipation until enough time had passed to make it “real.”

To make matters worse, I’d found out I was pregnant a few weeks before my husband and I were scheduled to shoot pick-ups in Los Angeles for the film adaptation of one of our aforementioned edgy plays. I was dismayed to learn the doctor wouldn’t see me until I was 8 weeks pregnant—right when we were out of town—because of the prevalence of miscarriage in the first trimester. As she explained, it wouldn’t make sense for them to see me until the pregnancy was really viable, so they scheduled my check-up for when I would return to New York, at the top of week 11.

Lacking a doctor’s guidance, I felt like I needed a master’s in philosophy and a zen Buddhist practice just to navigate the mindfuckery of early pregnancy. This potential baby was both alive and not at the same time. It was Schrödinger’s Cat, but in my womb. During this time, I also had several experiences where I'd cautiously divulge to a trusted friend that I was in my first trimester—always sharing that I knew I was "not supposed to tell anyone." But nearly every time I offered that caveat, people would actually shush me—as if uttering the word "miscarriage" while pregnant would invite it in. They insisted that if I believed things were okay, they would be; and as time continued to pass, I grew more confident that they were right, that I could trust my pregnancy was real. My cautious internal caveat of “I could miscarry” began to lose its footing. In my mind, Schrödinger’s baby was alive.

Back in New York, my husband and I excitedly went to our doctor’s appointment. The vibe was immediately optimistic and pleasant: We’d just made it to week 11, and after having a discussion about all the nightmare things we’d have to monitor for the next 30-odd weeks, things felt pretty real. Then, we got around to the ultrasound. At first, the doctor couldn’t really “find” the pregnancy visually. Which... seemed bad. Then, once she did, she noted that it looked closer to 7 weeks, not 11.

The vibe shifted.

The doctor asked about the timing—could we have mistaken the date of conception? In response, I showed her my overachieving honor student psychopathic period tracking data, and her expression changed. Suddenly, the life-changing timeline that had taken shape over the past weeks started to crumble. The following week’s nuchal translucency, done at week 12, was changed to a "dating sonogram.” Later, in my patient notes, I saw it was actually to check viability: No heartbeat had been detected.

While I was too blindsided to think clearly, my husband luckily had the presence of mind to ask what all of this actually meant. Finally, the doctor explained how the sonogram was to confirm if this was an "abnormal pregnancy." If it was, we'd discuss next steps of how to "remove" it, and we'd be able to "try again" basically right away.

Since this was a Friday appointment, we would have to wait an agonizing weekend before getting official answers at Monday’s sonogram. During two endless days of a new, unwelcome brand of uncertainty, I sat in my paradigm’s reversal, going from 95% sure I was pregnant to 95% sure I was not. In this purgatory, I tried to catch up to a new reality while still occupying the old truths I’d come to accept. Like a prayer or superstitious tick, I kept avoiding lox, soft cheese, and alcohol when we went out to eat, but I also cried for hours in anticipatory mourning.

That Monday, the doctor confirmed I had, in fact, miscarried a couple of weeks prior. Turns out there's a thing called a "missed abortion," where you miscarry but it doesn't actually leave your body, and you still feel totally fine. I’d always thought miscarriages were marked by cramping and bleeding and a big event—but no, mine was just straight chilling in my body for weeks, something I found horribly disturbing, but is medically normal. (Yet another thing no one talks about, and something I only learned of after it had happened to me.)

Going through the psychological whiplash of accepting that I was no longer pregnant felt even harder given all those hushed conversations that had preceded it. I felt like this pain was something no one wanted to hear about, or talk about—that I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. But then, something surprising started happening. The minute I would get over the fear of divulging my story—and the fear of making other people feel uncomfortable, sad, or awkward by being truthful about what I’d been through—all of these other stories began emerging around me. Women I’d known for years began privately sharing their own experiences with me—how they’d miscarried both before and after carrying successful pregnancies, how they’d had to endure D&Cs during IVF, how they had held the image of their future child in their heart and had struggled to let it go. Once I learned just how many women around me had carried the same pain, the powerful loneliness around my miscarriage fell away. And while feeling grateful for the empathy and support these shared stories gave me, I also felt sorrow that I’d never heard them before—that these women only now felt like it was safe or acceptable to share them with me because I’d gone through it, too.

It was also through hearing about other women’s experiences that I learned, in at least one respect, I’d been very lucky. One small silver lining of my story was the team of spectacular women doctors who saw me through my miscarriage as quickly and empathetically as possible—something a doctor friend informed me is "very unusual for OBs." They worked to get me seen within the week of my sonogram, and upon noting my distress, the doctor doing my D&C worked to fit me in at the hospital the next day so I could go under anesthesia. When I thanked her for all her efforts—knowing how glacially slow the medical world usually works—she simply said, "1 in 4 of us have been there, we know how important it is to get past this as quickly as possible so you can heal." That same empathy was echoed by virtually every woman who saw me through my care, from both of my doctors to the receptionists booking my appointments to the nurses in the hospital. (Weill Cornell… Thank you.)

Still, it took me nearly a year to feel well enough to write about any of it. This is partly because I had to grapple with my own internalized conceptions of what a miscarriage “means,” even while knowing intellectually that it does not “mean” anything. I was raised on a German workhorse ethic, believing anything I put my mind to I can make happen, so a “failed” pregnancy did not fit into my sense of self. Plus, navigating the term “infertility”—which suddenly gets slapped on you medically after miscarriage—has been far from easy, especially in a culture that seems obsessed with women’s reproductive viability, and how many years past the age of thirty they dare to age.

But as I’ve worked to come to grips with these many things that lie beyond my control, I hope that sharing my story can help start some necessary conversations. That maybe my sharing will help someone feel a little less alone in the same way so many women helped me feel a little less alone, too.

I won’t sugarcoat it: Miscarriage sucks. It’s sad. And no one likes talking about sad shit. But based on my own experience, I think we need to talk about it. Because when we don’t—when we carry it alone, when we shush the possibility of its existence—we give it unnecessary weight. So many others are carrying this, have carried it—and it shouldn’t feel so heavy. But to make that possible, we need to catch up culturally to the reality of miscarriage medically: It’s normal. Often, it’s your body resetting from a pregnancy that was not ready to cook. Whatever the root reason, it’s not a failure. It’s just another one of those things that happens.

When we stigmatize miscarriage by refusing to talk about it or treating it as a tragedy, we’re setting women up to feel isolated and broken, to feel like they’ve failed. I’ve found that, by talking about my own miscarriage openly, without hesitation, I’ve helped redefine what it means to me personally: It’s not a failure, and no one is to blame. It’s just another one of many steps along the road, a moment of sadness I’ve endured and moved beyond. It can feel tragic, but it is not a tragedy. It is normal. You’re normal. And if you need to feel sad, just know: There is a whole world of women out there sharing the weight of this with you, whether you realize it or not.

Author's Note: I’ve referred to people who can get pregnant in this essay as “women,” as it is a deeply personal story, written from my perspective as a woman. However, with so much rampant transphobia in culture and politics right now, I want to make clear that people beyond the traditional gender binary can get pregnant, and can also experience miscarriage—and I emphatically believe they should be included in this conversation.

[post_title] => We Need to Talk About Our Miscarriages [post_excerpt] => One would hope something so common would be discussed. But overwhelmingly, it's not—until you join the miscarriage club yourself. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => miscarriages-pregnancy-reproductive-rights-bodies-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-05-20 20:16:15 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-05-20 20:16:15 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8363 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 20, 2025May 20, 2025

We Need to Talk About Our Miscarriages

by Nikki Muller

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8378 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-05-13 19:09:37 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-13 19:09:37 [post_content] =>

How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life.

It’s a sweltering April afternoon in Bhaunti village, about an hour’s drive from the heart of Kanpur, India. Inside a large hall, shaded from the harsh sun, the air is thick with the scent of marigold and rose. Groups of women, dressed in bright cotton sarees and salwar suits, work with quiet concentration. Some sit in circles, carefully sorting flower offerings collected from nearby temples; others pluck delicate petals with practiced hands. At one end, a few women lift heavy tubs of freshly washed blooms, carrying them outside to spread on large sheets, where the sun will slowly draw out their moisture, preparing them for the next stage of transformation.

Inside the factory, 38-year-old Preity Mishra moves with quiet efficiency, neatly packing incense boxes with an ease that comes from years of practice. She first joined the factory seven years ago, after unexpectedly losing her previous job, where she had worked for nine long years. At first, Preity admits, she was hesitant. Preity, along with the other women, works for Phool, a company that converts flower waste into incense sticks, cones, essential oils, and dyes. “I thought it would be dirty work,” she recalls, brushing a speck of sandalwood dust from her sleeve. But her perspective quickly changed once she learned where the flowers came from. “When I found out the waste came from temples, I began to see it differently,” she says. “These flowers are sacred and offered in prayer. It felt like I was giving them a second life, which is noble work.”

Preity Mishra inspecting a box of incense sticks.

The story of Phool traces back to 2016, when Ankit Agarwal, a computer engineer turned entrepreneur, accompanied a visiting friend on a trip to Kanpur’s ghats along the Ganga River. It was the time of Makar Sankranti, an Indian festival marked by ritual river dips. Though the water appeared visibly polluted, devotees continued to bathe as part of the tradition. “My friend began asking me questions about the purity of the water, why people still took dips despite the pollution,” Ankit recalls. “I realized I didn’t have the answers. In the meantime, a huge tractor of flower waste came and was dumped into the river.”

That moment planted the first seed of what would eventually become Phool, which means “flower” in Hindi. “I returned to my job, but I couldn’t focus. I was working, but I wasn’t content,” Ankit says, sitting in his office in Kanpur. “I eventually quit and came back to research how this flower waste could be reduced or stopped entirely from polluting our rivers.”

India, with its countless festivals and year-round celebrations, generates a significant amount of solid waste, including an estimated 800 million tons of flower waste per year. As many of these flowers are grown using pesticides and insecticides, when this floral waste is dumped into water bodies, it begins to decay, producing a foul odor and contributing to serious water pollution—much like what Ankit and his friend witnessed in the Ganga River.

After he returned home to Kanpur, Ankit began crunching the numbers, calculating how many temples were in the region, how much flower waste was generated daily, and the scale at which it was being dumped. The results were staggering. According to government data, there are about 108,000 temples and mosques in India where flowers are offered every day, before being dumped in landfills or bodies of water, contributing significantly to the country’s water pollution and ecological damage.

A worker scatters flower petals on a plastic sheet to help them dry.

Ankit began reaching out to temples, hoping to convince them to hand over their floral waste so that it might have a second life. “It was difficult to convince them,” he says. “Flowers offered at temples hold deep religious significance, so naturally, there was hesitation.” The temples weren’t resistant out of indifference, but an abundance of caution. “They were sincere in their concerns,” Ankit acknowledges. “They wanted to know why I wanted the flowers and what exactly I intended to do with them.”

Once Ankit succeeded in securing the flower waste, he spent the next several months immersed in research, exploring different ways the discarded blooms could be transformed into something meaningful. “I spent around eight months studying how this waste could be turned into compost or used in other sustainable ways,” he says. Then, he had a breakthrough. “Incense sticks are usually made from charcoal,” he recalls thinking. “Why not try making them from temple flower waste instead?”

Ankit and his co-founder, Prateek Kumar, began operating out of IIT Kanpur, slowly putting their idea into action. Every day, Ankit would ride his two-wheeler to find a daily-wage laborer to help with tasks like sorting flower waste and basic processing. But the pair struggled to find reliable help—a new worker would show up each day, and rarely would anyone return, even when Ankit personally asked them to come back. It became clear that if the project was to grow, they needed a more stable workforce.

Then, by chance, a woman came to their office one morning looking for work, and Ankit offered her a day’s job. As with many others, he asked her to return the next day—and to his surprise, she did.

A group of women rolling incense sticks by hand.

While they worked side by side, he started a conversation. Could she come regularly? Could she help bring in other women like her? She readily agreed. “It would be better to come here and work with flowers,” she told him, “than to go to seven or eight homes every morning to clean toilets. Even then, we don’t always get paid—just some leftover food or old clothes.”

Ankit was struck by her words. The next day, they visited nearby neighborhoods together, and soon, 35 women had joined the initiative. He trained them, helped them get their Aadhaar cards for the first time, assisted them in opening bank accounts, and taught them how to use mobile phones—all small but powerful steps toward economic empowerment and independence.

“It wasn’t easy at all,” Ankit says. “But we conducted a three-day workshop to teach them the basics. I didn’t want them to remain stuck in the informal sector. I wanted to bring them into the formal workforce, with dignity, stability, and skill.”

A worker monitors one of the factory's machines.

This commitment is fundamental to Phool’s success, and remains an important part of their work culture. “When we established the company, one thing was clear: There would be transparency. That’s why you’ll see there are no walls in the office—just glass partitions to divide the teams,” Ankit explains. “We also made a conscious decision to ensure that the women working with us have a clear path to grow. That’s why we move them from sorting to incense stick making, and then to packaging—so they not only feel a sense of progression but also develop leadership qualities in the process.”

Another important aspect, he shares, is supporting his employees in sending their children back to school. “We currently have 500 people working with us, and 490 of them are women,” Ankit says. “Around 60% of them have enrolled their children back in school. Our mission is to support all of them so that [over the next few years], 5,000 children return to classrooms. This is something we’re intentionally working on, even if we don’t speak about it publicly.”

As for the company itself, Ankit and his team remain dedicated to product innovation and exploring new possibilities with flower waste. Recently, the team even succeeded in creating sustainable “leather” from discarded flowers.

Workers dividing and sorting incense cones for packing.

Nachiket Kuntla, who heads the research and development division at Phool, believes this innovation could be a major breakthrough for the leather industry and the broader sustainable market. “We spent a good 7–8 years researching and experimenting with this idea,” says Nachiket. “We’ve now developed a product that is sustainable and matches leather in terms of texture, quality, and feel. We’ll be launching a pilot product in collaboration with a fashion brand by the end of this year.”

Phool’s journey is a reminder that sustainability doesn’t have to come at the cost of tradition—it can actually grow from it. What began as a simple act of questioning river pollution has now bloomed into a movement that empowers women, preserves faith, and protects the environment. As the world looks for other, cleaner ways forward, perhaps it’s time we ask ourselves: What else are we throwing away that could bloom again?

[post_title] => The Sacred Cycle [post_excerpt] => How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => phool-kanpur-india-flower-floral-waste-temples-sustainability-water-pollution [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-05-13 19:09:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-05-13 19:09:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8378 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 13, 2025May 13, 2025

The Sacred Cycle

by Safina Nabi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8183 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-05-06 17:11:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-06 17:11:49 [post_content] =>

How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots.

Four gunshots and the sound of a cash register: In her 2007 hit “Paper Planes,” British-Sri Lankan rapper and singer M.I.A. (a.k.a., Maya Arulpragasam) interpolated these sounds between sharp lyricism that satirized Western perceptions of third world immigrants and the xenophobia that became especially rampant after 9/11. Against all odds, the world couldn’t help rapping along.

Later, the song would be named one of the top five best of the decade by Rolling Stone, one of the most-streamed of the decade by Apple, and the greatest song by any 21st century woman+ by NPR. Its success was as much due to its catchy refrain as it was to its unexpected content, especially at the time: The song was arguably the first rap song from the South Asian diaspora to articulate the increasingly politicized identities of South Asian migrants and second-generation immigrants to a mainstream global audience.

While the artist behind the song has since become a somewhat controversial figure, the impact of “Paper Planes” remains. And nearly two decades later, rappers from all over the South Asian diaspora have become a testament to the increasing globalization of hip hop, a subculture rooted in resistance, and its power as a language of global protest.

Founded in the Bronx during the 1970s, hip hop was born as a form of expression and resistance in Black and Latino communities, and as a genre, it’s only grown exponentially since. Throughout the 80s, as production and sampling technology became more accessible, hip hop began gaining traction on a wider scale, and eventually, was no longer limited to live performance, thanks to the popularity of shows like Yo! MTV Raps. By the 90s, it had broken into the mainstream, due to the meteoric rise of MTV, BET’s Rap City, and albums like Public Enemy’s “Fear of the Black Planet” achieving commercial success. This mainstream eruption of hip hop also coincided with South Asian Americans using rap to articulate their own immigrant identity for the first time—and now, in the streaming age, the subgenre has only boomed.

Last August, South Indian rapper Hanumankind, who spent his early childhood in Houston, Texas, went viral for his roaring hit “Big Dawgs,” a song about defying cultural stereotypes. The music video, which has over 218 million views on YouTube, features riders on motorcycles zipping around a “well of death,” a spectacle common in Northern India—the video at times feeling like an homage to the stunt driving in the controversial but iconic music video for M.I.A.’s 2012 hit “Bad Girls.”

Hanumankind’s success is the most recognizable contemporary example of the popularity and success of hip hop from the Indian diaspora, a success that feels inherently political due to the thematic explorations of his music. “He's able to use hip hop commercially to make himself successful, while also drawing on cultural and religious symbols that make his identity very much part of Indian and Hindu culture,” says Dr. Mirali Bulaji, a professor in race, global media, and nationalism at the University of Pennsylvania and co-editor of the 2008 book Desi Rap: Hip Hop and South Asian America.

With the myriad of backgrounds and identities that South Asian diaspora rappers have, the politics that they intentionally or unintentionally convey is dependent on not only the lyrical content of their music, but the way they market themselves. This is something Hanumankind is clearly conscious of: His visuals draw on Indian and Hindu imagery, while his music style feels distinctly American (he has cited Texan rap group UGK as one of his biggest influences). But this approach isn’t unique to Hanumankind. For his album “The Long Goodbye,” for example, British-Pakistani rapper and actor Riz Ahmed (who goes by Riz MC) released a short film that played as metaphor for the wrought relationship between South Asian Muslims and the rise of the far right in Britain. Although the visuals and lyrical content of hip hop for the diaspora varies, the thread that connects the genre is the use of cultural and religious symbols to inspire representation as a means of empowerment in the face of oppression, both for commercial reasons and not.

In an essay for Desi Rap, filmmaker and activist Raesham Chopra Nijhon writes that hip hop became a place for the broader spectrum of South Asian identity because it facilitated an accurate image of a more nuanced community than what mainstream Western culture had fabricated. As a genre, it offered a way for the South Asian diaspora to illustrate the nuances of racialization and how white supremacy functions in contexts independent from the racial dynamics that exist between white and Black people. The charged lyricism and dynamic cadences also offered a new way for South Asians, specifically in the U.S., to articulate their identity outside of the Black and white paradigm.

“It was a generation of young people who truly were looking for some way to express their identity, their angst about being othered, and finding ways to communicate that they were explicitly American yet global at the same time,” Balaji says.

It was these elements, along with similarities in the syncopation of both Punjabi music and hip hop, that drew Punjabi Canadian Taj Bhangu, who goes by the name Lioness Kaur, to become a rapper. “When the West really looks at South Asian music, they really just see it in this really cliched way and I feel like hip hop's such a great art form for bridging those gaps,” says Bhangu. Defying these cliches, she believes, shouldn’t be wholly dependent on its visuals, but also the music itself.

In an Instagram caption promoting her latest single, “Long Lost Brother,” Bhangu writes she wanted to fuse South Asian sonics with hip hop in a way that wasn’t orientalist. For her, this led to both a blending of sounds and culture: Most of Bhangu’s music intersperses exuberant strings with twangy sitar. In “Long Lost Brother,” this sitar doubles as the cyclical rhythm she raps over while she details memories of her childhood, with nods to both her Sikh Punjabi and Canadian upbringings: “Eating McDonald's, Roseborough Centre / Adventures and pulling pranks / Pulling Biji′s old crutches out / From under the bed.”

In her song “Politics at Home,” Bhangu further details her experience living in a joint family home, something common amongst South Asian families. Throughout the song, Bhangu talks about the misogyny that many Indian Canadians witness growing up, and connects the struggle her mother’s family faced going back home to the “pind” (“the village” in Sikh) with issues of class and the neglect of certain areas due to government corruption: “The pind could be the hood at times / They grinded to make it here, only to return / Put their dreams in an urn / They yearned for their daughter, my mother.”

Watching one’s mother deal with the loneliness and helplessness of generational misogyny isn’t an experience unique to the South Asian diaspora, but rather, a ubiquitous one—which is part of why her music has found a broader audience. But for those within the diaspora, Bhangu’s music articulates that emotional isolation in a way that is uniquely familiar, combining the linguistics of Western hip hop with South Asian instrumentals.

We see this use of more traditional instrumentals as a tool for blending cultures across the genre, including use of the dhol and chenda drums, traditionally played at religious ceremonies and cultural gatherings to bring communities together. Their exhilarating reverberation and almost unadulterated pace resembles that of the rapid yet succinctly meaningful rhythms fundamental to hip hop. In this way, the steady bass intrinsic to the sounds of both genres incites an intoxicatingly invigorating and empowering feeling that can be and has been used to rally and mobilize movements, political or otherwise. (Something producer Timbaland clearly appreciated in the ‘90s and early aughts, when he sampled South Asian instrumentals in multiple chart-topping hits like Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and The Game’s “Put You on the Game.”)

Of course, the South Asian diaspora isn’t homogenous, and South Asian hip hop isn’t either. It encapsulates countless subgenres, from the Punjabi hip hop that inspires Bhangu, which uses both the language and traditional instruments like the sitar and the dhol; to Desi hip hop, which encapsulates a combination of influences from the South Asian diaspora, including that of Indian Americans.

Hip hop also isn’t the first or only form of protest music within the diaspora. South Asian protest music can be traced back to the independence movement during British colonial rule across the continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Stanford ethnomusicologist Anna Schultz, the kirtan, a call-and-response form of singing and chanting Hindu mantras, was crucial in prompting protests against British rule and leading to political reform. “Through performance, they [kirtan performers] use signs in finely attuned ways to bring politics and religion together so that they are just one tightly bound unit of meaning,” Schultz said in an interview with Stanford Arts.

What was once resistance against British colonial rule, however, eventually evolved into Hindu nationalism; and this evolution of revolutionary politics packaged into the commercialization of empowerment has not spared South Asian hip hop. For both genres of music, directly combating and even angering the systems that encourage whiteness, colonialism, and capitalism are central to their origins. But as contemporary identity politics prioritize the optics of representation, it's easy for rappers from marginalized communities to fall into the trap of using their art to partake in shallow representation politics rather than engage in the tangible interest of their communities.

The obfuscation of hip hop’s political roots isn’t unique to the South Asian diaspora; however, its rising popularity within the diaspora coincided with the broader genre more generally becoming an asset for the commodification of resistance politics, something that has affected South Asian rap and hip hop today.

Balaji notes that despite many South Asian activists and rappers proclaiming hip hop as their tool of resistance, many don’t seem to demonstrate it in action. Last September, for example, Hanumankind performed “Big Dawgs” at a venue in Long Island in which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present, and was later pictured hugging him in front of the crowd. Modi has long been criticized for his Hindu nationalist statements and policies, barring Muslims from extensive citizenship and revoking the Kashmir region’s autonomous status.

While Hanumankind hasn’t been explicitly critical of Modi or his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in his 2021 single “Genghis,” the rapper, whose given name is Sooraj Cherukat, discusses the tribulations of street life in South India and attributes violence to the complicity of the Indian government: “But what you partying for? / We got issues in our nation 'cause there's parties at war / When our leaders aren't leading at the heart and core / And they tamper with evidence when you gon' file a report.”

Still, none of this has stopped South Asian rap’s momentum, or its resonance. The subgenre also feels especially powerful for many South Asians today because of its mainstream popularity—giving voice and a platform to a diaspora that has long suffered from intergenerational trauma amongst the many ramifications of whiteness and British imperialism. It’s also unlikely to die down any time soon. According to Business Insider, the rise of South Asian talent from all over the diaspora, and the increasingly popular mashup of South Asian artists making music over Western beats, can be credited in large part to the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Consequently, Balaji predicts the ever-increasing popularity of these streaming platforms, combined with the ability for anyone to create their own audiences on social media and the effects of migration on immigrant identities, will only lead to South Asian rap becoming an increasingly globalized genre.

“Artists in their respective countries are going to be able to articulate identities that are unique to their cultural and political circumstances,” says Balaji. We’re already seeing this today: Whether it’s Riz MC, Raja Kumari, or Yung Raja, rappers and artists across the diaspora are finding ways to honor their roots without straying from hip hop’s own.

Bhangu is one of these artists, merging the lyrical syncopation and metrical soul that is found in both hip hop and South Asian music, to give voice to being a Sikh Punjabi woman in Canada.

“I'm breaking a lot of barriers. As a girl, people don't really see that many female South Asian rappers, so it’s a shock for so many people,” she says. “But there are a lot of people who do support and dig deeper into the art and they feel heard.”

[post_title] => The Diverse Politics of Desi Hip Hop [post_excerpt] => How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => south-asian-hip-hop-rap-desi-diaspora-global-music-genre-hanumankind-lioness-kaur [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-05-06 17:11:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-05-06 17:11:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8183 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 6, 2025May 6, 2025

The Diverse Politics of Desi Hip Hop

by Anushka Dakshit

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8116 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-04-04 16:06:16 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-04 16:06:16 [post_content] =>

In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.

“You don’t seem like an only child,” people often tell me after I reveal to them that I was raised without siblings. Unsure if this comment is a compliment or a backhanded remark, I usually shrug and reply with something like, “Well, I grew up with cousins…” But what I don’t often say is my cousins didn’t quite feel like siblings, either. They felt like something else.

The truth is I don’t have an unusual amount of cousins. Five first cousins in the U.S., and one in Estonia, who I’ve never met. A growing number of second cousins once removed (the children of my first cousins). And a scattered few second cousins twice or three times removed (my parents' cousins and their offspring, respectively). It’s my first cousins, though, that I’m closest with—in large part because, as is true for many immigrant families, they were also my first friends.

As new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, my parents relied on the built-in community of care provided by our extended family: an old-world-style network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But while the adults in my family did play a role in my Los Angeles upbringing, it was my cousins who did the majority of the caretaking.

Only seven years older than me, two of my cousins in particular were somewhere between my babysitters, part-time siblings, and friends. Together, we would spend long sun-soaked summer days playing outside my aunt and uncle’s apartment. We’d make up elaborate games based on movies we rented from Blockbuster or 20-20 Video, where an older cousin worked. Sometimes, we were the “karate family,” influenced by none other than The Karate Kid. In silent agreement, we’d transform into a group of vigilante karate enthusiasts, climbing parked cars and saving stray cats from danger; cats that my uncle would rescue and bring home from his job as an LAX cab driver. Sometimes we would write our own Nightmare Before Christmas-style songs, practice obsessively, and perform them for the whole family. OOOo spooky, oooo spooky….I see a big fat moon…in the skyyy….a very big fat mooon. Sometimes, we’d be aspiring horror film producers. We would borrow my dad’s precious camcorder and record over family home videos with our very own renditions of the Blair Witch Project, nostrils and all. We even made our own version of the movie Hocus Pocus, which we titled, “The Heart of a Little Girl.” I was the little girl.

Then, the sun would set and my aunt would come home from her job as a cashier at the local grocery store, and my mom and dad would pick me up after a day of English and bookkeeping classes at the community college; or after a day of driving rich kids around. And I would always, without fail, break into tears, grabbing onto the leg of one of my cousins as they would obediently lead me to the door.

Only other only-children can relate to the loneliness. The pit of despair that formed each time, as a child, you were plucked from a social event and brought back to your parents’ apartment where you were forced to find creative ways to entertain yourself. Before we had the internet (and even after), I would spend long hours talking to the bathroom mirror, pretending my reflection was someone else. When I was with my cousins, the loneliness disappeared. When I left them, it would come back heavier than before.

The research is shoddy, but it is believed there is a correlation between only-childness and loneliness. In fact, studies have found that, compared to adults who grew up with siblings, only children often become adults who have significantly less interaction with their relatives. This may be true for some onlies, but not for me. I still, to this day, have remained close to my cousins. Even the older ones who had no interest in me when I was a toddler and they were teenagers. The ones who acted more like older siblings than friends by simply ignoring me, or making fun of my unibrow because it would “build character.” The ones who drew sharpie tattoos on my favorite doll’s face in between shifts at the video store, and made up for it by buying me a coveted “Diana’s Parking Only: Keep Out” sign for my bedroom door. And I’m still close with the ones who played “karate family” with me, too.

Cousin in Russian translates directly to “once removed sibling”; but often, the term is just abbreviated to brother or sister. Same goes for other Eastern languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and Korean. This must have something to do with Western Individualism vs Eastern Collectivism. The cultural values placed on the community, rather than the individual, have slowly been eroded from Western society, leading to recent phenomena like the loneliness epidemic. But many immigrant families never fully abandon the cultures they came from, including mine—and ultimately, cousins have an important role to play in keeping it that way. They are role models. They are siblings. They are caretakers. They are friends. They preserve family traditions, like avoiding the aspic and playing Monopoly on Thanksgiving. They step in and help out when a family member is in the hospital; and when you get in a fight with your mom, they are one of the only people on earth that truly understands. Because that’s what families are for.

Of course, not every American family looks like mine. We are apparently in the middle of The Great Cousin Decline, coined by Faith Hill for The Atlantic. This is due to the usual suspects: U.S. population decline, women choosing to have children later in life, and parents having fewer children in general. As of 2022, about 55% of Americans live an hour away from their extended families, while highly educated Americans live even further. Immigrant families remain the exception. My own very American husband has little interaction with his cousins, mostly due to their geographical distance. But there is much to be lost in living apart. Hill reminds us that the often overlooked reason why cousins are especially important is that “they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.” Growing up, that’s why the loneliness never stuck around too long: I always knew that my cousins were only a phone call away.

In the Oscar-nominated film A Real Pain (2024), a pair of cousins, Benji and David Kaplan, embark on a journey to Poland funded by their shared grandmother’s inheritance. It is meant to be a cathartic trip to both honor and witness where she came from and bear the weight of the concentration camp she survived. But the cousins could not be more different. David (played by the film’s writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg) chooses to settle into modern society and accept that life is suffering, while still doing what he can to enjoy it. Benji (played by Kieran Culkin, who won Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance) is the more nostalgic feeler, who cannot seem to settle down and process pain in a modern sense. He is overwhelmed by his grandmother’s loss, and, as it’s revealed later in the film, even tried to overdose on sleeping pills a few months before the trip. In Poland, Benji cannot stomach the juxtaposition of privileged American Jews riding first class on a train to tour concentration camps, and lashes out at the group. Eventually, David reaches his limit:

David Kaplan: ...I love him and I hate him and I wanna kill him... and I wanna be him, you know? And I feel, like, so stupid around him, you know, because he is so fucking cool and he just does not give a shit. And then... just, like, being here with him is just so fucking baffling to me, you know? It's just baffling, 'cause it's like: How did this guy come from the survivors of this place, you know?

Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, tells Hill in an interview that, “Cousins are essentially peers who can stretch your assumptions—without as much fear of the relationship ending if debates get heated.” In A Real Pain, we watch this play out: Once inseparable as children, the two cousins have since drifted further and further apart. But the cousins are also connected by their shared ancestral trauma and their unique perspectives on how to survive in modern society despite its contradictions. No matter their differences, neither will ever abandon the other.

My own relationships with my cousins have shifted over the years. I’ve become closer to some and drifted apart from others. There are religious differences, socio-economic differences, and the fact that we are simply in different stages of life. But when times get tough, we always reconnect. Like when my second cousin was diagnosed with Leukemia at a young age and I would visit her at the children’s hospital, or when our maternal grandmother who survived WWII died a few months before the pandemic, or when the most recent wars in the region broke out.

Cousins have our backs. They are our built-in friends. And from an evolutionary perspective, they have a biological stake in our survival. Our cousins are our companions for all of life’s curveballs. And while sometimes, we don’t get along, like siblings, cousins share both our family secrets and genetics. They share our lives.

I recently got married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at the famed Little White Chapel. This wasn’t an elopement, although that was our original intent. Once we started telling our friends and family about our plan, however, some insisted on coming.

Our wedding happened this past January, in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that almost burned down my high school and destroyed so many homes of friends and acquaintances, I’ve lost count. My cousin, who was supposed to make a speech at the wedding, was evacuated from her home the night before her flight to Las Vegas. In a last ditch effort, she ended up driving with her husband, young son, and mother-in-law with nothing but the clothes on their back to make it in time for my ceremony, like a true cousin, sister, or friend, or maybe, something even better.

[post_title] => First Friends, Once Removed [post_excerpt] => In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => first-old-friends-cousins-immigrant-families-los-angeles [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-04-04 16:11:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-04-04 16:11:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8116 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 4, 2025April 4, 2025

First Friends, Once Removed

by Diana Ruzova

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8093 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-04-02 21:03:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-02 21:03:11 [post_content] =>

How women artisans in Kashmir are reconnecting with an old tradition to weave new hope.

Every morning, as the sun rises over the old city of Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir, 48-year-old Rafiqa Ramzan steps out of her modest home and walks through the maze-like alleys of her neighborhood to catch the bus to work. On the way, she prays at the famous nearby Sufi shrine, Hazrat Makhdoom Sahib (RA), for her 17-year-old son's well-being and the stability of her job.

Ramzan, a single mother, works as a katanvajian—a woman who spins pashmina (cashmere) wool—a craft she learned from her mother when she was just 10 years old. In her youth, she would often compete and spin alongside her friends in her locality, and remembers the soft background noise of the radio, filling the air with old Kashmiri songs and folktales. The job, however, wasn’t sustainable: She continued spinning in adulthood, making it her livelihood, but by her early thirties, the meager wages forced her to give it up. After abandoning her spinning wheel (called a "yinder" in Kashmiri) for over a decade, she only returned to her roots in early 2023 after joining Zaevyul.

Named for the Kashmir word for “delicate,” Zaevyul is a first of its kind artist-centric initiative that operates as a small factory, helping women revive and recreate the region's heritage pashmina shawls. Wajahat Qazi, a writer-turned-entrepreneur, created the initiative in 2022 as a for-profit social enterprise aimed at reviving the historic craft and providing dignified livelihoods to local artisans. Originally, Qazi distributed carded pashmina to women to spin at home, but logistical challenges prompted him to bring the entire production process in-house, something unusual within the industry. However, he soon found that the shift not only improved quality control, but also fostered trust among the women, many of whom come from conservative families.

“It was difficult initially to draw women to this proposition, but once they saw the workspace and the respect they were given, it took off,” he says.

Wajahat Qazi, founder of Zaevyul, providing instruction to a spinner. (Shoaib Mir)

Known as “soft gold,” pashmina was first introduced to Kashmir by the fifteenth century ruler Zain-ul-Abidin, affectionately called Budshah or Great King by his subjects. His reign left a lasting influence on the region's socio-economic fabric, one of which was inviting skilled artisans from Persia (modern-day Iran) to share their expertise with the local population. This included the rigorous techniques of spinning pashmina shawls, still practiced today throughout the region and the fashion world, from Brunello Cucinelli to Louis Vuitton and Hermes.

Over time, pashmina became synonymous with Kashmir's identity. And the women of the region have been an integral part of shaping the industry for centuries, as they are typically its leading artisans. But beginning in 2006, the craft became badly impacted by the influx of cheaper, machine-made imitations, degrading the market for hand-spun pashmina. According to Kashmir's Handicraft Department, there were an estimated 377,000 artisans in the region at the time, nearly half of them women. But as a result of the industry’s decline, dwindling incomes forced thousands of people to leave the craft and seek alternative livelihoods, Ramzan included.

"Before joining Zaevyul, I faced many difficulties,” she says. “I relied on my brothers, and seeing how everything is overpriced broke me inside. The thought of being a burden began to take a toll on my mental health. But by the Almighty's grace, I learned about Zaevyul, which changed my life.”

When she first began earning a living from spinning, Ramzan would take home 1500 to 2000 Rupees per month. The time and effort she invested in the labor-intensive spinning process did not match the meager remuneration she received, which also wasn’t enough to support her son. But now, at Zaeyvul, she earns 8000 to 10000 Rupees per month, and has found so much more than a higher income.

“Before, I would spin pashmina alone at home, but we share our joys and sorrows here,” she says with a smile. “This sense of community has started healing me from within and increased my productivity. Being here gives me a sense of empowerment like someone has given wings to a crippled bird."

Today, Zaevyul employs 40 people, including 30 women, who work as spinners, weavers, and administrative staff, all of whom operate out of a spacious, well-lit karkhana—a manufacturing house specifically designed for artisans. For Qazi, the entire process and purpose of Zaevyul is also multilayered.

“I was struck by the need to create something meaningful,” he says. “My focus turned to the handicraft sector, particularly pashmina, a craft historically sustained by a gendered division of labor—women spun and carded the delicate fibers, while men wove them into luxurious shawls.”

Meemah (who opted to go only by her first name), like Ramzan, also works at Zaevyul as a spinner, and similarly notes the financial stability the venture has given her, alongside improving her mental health and offering her a sense of direction.

“I have often been at the receiving end of the turmoil we’re living in,” she says. “There have been days where I used to feel entirely depressed…I wasn’t myself, and spinning pashmina takes patience. I had to stop. But after learning about this place and joining it, I have been helped a lot, both mentally and financially.”

She shares this as she meticulously spins her pashmina wool in its original white color.

“I pray that we get many more orders and that more women join us. It’s a relief to work in an office-like setting,” she continues. “This place is more than just a workplace. It's a place where we've met other women and formed a community. We're not lonely here. It's a 10-to-4 job with breaks for prayers, meals, and rest.”

Rafiqa Ramzan (in green) spins pashmina alongside her friends at work. (Shoaib Mir)

Zaevyul is especially conscious of honoring this work-life balance, and ensuring the safety of its employees. With approximately 700,000 troops deployed in the region, Kashmir is one of the world's most militarized conflict zones. The ratio of military personnel to civilians is particularly striking, with one soldier for every 30 locals, according to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a UK-based think tank. This makes everyday commuting for work a tedious endeavor. But Zaevyul provides transportation to alleviate this difficulty, relieving the potential stress it may cause for its workers. Every day, a bus ferries 30 women artisans from different parts of Srinagar to Zeevyul, located in the city’s outskirts.

"Given the political instability in Kashmir, it wouldn't have been possible for me to travel back and forth here without bus service,” Ramzan says as she boards the bus with other artisans to head home. “The environment here is safe, providing us all with a sense of security, for us and our families. Moreover, working here has given me a perfect work-life balance, which wasn't possible when I was spinning day and night alone at home."

Qazi notes that his employees’ continued “economic empowerment” is crucial to maintaining Zaevyul. Hand-spinning pashmina remains a labor-intensive process, and the wages must justify the cost. It also requires immense skill and patience for women who are typically largely responsible for the bulk of household work.

“If you’re not paying them well, it doesn’t make sense for them to dedicate their time to this craft,” he says.

The challenges, however, are manifold. The cost of hand-spun pashmina is significantly higher than machine-spun alternatives, limiting its reach. And while pashmina enjoys global brand recognition, the premium price of handmade products restricts its affordability. This has led to a decline in demand for hand-spun pashmina, which continues to push artisans out of the craft, some never returning.

Despite these hurdles, Qazi is committed to his vision of Zaevyul, continuing to operate on the principles of empathy, authenticity, and ethical production, all while reviving this pristine craft and creating a broader, positive socio-economic impact. It has certainly made a material and monetary difference to all who work there, but also offers them pride and dignity in the work itself.

Looking ahead, Qazi dreams of expanding Zaevyul. The current workspace can accommodate up to 200 women, but financial constraints remain a barrier. His next challenge will be to identify and connect with new markets, conscious consumers, and ethical buyers who are passionate about supporting marginalized artisans and craftspeople.

“Our premise is to revive the craft in its most authentic form and help more women and weavers,” he says.

Like the women he employs, for Qazi, Zaewuyl is more than a business—it’s a movement to preserve Kashmir’s cultural heritage while empowering its artisans, one thread at a time.

[post_title] => Threading the Needle [post_excerpt] => How women artisans in Kashmir are reconnecting with an old tradition to weave new hope. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => pashmina-kashmir-artisans-cashmere-wool-zaewuyl-collective [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-04-02 21:03:15 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-04-02 21:03:15 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8093 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 2, 2025April 2, 2025

Threading the Needle

by Shoaib Mir

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8002 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-03-11 00:09:10 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-03-11 00:09:10 [post_content] =>

The real price of admission for Julie Mehretu’s Subprime Mortgage Mural.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

A very distressing thing happened recently: I agreed with Steve Bannon. In a recent interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat (more distressing still: being at such a loss about our hellscape slide into dictatorship that I voluntarily listened to Ross Douthat), Bannon said, “The financial crisis of 2008 brought on by the established order…is one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of this country.” By most estimates, over 8 million jobs were lost, and unemployment in the United States more than doubled. When the housing bubble burst, 3.1 million Americans filed for foreclosure—or one in every 54 homes. Meanwhile, the banks that helped perpetrate the crisis profited handsomely, as they successfully gambled on the country’s housing market collapse. This titanic feat of moral turpitude and greed was dissected by Michael Lewis in his book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, later made into a film. “None of the crooks or the criminals that did this were ever held accountable,” Bannon insisted, and, yes, I agree. ”None of the elites in this country were ever held accountable for it.”

The elites who benefited weren’t just bankers, either. In the midst of that crisis, artist Julie Mehretu received a $5 million commission from Goldman Sachs to dominate its headquarters’ lobby in Lower Manhattan. Goldman, of course, was one of the banks most embroiled in the Subprime Mortgage Crash—and by accepting its money, Mehretu indirectly became embroiled in it, too. Completed in 2009, the commission, titled “Mural,” was described by Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker in 2010 as “[h]undreds of precisely defined abstract shapes in saturated colors—small dots and squares, straight and curving lines, larger geometric or free-form shapes ranging from several inches to several feet in length—[moving] across [the wall] in an oceanic sweep.”

For the sake of clarity and precision, this article will henceforth refer to the work as the Subprime Mortgage Mural. And while at the time it was unveiled, Tompkins alluded to a touch of hand-wringing, he very quickly exonerated the artist for accepting Goldman’s money:

"Financial institutions have been taking a lot of hits lately for their role in precipitating the fiscal crisis. The behavior of Goldman Sachs, in particular, has infuriated nearly everybody, from Congress and the Federal Reserve to the New York Times editorial board and Rolling Stone, which described the firm as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’…None of this was in the air in 2007, though, when Goldman commissioned Mehretu to do the painting."

For the record, the crisis definitively started in August, 2007. But regardless, Tompkins further exonerates Mehretu by claiming that, allegedly, most of the money didn’t end up in her pocket: “The firm paid five million dollars for ‘Mural,’ about eighty per cent of which went into fabrication costs (including salaries for up to thirty studio assistants) during the two years she spent working on it.” (I would love to see a budgetary breakdown of these expenses given what I know of the lives of my peers who work in the arts and in fabrication, but alas.)

Mehretu has been back in the news as of late—this time not for accepting a large sum of blood money, but for spending it. Last autumn, it was announced she had dropped a $2 million donation to the Whitney to ensure anyone under 25 would have free admission. On the face of it, this was a lovely gesture. However, it begged the question: If the end goal was to make the museum more accessible to all, regardless of income, why was that inclusion sponsored by someone who could only afford to pay for it as a result of perhaps the most violent shift of capital and wealth redistribution in our lifetimes?

It wasn’t the first time the museum had accepted this kind of money, either indirectly (through donors like Mehretu) or directly (the Whitney is also sponsored by Goldman and Bank of America and many other fiscal institutions). But if homeownership is the main means of creating generational wealth in this country—wealth that BIPOC have been historically and repeatedly shut out of in the United States—it should feel especially troubling when a cultural institution is being funded by the banks most responsible for why so many people can’t afford the price of admission in the first place.

This problem isn’t uniquely American. Whilst grappling with its own quaint connection to empire and looting, the British Museum is also struggling to make the museum free for all…whilst taking money from British Petroleum to achieve it. France and Italy, though historically proud of their august, state-sponsored cultural institutions, are increasingly taking large-scale cultural funding from the private sector, including fashion conglomerates such as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Kering. Those two companies largely underwrote the recent restoration of Notre Dame.

But in the United States, museums have always leaned more heavily on private funding, and the government has for decades aggressively policed cultural institutions' values and slashed budgets accordingly—long before DOGE was even a glimmer in Elon Musk’s eye. For these reasons, the situation here arguably feels most dire. Mehretu’s donation is just the latest iteration of a fundamental problem with how we fund the arts. It was just a couple of years ago that photographer Nan Goldin dragged her protest against the Sacklers, who funded an entire wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art among many other projects, all the way to Oscars season in Laura Poitras’ harrowing documentary about the opioid epidemic, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The family name was subsequently removed from the Met. (However, the David H. Koch Plaza remains out front.)

Yes, ghastly people have been patrons of expensive art throughout history. But they did so, in many if not most cases, to trumpet their own glory and paint what we might call the victor’s narrative. Then, as today, we need to ask who is letting us in the door and what they want us to see and why. If we continue to let such people and corporations fund publicly accessible art in the United States—which could charitably be called an endangered democracy—what stories will our cultural institutions tell? What values will they have? If we are having this conversation around painkillers and petroleum, then it is essential that we have it about banks, too.

Let us begin with the Subprime Mortgage Mural itself. In that same New Yorker piece, aptly titled “Big Art, Big Money,” Tompkins describes the Subprime Mortgage Mural thusly: “There are four layers of markings in ‘Mural,’ and many of them implicitly refer to the history of finance capitalism—maps, trade routes, population shifts, financial institutions, the growth of cities.”

However, you almost definitely wouldn’t be able to identify any of this when looking at it. This is work that is, in a word, corporate—as is much, if not all, of Mehretu’s work. It won’t inspire the security guards to discover class consciousness when they clock in. It won’t drive the bankers to jump off the ledge in shame (not that the windows open wide enough). Mehretu’s work is slick: so slippery that meaning slips away, elusive as that subprime lending rate or 20th-century retirement plan. It is as vague as the name of a new miracle drug: No one knows how it works, only that it costs a shitload of money.

And, lest you doubt my judgment on this, or Tompkins’, or the fact that Mehretu took $5 million from Goldman right after the fucking Subprime Mortgage Crash (did she ever stop and wonder…too soon?), American Express also entrusted Mehretu to “re-imagine” teeny-weenie murals on limited edition Amex Platinum cards in 2021, a collaboration dressed up as a “sponsorship” of the Studio Museum in Harlem. It is hard to imagine how anodyne art must be to literally grace the front of a credit card, but one has to hand it to Mehretu: She is a very canny capitalist at any scale. Her work thrives on institutional affiliation.

Indeed, what does it mean to be a corporate darling of an artist? What does it mean to take such ill-gotten gains and produce what purports to be social commentary? After all, Mehretu’s stated aim is to marry political commentary and landscape art. In a talk with Art21, titled “Politicized Landscapes,” she said, “The abolitionist movement, the Civil War, the move towards emancipation, all of these social dynamics that are a part of that narrative we don't really talk about in regards to American landscape painting. And so what does it mean to paint a landscape and try and be an artist in this political moment?"

In this regard, Mehretu’s success has everything to do with the kind of identity politics this country and its art world cannot shake. Her background boasts what might be called a DEI hat trick: Ethiopian, Jewish, lesbian. Accordingly, it features front and center in most press about her, including Tompkins’ standard visitation in his New Yorker profile. This is hardly Sydney Sweeney taking commercial work because acting simply doesn’t pay her bills. This is also not Diego Rivera trying to take Rockefeller money to sing a love song to the USSR. No, it is actually something more sinister: an artist who is playing with notions of network and inclusion and accessibility while pocketing the dirtiest money in the land.

Cosmetics, of course, is essential to the politics of the Subprime Mortgage Mural and the Whitney donation it enabled. And Mehretu poses an especially illustrative case of the ethical dilemmas incurred by funding a museum with private sector money. This is because the optics of her donation involved not merely her art, but also her own biography. The Whitney has courted its own fair share of controversy around such treacherous PR terrain, from a curatorial scandal around a painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Biennial and a board member’s ties to tear gas to accusations of union-busting and exquisitely ham-handed social media that gets no love in the comments section. Perhaps it's no surprise that a museum named after a robber baron is slow to realize it has to cover its woke bases.

Unsurprisingly, articles about Mehretu tend to spill a fair amount of ink on her identity, as does the Whitney’s artist biography of her. However, I would wager that you wouldn’t be able to guess one goddamn thing about her if you looked at her paintings. Yet, she insists they are political. In a Guardian profile titled, “Julie Mehretu paints chaos with chaos – from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park,” Mehretu says of her process of creating a large-scale abstract work about the uprising in Egypt, “I don’t ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that, I was in here working on New York, and I’m drawing, and this thing is unfolding: I have al-Jazeera on the computer livestream, I’m paying attention to NPR…So I was looking architecturally at New York, and then suddenly I’m back in Africa. And then the painting grows through drawing after drawing, layer after layer.”

Looking at the piece one wonders: Is it insidious? Is it beneficent? It is the upholstery on my Aunt Sarah’s couch and curtains in her high-rise on Yellowstone Boulevard in Queens? Shapes skip and scamper about, lines zig and zag, maybe to evoke a network of some kind. There is color, pop, crackle, lacquer. There is balance, there is motion, there is form. There is sinew, texture, chaos almost threatening to find order and just the reverse: a hint of breakdown and frenzy. This is probably the most compelling aspect of the work to my eye, but also a damning endorsement of stasis: No matter which way you view it (a wave good-bye or hello to a world order), flux is the norm. Change is a threat never realized, reduced to a flat trophy on an enormous wall. The work is fundamentally corporate in that, it’s decorative and, upon viewing it, mostly you will glean that it is a megalithic mural that occupies VERY expensive real estate. That is what matters most to corporate art, ultimately: The placement is where it derives its power. In this light, it’s ironic if not hilarious that Mehretu often claims to reference the Occupy Wall Street movement, including in her Guardian interview. She has, if nothing else, come to occupy Wall Street.

The Whitney’s website states, “Mehretu’s work does not represent specific locations but rather takes up the radical possibilities of abstraction.” In fact, it does just the opposite. Her work proves exactly why Abstract Expressionism was the US state-sponsored school of painting during the Cold War: You can project anything onto it at all. This is also why Mehretu’s art succeeds in a corporate space. Absolutely no one wonders what a Soviet Socialist Realist painting is about. But you can look at a Jackson Pollock or a Julie Mehretu, scratch your academician goatee, and mutter something fatuous about velocity or uprisings or commerce or democracy, or whatever other bullshit is handy to spew at the uninitiated. Better yet, such jargon can be used to gatekeep art from those deemed not elite enough to understand it. The ambiguity becomes a cudgel.

Is Mehretu’s identity or community conveyed in her paintings in any meaningful or discernible way? Her work is often quite beautiful and inarguably well made. And art, of course, doesn’t have to say anything about politics at all. However, if you are going to spew political opinions, as she did for the Guardian or for her show at the Whitney in 2021, maybe don’t take that Goldman money when all those dreams of home ownership and generational wealth are barely cold in the ground. One cannot speak truth to power when one is on power’s payroll. In that sense, truthfully, it doesn’t matter what Julie Mehretu looks like or to whom she is married: She has still been bought.

Much has been made recently of how our so-called Culture Wars have distracted from a more obvious Class War. America is famously allergic to the idea of class, even if it’s as endemic and obvious as our obsession with faith, all while we claim to be secular. Last month, Laverne Cox spoke incisively of how America likes to scapegoat trans people, who make up less than 1% of our population, while billionaires, who also constitute 1% of our population, are actually the source of our woes. Indeed, just how badly have we all been played when Laverne Cox and Steve Bannon can agree on something?

As both museum patrons and people, we deserve public art and institutions that are better than the identity politics pushed by those who do nothing but take the money and run—only to pay lip service to inclusivity during New Yorker interviews. But the same political class of billionaires that has bought both political parties has also bought all of our cultural institutions. The big donors are the same on every wall and at every gala. If this tautological clusterfuck feels familiar, it should come as no surprise that Mehretu is one of the Obamas’ favorite artists. Of course the Democrats have that special distinction of believing the lie that they, too, can take billionaire money but somehow represent the marginalized. In reality, they are spineless whores bought by the same tax evaders as the Republicans—and the Whitney—just less honest about it. Mehretu is tellingly on Obama’s walls and on Amex cards alike—much like the Democratic party is enamored of the image of politics while taking objectively filthy money. Representation and promises of accessibility feel pretty hollow when they are sponsored by the same people who screwed millions of Americans out of their homes. This is a form of representation that is optics and optics only when people’s actual lives are getting crushed by a larcenous economy.

Sure, art does not have to be explicitly political to be good, but this art in particular is looking an awful lot like the worst of neoliberal politics right now: girl-boss abstraction about commerce that took subprime lending crisis blood money from Goldman and gave it back to the Whitney as penance. Mehretu’s art and the economy surrounding it encapsulate how identity politics have been cynically manipulated by big money on the alleged left, which isn’t left at all: It is money serving money, which is all money will ever serve. It is art about ignoring the little people. It is art for a media landscape that has no idea what the hell anyone in this country is thinking and cannot predict a single fucking election. It is art that restates the obvious opaquely and with no particular flair, like Pete Buttigieg explaining why all the planes are falling out of the sky on MSNBC. It is art that has the gall to reframe a whole lot of nothing as something beneficial, when all it does is launder the money and decorate the walls of the very, very rich, while lying about inclusivity to the poor. In short, it is art that confirms this sinking feeling that we’ve all been had by some great circle jerk every time oil execs, technocrats, bankers, and other swindlers hold open the museum doors for us: Have a little culture! As a treat! And it’s another reminder that, like our political institutions, we need our cultural institutions to represent something other than big donors who preach inclusion while robbing us blind.

[post_title] => Free Entry, but at What Cost? [post_excerpt] => The real price of admission for Julie Mehretu’s Subprime Mortgage Mural. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => julie-mehretu-mural-goldman-sachs-housing-financial-crisis-whitney-museum-new-york-art [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-03-11 00:09:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-03-11 00:09:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8002 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 11, 2025March 11, 2025

Free Entry, but at What Cost?

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7948 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-02-28 00:51:37 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-02-28 00:51:37 [post_content] =>

On the history we see—and the history we don't—in "I'm Still Here."

When Eunice Paiva first learns that her husband Rubens has been murdered in the Oscar-nominated film I’m Still Here, the audience only sees her reaction to the news, but never actually hears what has happened. The scene is bewildering to watch: Sitting on the office couch in her bathing suit, having just returned from swimming in the sea by their house, Paiva’s hair is still dripping with saltwater when she finds out her life has been changed forever. But the audience doesn’t yet know why.

I’m Still Here takes place during the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, and the scene almost functions like an emotional map of the fallout of fascism in Brazil—confusion over absence of information, followed by the heaviness of grief. Rubens’s murder is only confirmed to the audience much later in the film, when his now-widow specifically asks what has happened to her husband’s body. This is when the still-hazy facts fall into place: Rubens was kidnapped and murdered by the Brazilian right-wing military dictatorship, and his family will never see him again.

I’m Still Here is based on a true story: Both in the movie and in reality, the Brazilian government wouldn’t admit to killing Rubens until 25 years after the fact. For much of the film, this unknowing leaves both Paiva and the audience on uncertain ground—how can we react to news we didn’t really hear? And how do we grieve for someone we don’t yet know is dead?

It’s not surprising that one of the most talked about performances from the Academy Awards this year is Fernanda Torres’s quiet portrayal of Eunice Paiva, for which she has been nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Yet the film’s impact is as much a credit to her performance as it is to the powerful true story behind it. The first Brazilian film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, I’m Still Here unveils a history that is often disputed or played down in both Brazil and the United States. It is a resurfacing of the prohibitive and visceral reality of living under the Brazilian military dictatorship: A “dissident” politician, Rubens Paiva was one of 434 people the regime kidnapped and murdered under the guise of stamping out communism and socialism, a move that was aided and abetted by the US during the Cold War. Rather than focus on his story, however, the film instead turns the lens on his wife, Eunice—one of the countless women and families those killings left behind. Through her perspective, there’s a surprising subtlety to I’m Still Here—and in its silences, there are embedded histories that the average non-Brazilian viewer might not be able to understand, but that give important context to the story being told.

At the end of March in 1964, the Brazilian military staged a coup d’etat in response to then-president João Goulart’s structural reforms, which sought to reduce class inequality through workers’ rights and agrarian reform. These changes were not well liked by Brazil’s elite, who, in particular, viewed the agrarian reform—which would see abandoned land redistributed to people without any—as prejudiced against owners of large swathes of land. The president’s relationship with unions and his support for the working class were also understood as the beginnings of communism in Brazil, rather than as an attempt to regulate workers’ rights in a country that was still operating under the same logics of the colonialism and slavery that founded it. The regime’s anti-communist position was an ideological win for the US, which resulted in the launching of Operation Brother Sam, a plan to logistically support the coup d’état should Goulart refuse to step down. After being forcibly ousted, Goulart was banned from running for political office for ten years and exiled to Uruguay with his family.

The violent stamping down of political dissent started early in the regime through heavy censorship of the media. The military controlled the newspapers, the radio broadcasts, and the TV news reels, only allowing positive news to be disseminated, and silencing any publications or people who had dissenting or critical opinions. Left-wing organizations and parties were dissolved and outlawed, often operating illegally to organize resistance against the government. These groups were also severely persecuted by the regime, including the Brazilian Workers’ Party, of which both Goulart and Rubens were members.

In I’m Still Here, the civilian struggle against this enforced silence is portrayed a few times, but perhaps most notably, when Eunice sends her oldest daughter Vera to London for an improvised gap year. Preemptively guarding against her daughter’s young sense of justice, Eunice does this to prevent Vera from joining the Students’ National Union out of fear for her safety. The organization operated illegally for 21 years throughout the dictatorship, and was key in organizing protests against the military government—but the consequences of getting involved in the resistance could be fatal. At least 39 students were murdered by the regime for organizing against them. Eunice knew that Vera, a young woman raised in a bohemian, left-wing household, would want to join the struggle against the dictatorship in college, and preferred to keep her safe in Europe until the regime subsided.

But even in London, the global consequences of the dictatorship were still evident. In a letter she sends home to her mother, Vera writes that she ran into Gilberto Gil, a Brazilian musician who was arrested without trial and detained for 57 days in 1968. After Gil was released, he was exiled from Brazil, and forced to leave the country alongside many other artists, including Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, and Raul Seixas. Yet despite the dictatorship's mass censorship efforts, by the 1970s, music consumption had boomed in Brazil—and the regime aimed their attention at the genres of samba, rock, and MPB (Brazilian Popular Music), which had formed a broad front against the Christo-fascist repression of the dictatorship. It is estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people were exiled from the country during this period, some of whom never returned. And it wasn’t just musicians: Many artists, intellectuals, journalists, filmmakers, and poets were also forced to leave, as a part of stamping out any voice that wasn’t favorable to the regime. The artists and musicians who were allowed to stay in Brazil had to submit their work to the government for approval before it was released, just to make sure the content wasn’t critical of the regime and that it promoted conservative, Christian values to the population. In I'm Still Here, the importance of Brazilian music during these dark times is displayed through the film’s soundtrack, which features some of the exiled artists, including Veloso and Gil.

The mass exile of musicians and artists is not uncommon in Latin American history—nor are state-sponsored disappearances and murders. Rubens’s disappearance and subsequent death in I’m Still Here is representative of what happened in Brazil, but the reality is that dictatorships across the continent have left thousands of families destroyed, forcing women to take up a fight they never signed up for and demand answers from their governments. In Chile, the Pinochet regime kidnapped and murdered 3,200 people, and to this day 1,500 of the disappeared have not been found. In Argentina, the government estimates 9,000 people were killed during the country's dictatorship, while civilian groups claim the number of victims is 30,000. I’m Still Here portrays the case of Eunice, who, in addition to her grief, did not have access to her husband’s estate and bank accounts until the state finally issued a death certificate 25 years later. But it could just as easily have been about any one of the parents behind the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo, an organization in Argentina that, for 46 years, has fought to find disappeared students taken by the Argentine military regime in the 70s.

“The dictatorships of South America were not a banana republic matter,” Torres said in an interview with Vogue. “They were part of the macro politics of the time. That’s why I always repeat that [Eunice is] a victim of the Cold War; she’s not a victim of the dictatorship of a banana republic country. People treat the dictatorships in South America like something that happened on that faraway continent. But it’s all part of the same story.”

This same story continues to this day. But in exposing this complicated history of silence, I’m Still Here pushes for these silences to end contemporarily, challenging how right-wing politicians in Brazil and abroad regularly downplay the past dictatorship today in pursuit of their own political goals. If the dictatorship wasn’t that bad, they argue, then extreme-right president Jair Bolsonaro has done nothing wrong in attempting to stage a coup d’état against the newly elected left-wing president in 2022. But even the film’s Oscar campaign makes its intention explicit: to bring this history to a new audience, and to draw attention to the US’s involvement in deposing democratic regimes in Latin America in order to continuously exploit the continent for profit and labor. In the process, it has even strengthened the anti-amnesty campaign for the individuals who attempted to stage the coup in 2022.

In this sense, by telling Eunice and Rubens’s story, I’m Still Here has broken the silence that still persists, and that still helps to support fascist regimes across the globe. Despite the murders, the kidnappings, and the right-wing rewriting of history, the stories of the victims of these regimes, kept alive by the family who lost them, can never be killed. I’m Still Here is a testament to the power of political art and cinema—something the military regime wanted to exterminate at all costs. In a bid to truly commit to remembering history, I’m Still Here argues that a present-day consciousness of fascism is the only way to stop it.

[post_title] => The Women the Dictatorship Left Behind [post_excerpt] => On the history we see—and the history we don't—in "I'm Still Here." [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => im-still-here-ainda-estou-aqui-brazil-military-dictatorship-fascism-academy-awards-fernanda-torres-eunice-paiva-rubens-best-actress-picture [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-02-28 00:55:42 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-02-28 00:55:42 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7948 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 28, 2025February 28, 2025

The Women the Dictatorship Left Behind

by Nicole Froio

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7869 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-02-14 18:19:28 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-02-14 18:19:28 [post_content] =>

Sometimes, the death of a friendship can feel like a haunting.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

The first signs of our friendship’s death appeared when she did not win a poetry contest for which I served as a judge. you have humiliated me, she texted when the results were announced, each word on the glass screen as furious as a finger-jab. you have embarrassed me in front of my press. I was driving across the country with my husband when I felt my phone vibrate. We were on our way to a poetry conference, where I would give a talk on the craft of writing poems about trauma. how can you be so cold, she wrote. how could you do this. I wept as I read each new text out loud.

After that first near-death, the air between us felt colder. She began to drift away, becoming increasingly gauzy like a piece of silk sliding through my fingers. She stopped reading my poems and essays, stopped even asking about my work. This support was, she knew, what I treasured most about our friendship, all those evenings when we read one another’s writing and offered suggestions. Maybe you should break the line here; this metaphor could be more precise; I think you could expand this image of the trapped sparrow.

We would talk for hours on the phone. “I’m making my favorite beverage,”she might laugh, and I could hear in the background of her call the sputter of coffee brewing or a pitcher of milk being frothed, that shhhhh-shhhh-shhhh from the steam. Sometimes we spoke so long that I would have to say, “Hold on—I’m almost out of power.” I would plug the charger into the nearest outlet and sit on the floor with my back against the wall, placing the cellphone in my lap like a small, delicate animal that needed comfort.

But once our friendship began its dying, there were fewer and fewer conversations. When she did offer to read my work, her critiques were harsh and tearing. Or else, she was indifferent. “This looks fine,” she would say. The withdrawal was her punishment. Already, she was becoming spectral.

Almost two years after the dying first began, my friend finally chose to become a ghost. Over the stretch of a summer, she theatrically disappeared. Her silence was ostentatious and immense. My calls and messages went unanswered for weeks. I texted her, asked what had changed. Her answers answered nothing. I’m just so busy, she would say.

In a ghost story, tension is created through uncertainty. Is the ghost malevolent, in need of help, or simply lost? Those who encounter a phantasm must fill in the narrative on their own. During our last conversation, she complained about her most recent rejections from several literary journals. “I suppose you’re still getting as many acceptances as ever,” she said, her tone scraping like a querulous violin. I don’t know what I answered. But I remember thinking, when the call ended, that I would never hear her voice again.

By the time summer passed, I knew our friendship was a thing that should be laid to rest. I had waited too long already. In the Jewish tradition, we bury a body within 24 hours of death. When a loved one dies, we say the mourner’s Kaddish for eleven months minus a day. After that, the bereaved are expected to reenter their own lives. They must only reexamine grief on the anniversary of the death, the yahrzeit, lighting a candle that burns on the kitchen table for 24 hours, the flame like a flimsy, wobbling soul. It was time to reenter my life without her in it.

Then, in late fall, my friend decided to visit me from beyond. Ghosts are said to haunt the sites of their deaths or the places to which they once felt most attached, battlefields, creaking houses, cobwebbed alcoves. Because we had never lived in the same city or state, much of our friendship resided in the ether of texts and the internet. So, it seemed fitting that her arrival came in the form of an email on the evening of my 49^th birthday.

I was sitting with my family in a restaurant. I felt the delicate buzz of my phone and looked down. Best wishes for a Happy Birthday, she wrote. My eyes slipped across her words, the accusations of arrogance, that I thought too much of my own accomplishments as a writer. People talk about how, in a moment of shock or desolation, food can become ash in the mouth. Something vicious occurs and the tongue responds with cremation. Everything it tastes turns to cinders. But—as I held the poisonous, green glow of the phone in my left hand, a fork still gripped in my right—the food tasted like choking smoke.

Later that evening, I wrote to her:

Your birthday message has given me the closure I so needed. I feel able to move on now. Thank you for that.

Good luck in your future endeavors.

Is it possible to escort a ghost from one’s life in such a crisp, businesslike way? My email had the detachment of a rejection letter; but, to me, it felt like a door held open as I spoke to an empty room. Go, I pleaded, please, leave now.

Still, I’ve allowed myself to mourn. There was a story I used to tell whenever people asked how my friend and I first met. “I was a young grad student,” I would explain. “And I wrote her a fan letter—an email saying how much her first book meant to me. Have you read it?” I would interrupt my story to ask. “It’s a wonderful collection. And that was how we became friends!”I would turn to look at her, waiting for a grin or nod in confirmation. But over the years, the story must have lost its shimmer. She stopped smiling back. Sometimes, she would say, “Oh, I can’t recall how we met,” and flit a hand, as if to clear away the thick lilies of a perfume from the air around her.

Sometimes friendships between writers are less spectral than they are ghoulish. Envy. Competitiveness. Insecurity. Every writer is a host to such creatures. And it is always difficult to confront that which horrifies the self. Looking back, I see what was hidden from me before—that my explanation must have struck her as cruel and self-congratulatory. When we became friends, I was very young, still discovering the voice of my poems and just beginning to publish, and I couldn’t believe that someone so gifted would want to make space for me in her life. My friend, two decades my senior, was further along in her career. By the time things ended between us, however, our positions had changed—and perhaps this haunted her, too.

And, yet—“Here, take half of this sandwich,” she would say, sliding the plate across the table toward me. “Do you want a taste of this cake?”she would ask while holding out her fork. Whenever we spent time together, she fed me, gave me a jacket to stay warm, even offered the lipstick from her purse. She was generous like that.

Still, I can admit too that exorcising her ghost was a relief. The morning after the birthday message, I woke to find the constant pain in my back was gone. For months, I had felt a sharp stone near the base of my spine, as if someone had lodged it there. It often hurt my sleep so that I twisted for hours in bed, unable to find a restful position. Some nights I barely dozed. But the email from my friend had dislodged, at last, the rock from its pointed place.

In a Jewish cemetery, we don’t lay flowers on the graves. A bouquet is too brief; blossoms wilt in a week. Instead, we put small stones on the headstones, leaving our grief behind us when we go. After we have cried, after we have kneeled beside the carved letters and let our fingertips follow each deep groove in the granite surface, we stand. We walk away. The pebbles stay where we have positioned them. The weight of our loss becomes lighter. The pain disappears from our spines. Those little, smooth stones pin our dead—at last—deep under the earth. Let them rest, I say. Let her rest and never return.

[post_title] => Ghost Story [post_excerpt] => Sometimes, the death of a friendship can feel like a haunting. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => old-friends-friendship-ghosting-breakup [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-02-21 23:15:39 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-02-21 23:15:39 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7869 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 14, 2025February 21, 2025

Ghost Story

by Jehanne Dubrow

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7813 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-02-03 23:03:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-02-03 23:03:39 [post_content] =>

From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no."

I’ve been to at least 15 countries in the last two and a half years, some of them repeatedly, including frequent trips to Nigeria and the United Kingdom for personal and family commitments. But most of my travel has been while working on my forthcoming book, Foremothers, including visiting new countries for the first time, such as Brazil, or some, for the first time in a long time, like South Africa.

Foremothers, slated for release in the near future, has taken much more time and much more out of me than I thought it would when I first conceived of it over seven years ago. Surprisingly, this hasn’t just been because of the laborious effort of working on a cross-continental, multicultural, multigenerational, women-centered historical nonfiction book. It has also been due to the universal sentiment of doom and gloom I kept encountering while researching and writing it—raising my internal and intellectual alarm bells beyond the scope of the project. As such, in the wake of my travels, I’ve found myself repeatedly considering a new and troubling question: Is it just me, or is anyone, anywhere having a good time?

Of course, the very premise of this good time and its practice may not even be universally defined. What constitutes a good time in Dakar, Senegal may not be the same as in Lagos, Portugal. But even if the specifics of a good time and good times are relative, we can all agree—as difficult as it may be for us to do, given our abundant disagreements—that having a good time on a broader scale must consist of some fundamentals. For any country or society or group of people anywhere to claim it, for example, there must be established, uncontestable liberties that its people, irrespective of their differences, enjoy collectively. Healthy, nourishing, affordable food must be available to its inhabitants. Their most humble abodes, whatever they look like, ought to be functional and secure to the environment they live in. Basically, there should be basic human rights, and then some, for all. And even though, across communities and nations, these good time aims may not previously have been achieved, this did not change its pursuit for and by subsequent generations. It seems, however, this is no longer the case.

To the pessimists and realists, whose differences have become the same, these so-called “good times” have always been little more than a post-World War II mirage, chased by the utopic dreamers who don’t understand the real world and how it works. To others, the vision has long lost its luster because too many of us are unwilling to pay the price it would take to accomplish it, from living with less, to partaking in simultaneous revolutions more. This view, most embodied by the old-school retired optimists, has also found favor with the apolitical and the nihilistic, who mimic each other so closely they can hardly be told apart. But even for the optimists still-in-residence, and indeed those rare fools who dare to be counted and characterized as the hopeful, the dream of a good time appears increasingly illusive, increasingly difficult to hold onto. This, I think, has been the greatest throughline of my travels, and perhaps the most worrying, too—a collective loss of hope among everyone, but especially amongst the hopeful.

The reasons why appear obvious enough. COVID and its poor handling by political and public health institutions alike around the globe. The economic frustrations stemming from a widespread rise in cost of living and inflation, and the ebbs in job opportunity and security; everywhere, the rich have got richer, and the poor have got poorer, with fewer people able to make it to, and stay within, the in-between. Climate change is unequivocally upon us and we are living through its effects, wondering with each unprecedented event or catastrophic change to a people’s way of life, the longevity of our human existence on Earth. We have become witnesses to, if not reluctant consumers of, the daily accounts of the violence of apartheid, war, and the unjust global nation-state dynamics respective to Palestine-Israel, to Sudan, and elsewhere, mainly in the Global South—even as the most hopeful among us have protested and petitioned continuously in the face of ever-creeping sentiments of powerlessness.

All this has also come as trust in news media everywhere, but especially in the United States’ conglomerates, remains at record lows, and in the midst of a technological insurgency of misinformation and disinformation where even the media literate are as liable to conspiracies as they are to good-faith misinterpretations. Add to that a broken faith in political systems that no longer appear built for the world we live in today, tightly tethered to a system that continues to serve the most materially advantaged. But even more alarming still, is the broken trust permeating through the people we live near to and alongside, as a contagion of loneliness sweeps through the world, posing as much threat to our species’ health and well-being as future pandemics inevitably will—all of which is, in part, an outcome of a rise of individualism around the world.

This incomplete list of gloom and doom sounds bleak, because it is. Yet much of what has even been listed has always been true of our collective human experiences, in eras long past that in important ways were objectively worse than this one. What we are experiencing now, then, is just the latest iteration of the human condition, the sufferings and the sufferers altering every few hundred years or so. But this reality also stands in contrast with the objective progression of this time—in science, in medicine, in technology, in faith; in short, in all that we know makes for a good life, and a good time, for the many. In the context of our human history, perhaps these progressions frustrate us all the more because in spite of them, the human condition has not been permanently altered. But maybe the biggest difference between the eras of yesteryear and today, is that so many of the people I have encountered in my travels, whatever their politics and whatever our disagreements, do not believe that those who come after them will enjoy a better future.

From what I’ve observed during my travels, it’s not difficult to see why. In Nigeria, the country of my birth, years of unfettered greed and complacency by politicians and the rise of high-influence people who prop up ethnocentrism and religious bigotry, in tandem with a return to the old-school tricks of its former dictatorship era, including threats of violence and free speech suppression, have led to a national mood of despondency for an otherwise almost hazardously hopeful people—a people I ordinarily advise to be more skeptical. This has dashed the reveries of my elders, peers, and juniors, some of whom returned home at the turn of the late aughts, in the midst of a prodigious cultural boom, to partake in a contemporary attempt of nation-building when the country looked on the ascent economically. Today, Nigeria is experiencing what has been called its worst economic crisis in a generation, and the high cost of basic needs has resulted in over 30 million people facing food insecurity in 2025.

In South Africa, high unemployment and depletion in the quality of public services have resulted in the economic disempowerment of everyday citizens, who blame migrants with its cause, stoking the country’s African-centric xenophobia. All of this has been laid at the feet of its African National Congress (ANC) party, the former heroes of the apartheid struggle who lost their 20 years of political dominance in 2024. Following South Africa’s elections last May, the ANC was all but forced to form a political coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, the latter of which a journalist friend of mine referred to as “the residual party of white privilege.”

But even the more hopeful chances we might have anticipated at achieving a “good time” have struggled to achieve it. This includes Brazil, a place where the people seem to most demonstrate the desire for a good time—partly because that Brazilian label runs deep in the national fabric, and partly as a result of their 2022 election in which leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva replaced the authoritarian-like Jair Bolsonaro. In the weeks after Lula was sworn in, I attended carnival in both Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, documenting the joyous tradition and its history, and was told by many of the relief they felt at Lula’s return, his third time at the helm of the nation. Yet Bolsonaro’s continued influence prevails to the point of his own possible comeback, even despite a recent police report of his attempt at a failed coup in those same 2022 elections.

Meanwhile, as in much of the West, right-wing extremists in Portugal gained support via parliamentary representation during its general elections in March last year, and the once open, migrant-friendly policies of the country that drove its digital nomad explosion are now set to be restricted. In the UK, the self-inflicted Brexit wound has come to fester in the last few years following its summer 2016 vote. Compounded with the COVID years, it has left the country’s economy smaller, and exacerbated its cost of living crisis; any night out in London will confirm a decimated scene, unveiling how the once Swinging City hardly deserves to be mentioned among its global equivalents anymore. In the United States, where I have lived for much of my adult life, the early days of a second Trump presidency have already brought about a sense of impending chaos and doom throughout structures and institutions, political, cultural, and economic, after his landslide victory in November. Much ink will continue to be spilled as to how and why he was reelected at all, but the fears of the authoritarianism that accompany Trump’s presence long preceded his first administration, and will supersede the current one. It’s unclear, too, if the coalitions that oppose his presidency even have the wherewithal to form and execute an integrated vision that will safeguard the communities they claim to defend, not only against Trump’s actions, but for the good of the people, regardless of who sits in The White House.

Of course, some ordinary people—and not those who actually benefit from these global state of affairs—have boasted of victory in all of these instances. Their overall political participation (and not just their electoral one), or lack thereof, stems from a plethora of grievances and discontent—many real, some imagined—leading to a need to believe that their side will at least see gains, or more honestly, not suffer quite as much as the “losers.” This of course is an effective political strategy set up by those who truly benefit—convincing their base that despite the lack of evidence that surrounds them, they have been victorious. But a cursory examination of the whole, along with the many candid if unsuspecting admissions people have shared with me during my travels—including from those claiming electoral victory—nonetheless reveals that none, regardless of which political side they may be on, believe that their life will marginally improve after an election. The winning side confesses deep-seated dejections as much as the imagined losing side, in sometimes unspoken but always communicated anxieties that the good times are no longer within one’s reach, nor within one’s children’s reach, if they ever even were.

The privilege of observing this phenomenon these last few years has been witnessing how its cultural ramifications have grown alongside its political ones. This is obvious in the rise of the rhetoric and content of trad wives and the manosphere, indicating a desire to suppress women’s rights and keep men in less empowered, less diverse visions of masculinity. Oppression begets repression to more than its victims, and because it does, a good time becomes impossible for all, oppressor and oppressed alike. Relatedly, another cultural consequence can be seen in the choice—when it is a choice—to delay or wholly repudiate parenthood, not only because of the real expenses associated with it, but because so many have decided they would rather deny themselves the experience than foist the offerings of this dystopia we are headed towards onto their potential offspring. But less obvious manifestations can also be seen in how so much of the latest sociotechnological innovations are not improving our material lives but instead inviting us to escape into virtual apathy and antipathy. It struck me continuously throughout my travels how much even when around others, people expressed a desire to abscond into their digital lives, most often to nurse parasocial relationships where they imagined their counterparts as more fulfilled than them, counterparts who they seem to have outsourced their hopes and dreams to. Witnessing all this and more, and as someone who ordinarily accepts that little is new under the sun—seasons of plenty and joy live alongside seasons of paucity and pain as a fact of life, and we are called to persist in all of them—I, who considers myself among the hopeful, began to wonder if hope here is even the answer. Moreover, what does hope even look like under such universal malaise?

The truth is I don’t have a unanimous solution, or at least, not yet. Certainly, building coalition across issues in ways that acknowledge our political and social differences has been advocated for by those more knowledgeable than I, as have mutual aid collectives in our communities by movement leaders at the frontlines of our despair. There are guides to survival that have been written in the form of literature, such as Octavia Butler’s Parables, or nonfiction directives we can follow to address the underlying litany of systemic problems we face, offered in books like David Graber’s The Utopia of Rules. But because of the work I do as a journalist and the work I have been doing as a forthcoming author, and because of who I am—a person whose imagination is wired to pursue history in order to realize the future—I have found myself meditating on not only the stories of significant women of the past that I’ve collected for Foremothers, but on those of my own foreparents, too.

In the past year especially, I have contemplated not infrequently the lives of my foreparents, including those I never met and those that in my own lifetime transitioned beyond the physical realm. I have thought about the conditions they endured—from illness to war to colonization to migrations, new and old. And I have thought about the fears they overcame, the joys they found, and the unwavering perseverance they had to continue on; at least in part, for the sake of descendants they would never meet. And they did this not always because they believed they could promise their descendants a good life, but because they believed that whatever progress they made—even the most minute—should never see its end when their own lives ended on this Earth, but instead, be built upon with each generation that followed. Their responsibility to those who they could not know would come after them, was, above all else, a refusal to succumb to whatever hopelessness their circumstances presented, and instead a choice to hold onto an imagination that made no promises of what was to come, but only of what is possible.

For what it’s worth, although I didn’t hear this same sentiment expressed in great quantities throughout my travels, the debt of continuing to carry as a testament to one’s forebearers was the singular throughline even the most faintly hopeful people managed to convey. From a source in Luanda, Angola who told me how our dues to our ancestors is what can propel us forward in times of difficulty, to colleagues I encountered in Nairobi, Kenya who proposed that in order to keep moving forward, we must look continually to all those who have survived before us.

All the same, I cannot promise myself a good time knowing what I have seen these last few years and even prior to them, much less can I promise a good time to anybody who will come after me. I also cannot promise relief will come anywhere, because for most of us, even those of us who might have the means and privilege of movement, there is nowhere to run to, to escape this intercontinental anguish. But alongside the pragmatism of collective coalitions in our communities, small and big, that we must adopt in order to persist, we owe it to the foreparents gone and the foreparents still to come to never let our imagination yield to believing that both good and better times are not possible. Our collective survival depends on it.

[post_title] => Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time? [post_excerpt] => From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no." [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => is-anyone-anywhere-having-a-good-time [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-02-03 23:06:17 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-02-03 23:06:17 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7813 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 3, 2025February 3, 2025

Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time?

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7604 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-01-01 11:27:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-01-01 11:27:00 [post_content] =>

How skincare has, and hasn't, changed across generations of women.

I have a distinct memory from when I was a young girl, of my nani, my maternal grandmother, opening her Ponds cold cream, with its white base and light green lid, and tapping it onto her face.

I’m still a child, maybe 10 or 11, and when she finishes, she offers the jar of cold cream to me, insisting I also start putting it on regularly to take care of my skin. As I scoop up some of the cream and begin applying it, my nani watches my technique intently, correcting me wherever she thinks I'm not being gentle enough. “Never rub your face,” she tells me. “It’ll make your skin sag and give you wrinkles.”

For as long as I can remember, I have associated my nani with that Ponds cold cream. It really was, and still is, such a key part of her everyday life. She still has jars of it in her bedroom and her bathroom so that it’s always on hand, and brings it with her whenever she leaves home. Yet despite her obvious brand loyalty, my nani’s routine has always been more about process than product. At a time when women were asked to be invisible, to put everyone before themselves, those five minutes spent meticulously applying her face cream each night were an almost rebellious act of self care.

Skincare in Pakistan, and perhaps across the world, has changed significantly since my nani’s days, and I’ll admit even I’ve given in to the hype, buying at least a couple of products with fancy ingredients on the label like “hyaluronic acid” and “AHAs.” But unlike my nani, I’ve always been far less meticulous with my skincare routine. Perhaps it's because these trends are still quite new to me, or maybe the routines themselves have become too complicated. But perhaps more than either, it’s because these products are only selling me an idea of self care, rather than actually fostering a habit of it.

Growing up, aside from what I learned from my nani, the concept of skincare was taught to me very differently. In fact, it wouldn’t be remiss to say that in South Asia, the importance of skincare starts from the womb. I remember, starting from when I was a child, the pregnant women around me were told to eat “white” foods during pregnancy so that their baby would have fair skin. Anything dark—coffee, chocolate—was to be avoided, out of fear that it would cause their baby to have a darker complexion. Despite these myths being completely debunked, they still form a critical part of skincare motivations for older South Asians today, and pregnant people often still receive the same advice.

It’s no secret that whitening has long been a major motivation behind skincare within many Asian cultures and amongst countless other cultures around the world. Despite global trends to push “fairness” out of advertising lingo, the underlying beliefs and colorism still persist, along with the dangerous ways people choose to realize them. This has been true for centuries: Some Renaissance era women would even wear leeches behind their ears to suck out their blood and leave them looking paler, which was considered more beautiful. As recently as the mid to late 20th century, many brides in South Asia would utilize a similar technique in anticipation of their weddings—again, to appear paler and “more beautiful.” Dr. Christine Hall, a GP and Aesthetics Doctor at London’s Taktouk Clinic, says that similar beliefs have long existed in Korean culture, too. “There is an age-old belief which suggested that darker skin tones mean that you worked the land, and so this was correlated to a poorer societal class,” she says. “As a result, most South Koreans did and still do prefer to avoid the sun and tanning—but the focus is on anti-aging, and not so much skin lightening or bleaching.”

As Dr. Hall notes, while some skincare practices have remained consistent across generations, it is the motivations and drivers behind those routines that have continued to shift. In a more extreme example, a recent T: The New York Times Style Magazine article reported that people are still using leeches for beauty treatments today—not for the sake of becoming paler, however, but “in an effort to refresh the skin and reduce wrinkles.”

It makes sense that as beauty standards have continued to evolve, our motivations for partaking in skincare would evolve with them. But, Dr. Hall argues, this isn’t necessarily always because women are trying to chase an ever-changing standard of beauty. After all, we live in a time where women are perceived very differently from the world my nani grew up in; and some of these shifts can also come from letting go of the societal pressures that demand women to conform to them in the first place. “Sometimes, the ideology of having perfect skin and being beautiful goes too far,” Dr. Hall explains, citing the extreme pressure many South Koreans, especially women, feel to maintain their looks. “This has resulted in a movement called ‘escape the corset’ where women are cutting their hair short and throwing away their makeup and refusing to conform to these unrealistic expectations.”

In some ways, the motivation behind the “escape the corset” movement—driven by self-empowerment and a woman’s right to look however she’d like—almost feels closer to my nani’s relationship to skincare than most of what’s sold to us today. One major reason for this, of course, is the overwhelming and unnecessary economy of choice fueled by capitalism, which depends on continuously moving the bar for “beauty” in order to keep us buying more new products. Beauty is now a multi-billion dollar industry, largely funded by women, and it’s only growing each year. This is also partially why, compared to previous generations, there’s been a global shift from more natural skincare—including a reliance on homemade DIY products—to lab-formulated, fancy-sounding multiple-step routines that can only be purchased in a store, and at a cost. “In Greece where I’m originally from, older generations always used natural remedies for many years,” shares Fani Mari, a freelance beauty journalist and content creator. Despite not being a fan of DIY skincare herself, she still incorporates some of these remedies into her skincare routine because they’re simple and effective—and connect her to her culture and the elders who passed it down to her.

For many young women, a similar influence has guided them through their own skincare evolutions, as well. Haniya Shariq Khan, a young college student in Lahore, remembers her own skincare journey with her nani very fondly. While her nani passed away five years ago, Khan shares that she and her mother still follow the same skincare regimen she taught them to this day.

As the wife of a landlord, living in a rural area, Khan’s grandmother endured grueling days of work for most of her life, and skincare was her reprieve. “She was expected to do certain chores, such as making lassi by hand, an incredibly rigorous activity, but she realized quickly that the leftover butter made for a really nourishing moisturizer,” Khan shares. As time went on, and her grandparents' financial situation improved, she continued to indulge in her skin, eventually buying new creams, including some from as far as London.

“I think honestly she was just very into beauty,” Khan says. “Growing up so poor, she had no shoes to wear if she outgrew them… [But] even as a little girl living in the tenements, she used to be crazy about fashion, about the latest hairstyles, and always had her own kohl and mirror from the age of about nine. So this was a hang up from her very deprived childhood: She was keeping her inner child happy by indulging in all these things.”

This relationship to skincare felt similar to my own nani’s relationship to it, even if it took a slightly different shape: So much of the motivation behind skincare for our ancestors was a way of indulgence and self care. While on surface level, this might seem shallow, or largely motivated by societal pressures, these individual experiences show a far deeper sense of well-being, and even treating one’s self, in a time where, for most women, this was largely inaccessible.

Based on most beauty ads today, it may seem like “self care” is still the main driver behind the skincare industry. But the onslaught of consumerism, and the increasing pressure to buy more and more, has turned it more sinister. As a culture, we’ve turned skincare into a necessity. Combined with the pandemic’s impact on our mental health, the pervasiveness and pressures of social media, and an overflow of information in the digital age, skincare has also become a compulsion. Children as young as 10 are now buying into the pressure of using anti-aging products. Capitalism has meant that the move away from the pressure to wear makeup hasn’t necessarily freed us from caring about our appearance. It’s only made skincare our new cult-like obsession, and makes me question whether we’ve learned anything at all.

The way we begin to counter this is by discerning and deciding for ourselves what feels right, not what we’re told will make us feel beautiful by a slew of constantly changing trends and ads that insist we have to buy absolutely everything. It’s by returning to why our grandmothers washed their faces, and reconnecting to skincare as an actual vehicle of self care. This is easier said than done, but some beauty enthusiasts are trying—and in the process, building a new legacy that seeks to find the balance in all of it.

Meraj Fatima, the founder of Her Beauty, a Pakistan-based skincare brand that launched last year, says her brand was inspired by her own skincare journey, and unlearning the skincare traditions of past generations that didn’t work for her. But in the process of creating it, something surprising happened: Her mother and grandmother were willing to go on this renewed skincare journey with her.

Fatima, who had Rosacea growing up, says her skin condition meant she had to figure out what worked for her and what didn’t amongst the various natural “totkas” (home remedies) her mother and grandmother had passed down to her. “One thing that differentiates me from my mom is my mom used natural agents to do skincare, like using lemon, which is terrible for your skin, or malai, which could soften your skin, but my kind of skin will react to it,” she shares. Today, her mother and grandmother are open to trying the products she recommends instead, and are some of Her Beauty’s regular customers.

Still, Fatima wants to be mindful of not eschewing old remedies or products just because something newer and supposedly “better” might be available. She always tells potential customers to start with what they have at home first, and not buy products unnecessarily—even if they’re her own. “I’ve seen my teenage cousins who feel pressured to use so many products without reason. And I have a daughter, too, now, so I keep thinking about what I want to pass down to her,” she says.

The work for younger generations of women, then, is one of both learning and unlearning: Seeing skincare as more than just a trend, but instead, as a practice. Or perhaps as a ritual for the self, or an act of rebellion, like it was for our nanis. Perhaps, then, rather than buying something new, we need to step back, and realize the Ponds already in our cabinet is already enough.

[post_title] => Why Our Grandmothers Washed Their Faces [post_excerpt] => How skincare has, and hasn't, changed across generations of women. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => generations-women-skincare-beauty-standards-pakistan-south-asia [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-02-05 19:38:19 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-02-05 19:38:19 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7604 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 1, 2025February 5, 2025

Why Our Grandmothers Washed Their Faces

by Anmol Irfan

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7581 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-12-20 23:16:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-12-20 23:16:49 [post_content] =>

All the movies, podcasts, books, albums, and TV that made us feel a little more human this year.

Anna Lind-Guzik, Founder

Best Thing I Read: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. It was my first time reading Verghese, and I've added him alongside Chekhov to my mental list of favorite writers who are also doctors. It's an epic novel mostly set in a hospital in Addis Ababa, with unforgettable characters and a stunning historical backdrop. The bodily detail can be gruesome at times, but the characters' humanity is what sticks with you.

Best Thing I Watched: When I want to cry-laugh and feel things, I watch Somebody Somewhere, created by Bridget Everett. It's a quiet show set in rural Kansas about chosen family, grief, and vulnerability. The series just ended on HBO, but I hope it gets picked up by another network for more seasons because it's a beautifully moving story with characters that feel so real, and aren't like any you'll find elsewhere on TV.

Best Thing I Listened To: I went deep on relationship podcasts this year, and *ugh* they were genuinely helpful with personal growth. Because I'm a nerd, I looked for academics and practitioners to teach me, and the top two I turned to were Reimagining Love with Dr. Alexandra Solomon and my longtime fave, Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel.

Kovie Biakolo, Contributing Editor

The Best Book I Read: You Don't Know Us Negroes And Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston has been one of my favorite reads this year, even though I'm not quite done with it yet. It's an essay collection that covers almost every facet of Black American folk culture from church and church going to dance to the politics of race and gender, showing Hurston as every bit of the all-rounder she truly was. Reading it with 2024 eyes, Hurston's writing easily allows you to place yourself in the time and landscape of the early 20th century she wrote in, but there's an authenticity and love to her writing about culture that transcends time.

The Best Thing I Watched: Tell Me Lies Season 2 is an amazing feat, considering it is only eight episodes and the second season has come two years after the first. For a show that jumps timelines between present day and the past lives of Millennial college students, it traverses a lot of serious issues, from sexual and emotional abuse to grief to murder. But if it sounds so serious you couldn't possibly enjoy it, you'd be wrong, because almost every episode manages to keep you on your toes and keep you invested in the outcome of a story largely depicting a bunch of deeply flawed—or really terrible—people.

The Best Thing I Listened To: I've listened to Shaboozey's "A Bar Song" on repeat a lot, so I have to give it a shout-out along with the album, Where I've Been, Isn't Where I'm Going, which I think is doing interesting things in genre-bending country, similar to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter. Along with these, I have to give a nod to Esther Perel's podcast, which is among the best out there, teasing out contemporary platonic and romantic relationships matters from sex to grief to family, unpacking a lot of taboo topics with clarity and empathy.

Marissa Lorusso, Newsletter Editor

Best Book I Read: Mating by Norman Rush. A friend recommended this 1991 National Book Award-winning novel to me with such enthusiasm earlier this year that I couldn't resist. It tells the story of two Americans in Botswana—a woman who's in graduate school and a man who's an anthropologist and is trying to start a matriarchal society in the desert. They fall in love, work alongside each other, argue about politics and gender and history—it all makes for a long, immersive, heartfelt, and genuinely unique novel.

Best Thing I Watched: I Saw The TV Glow. Even if you only interpret it as an allegory for the fear, isolation, and regret that can sprout up when we ignore serious questions about our gender identity, I Saw The TV Glow is a deeply moving film in a league of its own. But then there's everything else the film tackles, too, right on its surface: life in the suburbs, the way our tastes shape our identities (and vice-versa), pivotal teenage friendships. Together, these themes and subtexts all add up to a brilliant and strange viewing experience I kept close to my heart all year. (Plus its soundtrack, filled with original songs by an impressive slate of indie-rock luminaries, is pitch-perfect.)

Best Thing I Listened To: I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy. The punk band, led by Marisa Dabice, has been churning out an impressive blend of confrontational rock, gauzy guitars, and razor-sharp pop melodies for several records. But their latest is an impressive level-up, filled with moments of iridescent beauty alongside the kind of righteous rage I needed to sustain me this year.

Kiera Wright-Ruiz, Social Media Manager

Best Book I Read: My favorite book this year is Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store by Paola Velez. Paola is such a force in the kitchen. Her imaginative recipes like thick'em (an ultra thick cookie) and plantain sticky buns (!!!) make me ecstatic to preheat the oven.

Best Thing I Watched: I LOVED Netflix's Chicken Nugget. In this K-drama, a woman steps into a machine and accidentally transforms into a chicken nugget. It's absurd, funny, and, oddly, moving.

Best Thing I Listened To: Whenever I listen to NPR's Code Switch, the episodes tend to linger and give me something to chew on for days or even months afterward. Their episode from January called "Taylor Swift and the era of the 'girl'" is something I keep revisiting. It's about those who get to embrace girlhood and those who don't.

Gina Mei, Executive Editor

Best Book I Read: As I've already sung the praises of Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario, which was easily my most haunting read of the year (and perhaps my life), I'll choose The Future of War Crimes Justice by Chris Stephen as another equally depressing 2024 favorite. I found it to be a super digestible and straightforward look at the history of war crimes justice, and all the reasons (mostly bureaucratic, all utterly enraging) that so few war criminals have ever been tried for their crimes, let alone convicted. For something lighter, My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman was an enjoyably strange, genre-bending book that even got me out of a writing slump. For something in-between, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney seems to have become her most divisive book to date—but personally, I thought it was her best.

Best Thing I Watched: My film/TV consumption this year skewed very international, and with movies, often independent, which led me to a lot of what one Letterboxd user dubbed "freaky movies for freaks"—appropriately, in their review of 2022's Babysitter. Directed by and co-starring Monia Chokri, the film is strange and horny and feminist to its core, as much a playful skewering of casual misogyny as it is a psychedelic fairytale about exhausted motherhood. Combined with an utterly delightful performance from Nadia Tereszkiewicz as Amy (the titular babysitter), and a perfect one-and-a-half hour run time (bring back movies that aren't exclusively 3-plus hours), it's also a total technicolor feast, worth a watch just for the visuals alone.

As far as TV goes, I've started dabbling in more K-dramas this year, and ended up watching Netflix's The 8 Show, which drew a lot of comparisons to Squid Game when it first came out. I'm here to tell you: The 8 Show is much, much darker, and far more violent, and somehow, an even more scathing critique of the power that money affords and denies us.

Best Thing I Listened To: "Don't Forget Me" by Maggie Rogers was one of my most-listened to songs of the year, and has not once failed to make me feel something when I listen to it. But overall, I didn't listen to as much new music this year—although Faye Webster's new album Underdressed at the Symphony was a notable exception, and is filled with gentle tunes perfect for basking in all your sparkling melancholy.

[post_title] => The Best Things We Consumed in 2024 [post_excerpt] => All the movies, podcasts, books, albums, and TV that made us feel a little more human this year. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => best-movies-albums-books-podcasts-tv-television-series-2024-roundup-favorites-recommendations [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-02-03 23:06:43 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-02-03 23:06:43 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7581 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

December 20, 2024February 3, 2025

The Best Things We Consumed in 2024

by The Conversationalist Team

Sign up for our newsletter