Take a look at Mark Rothko’s Untitled (1968) – the blue background displays a deep sapphire shade that, although obstructed by large black blocks, nonetheless hypnotizes and radiates an overwhelming, solitary gravity. The colors wash over and swallow the viewer. The work draws the gaze in, appearing as a diveable well into the infinite and unknown. One feels empty, subsumed by the void before them.

At least I feel that way, but maybe the blue doesn’t do it for you. Maybe you think Rothko’s color fields are just a bunch of paint blobs. Or maybe he’s just one of the many great abstract expressionists. Many, if not most, view Rothko in these latter ways, not leaning towards a more emotional interpretation. It makes me question if I invented my interpretation from nothing, and if my experience is legitimate. Since Rothko’s color-fields reduce two-dimensional art to its most fundamental elements – shapes, textures, and, crucially, colors – his works are the perfect basis to explore the effect of color in its most primal form, as simply the shade, the pigment. Can color, specifically blue, because I find its depth uniquely powerful, limn the ecstasies and tragedies of life and elicit real, justifiable emotions? Or am I playing a trick on myself, divining something out of nothing? Am I just unbearably pretentious?

“Blue” is what we say to refer to 450 to 495 nanometer wavelength light, sandwiched between “green” and “indigo”. It appears occasionally in nature: in certain minerals, hydrangeas, and the iridescent rings on a blue-ringed octopus, but it’s rare. For things in nature to appear blue, an organism’s cells must absorb longer-wavelength, lower-energy light, which demands more energy from the organism; only niche evolutionary paths can produce an organic blue.

Early humans didn’t employ blue at all, with primeval cave paintings only marked by charcoal blacks, and clay reds and yellows mixed with fat and fire. Ancient Egypt made the first-known blue, “Egyptian blue,” from mixing copper, sand, and calcium in a furnace. Out of that crucible came a glassy material of copper silicate, which, when ground up, gave the new power of a previously-unattainable pigment to the surfaces of the world. Blue became part of the human palette.

Egyptian blue, however, would be lost between the exchanging hands of history, as the Romans didn’t know how to make it. They used alternative methods: ancient sources detail a week-long process of mixing efflorescent copper-mash, violet petals, fat-based soap, and urine to obtain “azure-blue,” which can be purified by adding lime, other flowers, or sealing it in a process similar to wine fermentation. New shades of blue popped up in the human lexicon.

Until the 19th Century, these intensive copper-based methods persisted. Blue pigment would cost artists and patrons greatly, while people throughout the ages sought finer and more efficient methods. Semi-precious minerals, azurite and lapis lazuli, were the other primary sources of blue pigment, demanding significant labor and cost to extract and make usable. Azurite was relatively common and contained dark and light-blue specks, with a greenish hue. Lapis lazuli, on the other hand, bore a deep, weighty blue that waxed purplish. More expensive than gold, lapis lazuli, also called “ultramarine blue” (a deeper blue than the sea), was highly valued for its luster and pure deep-blueness. Ultramarine was found in the Ajanta Caves in India, decorating the colossal Buddhist monuments. In Renaissance Italy, it was almost exclusively reserved for depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. This blue, the deepest blue, was only used in religious and regal imagery due to its rarity and cost. It’s rumored that Michaelangelo left The Entombment unfinished because he couldn’t procure the funds for ultramarine pigment. Blue maintained a lofty, opulent quality that projected an august gravity.

The 19th and 20th Centuries brought new techniques for pigment synthesis, which brought down the cost of color, especially blue. Synthetic ultramarine and a new “Monastral Blue,” another deep shade, began to be industrially produced. Blue of all kinds was no longer only for kings and Christ. Blue can be found from Monet’s plein-air impressionism to Rothko’s color fields. No longer exorbitant and widely unusable, it could become and mean anything.

The Yale University Art Gallery offers blue in many flavors and fragrances, particularly with their modern works. We have Braunes Mädchen (Brown Girl) (1921-3) by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, an oil painting of a glancing girl wearing a brown headscarf, almost shrugging (is she diffident or indifferent?). Brushes of blue occupy the tilted walls in the background, and the shades of blue reach over to her cheeks and eyes. 

Rooms by the Sea (1951) by Edward Hopper shows the interior of a lonely sea-side room: the threshold at the left hints at a living room with velvet couches and an obscured photo, and the right opens up to the sea, as if the room were in the middle of it. The sapphire water contrasts with the muted blue of the sprawling shadows. When I saw it, the solitude desolated me, as if I could be swallowed by the sea, menacingly edging into view.

Untitled (1954) by Rothko – not to be mistaken for the 1968 one – is brighter, mostly orange and red, but a faded field of sky-blue sits on the bottom third. It’s a monolith, ninety-three by fifty-six and three-sixteenths inches, and the lightness of the blue held me for a while: the shade was in its dissipating moment, and if I looked away for even a second, it would be gone.

Modern blue can be the shadows on an oceanside inn, the walls and air surrounding that encapsulate us, and even a formless field, marking a revolution in color. Were modern artists conscious of this revolution? The historical record offers nothing specifically, but modernist movements obsessed over the use of vivid colors. Picasso had a “Blue Period,” then a “Rose Period,” largely referring to his palettes during the respective eras. Matisse had his Blue Nudes, made shortly before his death, lithographic cutouts of abstract women in classical poses, colored ultramarine against white backgrounds.

Interior at Le Cannet (1938) by Pierre Bonnard could offer a commentary: vivid lapis flowers sit at the compositional center, as if the blue constitutes a distinguished rarity, but it subtly lies elsewhere throughout the painting: in the floor patterns, on the walls, in one splotch in the top-left corner. Maybe Bonnard was being satirical: this once-revered pigment is now everywhere, profaned. Did modernity profane blue? Once rare and elevated, it now signifies nothing concrete or specific, almost at risk of entirely losing meaning – are we just to derive sadness or solitude from looking at the pure blue of a Rothko? Perhaps blue possesses its own meaning, somewhere between 450 to 495 nanometers, or maybe we killed it.

“Depth, trust, loyalty, sincerity, wisdom, confidence, stability, faith, and intelligence” is what comes up on the first website (supercolor.com) when you Google, “what does blue mean.” “The color blue represents both the sky and the sea and is associated with open spaces, freedom, intuition, imagination, inspiration, and sensitivity,” continues supercolor.com. But, doesn’t the sea also represent danger and peril as in, for example, the Odyssey? Blue can mean cold, since it’s the color of ice, but fire, when extremely hot, becomes blue. So can’t blue also mean hot? Essentially, the invented symbolisms of blue are barely inherent to its hue.

The site claims that blue “calm[s] and release[s] feelings of tranquility,” which enters the world of chromotherapy, a practice which posits that colors inherently have therapeutic and even medical applications. Chromotherapist Samina Yousef Azeemi offers that simply seeing colors can treat “cancers, SAD, anorexia, bulimia nervosa, insomnia, jetlag, shift working, alcohol and drug dependency.” It should be well noted that scientists believe that chromotherapy is pseudoscience, with any emotional effects from color likely placebos, though color does elicit basic reactions for most people. If the inherent symbolism of blue is undefined, then certainly its visceral effects (which I felt with the first Rothko) are even more doubtful.

It’s easy to feel the awe of God in the Sistine Chapel or intense agony in an El Greco painting, as faces and scenes we see as our own are present, but, in a modernist world, when elements of art become abstracted, when forms and components no longer have the firm anchors of traditional realism, color itself may not fill the vacuum of meaning that traditional and realist art left. I worry that we lost emotion in pre-modern art, and that we cope with modern art, especially the more abstract, through inventing loftier, more erudite (and even more elitist), and less relatable concepts with which we nonetheless attempt to relate. I sometimes think that I feel about the 1968 untitled Rothko the way that I do because Rothko is “important,” and I should be feeling something more than what’s on the canvas. Perhaps the ultramarine blue captivates me only because I wish to be captivated.

But I won’t ruin Rothko for myself. Maybe blue doesn’t have any inherent meaning, and it has to rely on human-made cultural contexts: it must be rare to feel special, and it must only be used with Christ or Mary to feel divine. But, what if “meaning” and “interpretation” are besides the point? What if we allow ourselves, in spite of the instinct to glean validating “meaning,” to simply feel the work and embrace whatever comes up? I say go to the YUAG’s Modern and Contemporary Art section and pick out a work that’s interesting (it doesn’t have to be blue). Don’t read the blurb next to its description, and just look at it for as long as it keeps you. Let the experience be for you. Indulge in it.

I mean, consider the Ancient Egyptians. They didn’t need to invent Egyptian blue – there was potentially no precedence for the synthesis of blue pigment. But, the shimmering blue of the Nile and the deep sheen on the shells of scarabs must have called forth something deeper within them, the recognition of something that so perfectly limned aspects of their being not yet depicted or even depictable. They had to make it for themselves.

The post FEATURE: Sort of Blue appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The award that would finance the sneakers celebrated a career dedicated to chronicling the personal and collective stories that make up the Americas. Over two decades, Alarcón has covered, among other topics, Salvador Allende’s cybernetic ambitions (in Spanish, with the Radio Ambulante podcast team), the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador’s capital (in English, for the New Yorker), and the aftershocks of political violence in Peru (in English again, throughout his first two books). Alarcón’s work spans and crosses genres, mediums and languages. This Pan-American range takes the shape of his life, one spent navigating the cultural codes embedded throughout the Americas, South to North.

Alarcón was born in Lima in 1977, the year the Maoist group Shining Path decided that it had enough cadres to start a “popular war” against the Peruvian government. Two years later, as the country entered a large-scale armed conflict, Alarcón’s parents, both doctors, left for Alabama. Indoors, speaking Spanish with his family, Birmingham was not so different from the country he had just left—but outside, where he was one of the few Latinos in the area, the distance was indisputable. At eighteen, he moved to New York to study anthropology and creative writing at Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Lima, Iowa, and California before moving back to the largest city on this continent. The hemispheric scope and cosmopolitan tint of Alarcón’s work— they come from this itinerant background.

At least I had that suspicion when I read him for the first time. Back then I was in high school and obsessed, for some reason, with American nonfiction—its novelistic thrust, its heedfulness. Back then I passively believed that the New Yorker was a very well-written website; only months later, after subscribing for the tote bag, I realized that it had been a magazine first. I spent my nights trudging through the Harper’s website, wondering occasionally if it was common for Latinos to write for them, if someone on those websites had written about my country and city with the same exhaustive, delicate detail.

During one of those nights I discovered Alarcón’s eight-thousand-word essay about election night in Lurigancho, Lima’s largest prison. The next day, I listened to Radio Ambulante, the podcast for which Alarcón is the presenter and an executive producer, for the first time. The episode was called La concursante. Near the end of it, the mother of the protagonist begins to sing. The Andean lilt of her voice was the same as my grandmother’s. I was seventeen years old then and had been living outside of my country, alone, for the first time. Over those first months abroad very few things made sense to me. But that voice, its cadence—I understood them instantly.

I don’t say this to Alarcón when we speak over Zoom, but the topic comes up anyway. “When I was your age,” he tells me one morning in November, “all I wanted was to be part of the conversation. I came from Alabama, which is the most random place you can come from in the United States, and before that, I came from Peru, which is the most random place you can come from if you’re in Alabama.” As a teen, his heroes were musicians, painters, poets, novelists. Art made him understand that the world had, somewhere, a space reserved for him. Hence a career dedicated to depicting the personal and historical forces that define our time. “When I was your age, I looked at art as the key to understanding this world we live in. There were things that I read that made me feel less alone. I wanted to be part of that.”

***

In January 2011, Alarcón was writing his most recent novel, At Night We Walk In Circles. He had been working on it for five years, and didn’t seem to be making much progress. “The draft of the novel that I finished was terrible. It was a moment of panic about my talent, my future, and my abilities. And I was like, well, why don’t I try something completely different?”

He and Carolina Guerrero, his girlfriend at the time, had been thinking about starting a radio project. Their podcast, inspired by radio shows like This American Life, would be called Radio Ambulante. It would combine narrative journalism and investigative reporting; crucially, it would be one of the first projects to do so in American Spanish-language radio. Neither of them had significant audio experience, but that didn’t deter them: as Alarcón told The Rumpus in 2014, reflecting on those first days, “Not knowing what the fuck you’re doing is always exhilarating.” 

Alarcón became the host and the executive producer; Guerrero, the CEO. The next year, in 2012, they got married. Instead of a wedding registry, they asked their friends and family to donate to Radio Ambulante’s Kickstarter. (They also fundraised by holding a bake sale in their neighborhood for a couple of days.) By July 2012, these campaigns had yielded about $46,000. Recorded from Valparaíso, California, Tamaulipas and El Callao, the show’s first season put into practice an unifying principle: the three Americas are a single cultural region connected through the Spanish language. 

Early on, some doubted the viability of this pitch. As told by Alarcón in a MELUS interview from 2014, executives at outlets like Univision told him and Guerrero that there was no shared market for a show that compiled stories from across Spanish-speaking South America, let alone Central and North America. A Cuban residing in Miami, a mother in Cuzco, a student activist in Buenos Aires—they all have different backgrounds, convictions, lives. Does it really matter that they speak the same language? 

Alarcón and Guerrero believed so. Yes: Latinos comprised a vast, complex range of stories. But neither Spanish nor English-language media in the U.S. made space to explore these narratives with the thoroughness each one demands. Opening up that space, teasing out the singular, local circumstances that framed each story—that was what Radio Ambulante would do.

As Natalia Sánchez Loayza, an editor of the show, told me, “We’re producing for everyone who speaks Spanish—everyone, everywhere, which is a lot.” Alarcón was aware that this was an ambitious undertaking from the outset: as he said in that same MELUS interview, it would be enough to capture the attention of an interested niche of listeners. Radio Ambulante did not need “to have a massive audience.”

But three years after the bake sale, in 2015, the show hit over 1.5 million annual downloads. The following year, it was being distributed by NPR. Luis Fernando Vargas, a senior editor for the show, told me that when he joined in 2016, the team consisted of six people; now they are 32. And this November, when Spotify Wrapped released its data, Radio Ambulante was in the top 1% of the most popular podcasts on the platform globally.

For most who came of age in the 2010s, podcasts have come to be associated with a certain form and milieu: sour advice (Call Her Daddy), political polemics (The Joe Rogan Experience), or terminally online cultural commentary (Chapo Trap House). But Radio Ambulante has less in common with them than it does with, for example, a magazine like The Atlantic. Their approach to episodes is delicate, rigorous, nearly artisanal: between reporting, outlining, drafting, editing, copyediting and fact-checking, it might take anywhere from five weeks to two years until a story is ready for publication. 

While the exhaustive editing process means that every episode has many contributors, Alarcón’s presence is nevertheless crucial. In the words of his colleagues, his vision and attention elevate every story. “Daniel is the most artistic part of the team,” Vargas tells me. In the newsroom, he brings “the one phrase” that pierces through the team’s vision and “recontextualizes everything.” The result of this collective work is a tight 40-minute episode singular in its detail. The stories move, week to week, from a personal narrative about a love for karaoke to the dizzying street system of Costa Rica or the Venezuelan immigration crisis. They all bear specific, local marks — accents, words, historical notes — of the place they portray. Spanish, here, is deployed with care and attention: not as the dry language of books, but of families and city streets. Suffused with history, refined by its speakers, here the language is spoken as it is lived. 

***

Before the podcast, Alarcón was an Associate Editor at the Lima-based magazine Etiqueta Negra. For the uninitiated, Etiqueta Negra is perhaps best described through Alarcón’s fiction. Near the end of At Night We Walk In Circles, his 2013 novel, the nameless narrator takes a job at a nameless magazine of literary journalism. “At the beginning, we did everything: the writing and editing, the layout and design. We were the accountants, which explains why bankruptcy loomed each month; and we were the custodial staff, which explains why the office was in a state of constant disarray.” 

The similarities to Etiqueta Negra are not coincidental. The job was, in Alarcón’s words, his school: “My education in journalism. I teach a master’s degree in journalism now, at Columbia, but I didn’t get a master’s.” It was at the small magazine that he learned “to report and to edit, learned to be part of a team, to work with other journalists.”

He worked for about ten years with Etiqueta Negra’s small team, producing longform journalism — though longform is a vulgar translation for what may be better understood as marathon journalism. A more apt word might be crónica, a genre that mixes investigative journalism and the literary voice of novels. The crónica, of course, has a long legacy in Latin America. As Yale professor Anibal González-Pérez explains to me, writers Rubén Darío and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájara first shaped the crónica before writing the poetry that would make them central figures of the Latin American modernist movement. Etiqueta Negra, however, was also conscious of American New Journalism — it was equally indebted to the literary tradition of Latin America and the elegance of American writers like Truman Capote.

Eliezer Budasoff, managing editor of the magazine between 2014 and 2016, calls his years working for the magazine both “hellish and full of joy.” During his two-year tenure, he recalls pulling all-nighters before every issue was sent to the press. “Our ambitions were so high and our resources were so low — one usually pays for the difference between those two things with one’s body.” Sánchez Loayza, who interned there from 2014 to 2016, tells me that the magazine taught her “to have high standards.” Alarcón speaks in the same effusive tone: “The people who published in those pages are some of the writers of my generation (and younger, and some older) that I admire the most.”

It was rare to start a magazine of such a high caliber with so few resources. It was more unusual to start it in a young democracy like Peru, which was recovering from the two decades of armed conflict that prompted Alarcón’s parents to migrate, followed by eight years under Alberto Fujimori’s antidemocratic government. That this magazine was also able to publish texts from Martín Caparrós, Susan Orlean, Joaquín Sabina, Jon Lee Anderson, and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa alongside many other young writers from across Latin America—it’s almost surreal.

In a note posted in n+1 in 2008, Alarcón wrote that “Etiqueta Negra has been called (not by us) the finest magazine in the Spanish language.” (In the next line he added, “we’ve been called other, unprintable things as well, but this isn’t really the point.”) When we spoke, Alarcón recounted those years with reverence: he calls its impact in Latin America “legendary.” Even now, referring to one’s time at Etiqueta Negra carries its own gravitas. “It’s as if the New Yorker had died at some point,” Sánchez Loayza tells me, “and you say you used to work for it.”

Some view that comparison as inadequate. Budasoff, raised in Paraná, an eastern province of Argentina, told me he grew up reading the New Yorker online but had never seen a copy in the flesh. After he arrived in Lima to work for Etiqueta Negra, he held an issue of the American magazine for the first time. Immediately he was disappointed. “Many people used to explain what Etiqueta Negra was by saying it was the New Yorker in Spanish. But at that moment I said ‘fuck, no.’” He laughs. “‘Our magazine is much more beautiful.’”

Etiqueta Negra alumni speak about their publication in the past tense, but often the present tense slips in. Listening to them, one gets the impression of an insular, mythical world, now extinct—especially given that when the magazine closed in 2017, it left no official website or online archive. People my age learned of its existence through certain preeminent texts, photocopied and shared in classrooms or reposted in blogs. I have memories of going with friends to the historic center of Lima and wading through large bins of old issues of National Geographic and People to find a second-hand copy of the magazine. In a sense we were in love. The stories in Etiqueta Negra fascinated us; they were like nothing we had read before. Or, we would admit, they were like the stories we had found in the English-language websites. But they were better, we would say to each other. Because they were written in Spanish, and they were about us.

***

In high school, at Indian Springs, Alarcón was classmates with the novelist John Green. They both wanted to be writers and shared, as Alarcón said in 2014, “a seriousness about it that wasn’t exactly normal for adolescents.” While working on his first novel, Alarcón told The Creative Independent in 2018, he would wake up at five in the morning every day to write for a couple of hours. While writing on his latest novella, he moved into his friends’ home for two weeks just to be able to finish the book. In that same interview, he was asked how he managed the responsibilities of his four jobs. “My solution,” he answered, “is to work until I’m dead.”

People notice. In the words of Vargas, the Radio Ambulante editor, “the man is crazy. He works like crazy. And somehow he always finds a way to pick up his son Eliseo from school.” Sánchez Loayza tells me in December that while Alarcón was supposed to be taking a break from Radio Ambulante, “he’s never truly on sabbatical.” And Elda Cantú, a former editor of Etiqueta Negra and current editor for the New York Times, tells me that when she and Alarcón worked together, she noticed he was deeply absorbed by his reporting. “He was always very curious about the people he met. By talking to him, you could just witness the way he was thinking about the story, how he was shaping it throughout a day of reporting.” 

I ask Alarcón if he ever had any pragmatic doubts about becoming a writer. “I don’t think I knew how precarious existence would be—or could be, because I’ve been really fortunate.” Even if people had told him, he adds, he wouldn’t have believed them. “I had that young person’s sense of invincibility. I just assumed that things would work out.” 

He tells me that his first job out of college was as a public school teacher. “I would get up at six, be at school at seven thirty, teach all day, grade papers, walk home, make dinner, then write until midnight, then do it again, every day, every day. My friends were living in New York and they were going out, and partying, and some were making a lot of money, and some were simply having much more fun in a traditional sense. And I was like, ‘Well, but I want to write a book.’”

“It’s not like I was a shut-in or anything. I had a life and I had friends. But, you know, if that was what I wanted to do, I was really happy to do it. I knew that it was going to be hard but, well, I grew up watching my parents work. I was never scared of working hard. That wasn’t really an issue.”

Julio Villanueva Chang, the editor-in-chief and founder of Etiqueta Negra, tells me he does not remember exactly how he met Alarcón. But he remembers Alarcón’s first story for the magazine: a piece about the Mall of America. “Dani traveled to Bloomington, gifting us his time and money, but above all his intelligence, generosity, and eagerness to learn.” Alarcón had already graduated from college and was working as a teacher in Lima, in the district of San Juan de Lurigancho. Later, he returned to the United States to work from San Francisco as an associate editor for Etiqueta Negra. “Dani was our chancellor in the United States,” Villanueva tells me. “I was impressed, from the beginning, by his desire to help and commit to a community, even in an adventure of uncertainty like the magazine.” 

A couple of minutes later, he shows me a picture of Alarcón. The writer is wearing a black shirt that reads LATINO-AMERICANO and bright red cleats. He is crouching down over the grass, surrounded by other men in black or bright sneakers, squinting in an expression of mock seriousness. The picture was taken during a lightning football match last October. Alarcón’s team was called Etiqueta Negra, Villanueva Chang tells me. They had just won the game. “A personality like Daniel’s can be misleading,” he adds. “He can be very calm in an earthquake and very euphoric in football. The same happens, I believe, in his commitment to work.”

***

Two of Alarcón’s books and several of his stories take place in an unnamed Latin American city that he describes as a version of Lima — Lima in the eighties, marred by political violence. “The news in the late 1980s and early 1990s never failed to supply a somber, cautionary anecdote starring families just like one’s own, now mired in unspeakable tragedy,” writes Alarcón in At Night We Walk in Circles. “Men and women disappeared, police were shot, the apparatus of the state teetered.” 

My classmates and I were born after the conflict, though nearly everybody in our generation has inherited a story of the war from the adults in their lives. As a teenager, if the lights went out in her neighborhood, Barrios Altos, my mother knew that the guerrillas had blown up a light tower. One of my teachers remembered that, as a child, he only understood the scale of the conflict when, upon turning on the shower, he was covered in both water and feces. 

I have no trouble recognizing the country of my parents in Alarcón’s stories. It’s a strange feeling for someone like me, who spoke only Spanish for the first half of my life and still writes almost exclusively in that language. Alarcón’s novels contain some of the best prose about Peru that I have ever read. But unlike most other descriptions of the country, his works have not come to me in my first language or in translation from it. Alarcón’s English is fluid; it belongs to him the way it belongs to a native speaker. And it’s strange, deeply strange, to read in English about a country that I can only imagine in Spanish. 

It is a curious time to read Alarcón’s fiction. Let me explain. I spent the holidays back home, in Lima, and two days before Christmas I met with Sebastián, my best friend. We had dinner and then walked around Miraflores, an upper-middle-class neighborhood nestled over a seaside cliff. Outside of its commercial center, the streets are placid and cold. Sebastián and I spent the night walking; we had met because he was migrating to Spain soon and we didn’t know when we would see each other again. 

As we walked he told me, laughing, about the time he visited some of his cousins in Italy. Their parents, like Alarcón’s, left Peru as the war started. In Italy the cousins spoke to Sebastián in a Spanish frozen in the eighties. “They called me ‘chochera,’” he said. “I was like, man! Nobody in Lima says ‘chochera’ today!”

I laughed with him. “Do you think they are Peruvian?”

“I feel more Peruvian than them,” he replied. “But I don’t know if I’ll feel like that for much longer.”

A thin, warm drizzle started to fall. I told him that I felt the gap would only widen for me too. But a country needs to be seen from many points of view, inside and out; wherever you are, that’s where you should speak from. “But then maybe I wouldn’t have said this when I was younger. When I was in high school I just wanted someone to listen to me. And sometimes I think that I only say these things, speak from where you are, because now I am the one who lives abroad. Now people can listen to me. And I need to explain why they should.”

We turned left then, through Malecón Balta, toward a red tile park at the edge of the cliff. Fifty meters under us, taxis and cars moved north to south, south to north. Beyond them was the sea. I asked Sebastián if he thought that many young people were leaving the country or trying to leave. He said yes. We walked some more. “Actually, I don’t know the numbers. Maybe everyone has always been leaving.”

A year ago, Peru endured one of the largest episodes of political violence since its civil war. More than fifty people were killed by the police during protests following Pedro Castillo’s autogolpe. The government that murdered them remains in power. Alberto Fujimori, the dictator who oversaw a series of extrajudicial killings in the nineties, was released this December from prison against the request of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And the Peruvian economic miracle, long impervious to the country’s political crises, has ended; last year, the country faced its worst recession in two decades.

And some people, it’s true, are leaving. According to a poll published last September by the research center Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 60% of young adults say they have plans to leave the country in the next three years. Last November, Americas Quarterly reported that in 2022, close to 400,000 Peruvians left the country and did not return—a four-fold increase from the 110,185 who did so in 2021. 

One wonders if countries, like novels, have themes. It’s a strange time to read Alarcón’s fiction because the questions he asks — about violence, migration and the tension between past and present — have reemerged with unusual force in the last few years. They are the questions every young person in Peru has had to ask themselves when confronted with a country sliding, slowly, down the edge of a cliff. 

When I asked Alarcón about the current democratic crisis, he said he saw Peru’s situation as symptomatic of the current crisis of this continent. “My concern is that the democracies, the precarious democracies, of Latin America did not fulfill their promises to the middle and working class. We’re paying the price now.”

He continues, “we — ‘we’ being people who believe in democracy — and the political elites did not prove to young people that democracy was in and of itself something valuable, worth saving. And so now you have an entire region that is tilting towards populism and nihilism. It’s scary and frightening and dispiriting.” 

“But I hate opinólogos. Take this with a grain of salt.” I nod, looking at the clock — in less than a minute our conversation has to end. He’s a busy man. I stop recording and switch back to Spanish to talk about our plans for the week. I joke that I’ll spend the rest of the day thinking of how to translate ‘opinólogos’. Alarcón laughs, and then replies “pundits”—with the swiftness of a reflex, without missing a beat. 

The post FEATURE: Daniel Alarcón’s Americas appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The post POEM: All Longing Erased appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Yale, advertised as a Great Bastion of arts and expression, teases its students with too many options for involvement. Beginning to write at Yale is overwhelming. How does one know which publication will want their work? Should you write for the daily news or the weekly news? What even is the YDN Magazine? In the end, most who want to write find a place for themselves—or multiple places, as it turns out. But the problem of Yale’s expansive index of newspapers, journals and magazines is not who is going to write, but rather who is going to read. So, here is your beginner’s guide to reading and writing at Yale.

THE STUDENT PUBLICATION FOR STUDENTS

When I ask my friends what they are reading outside of breaking Yale Daily News pieces, it’s usually the Yale Herald—self-proclaimed to be Yale’s “most daring publication.” Their recent “fronts” have discussed everything from Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Visiting Fellow Sheila Heti, and the age-old question of how to “poop like a hero.”

The Herald’s pieces cover Yale’s campus, offer cultural critiques, review films and albums, and include a weekly “blocklist” (8 things the editors hate that week—nothing from seahorses to NATO is safe). Herald contributors not only submit articles, but also create little “treats and marginalia” as Co-Editor-in-Chief Josephine Steuer Ingall ’24 says: crosswords, cheeky jokes, and artworks that make each issue unique.

The Herald was founded in 1986 as the first campus weekly to emphasize long-form reporting. According to Steuer Ingall, the publication leaned slightly conservative until the 1990s, when it began to take the shape students recognize today—that of a cheeky arts publication featuring comics, commentary, and prose. “We were founded with the ethos of ‘what do people want to read?’” Steuer Ingall told me, noting the publication’s “situational awareness.”

The Herald is tailored to the student as the reader. “We are college students at Yale producing a college newspaper for college students to read,” Steuer Ingall said. The Herald plays with the dynamic between student readers and writers; people who “consider themselves alt in some way,” Steuer Ingall explained. The Herald emphasizes its community of staff and readers, and the publication’s content reflects that.

CREATING A NEW NICHE

During a gap semester in 2020, friends Alexandra Gers ‘24 and Eden Bray ‘24 noticed that there was no publication designated for “editorialized fashion, photography, and writing” at Yale. Their venture, FUSE Magazine, attempts to fill this gap. The magazine published its first issue in spring 2022 and its second the following fall. Both have been print exclusives distributed at themed parties open to the student body. This method of circulation creates a community around FUSE, allowing readers to talk with the student artists and models who participate in making the magazine. Gers considers the issues to be “tangible art,” a status which elevates FUSE from something catalog-adjacent to something students can proudly display. She emphasized that “there is something to be said about scarcity”—making each covetable issue something a student will want to physically pick up.

Along with the success of their first print issues, the FUSE team is also building a website to incorporate different media like videography. According to Gers, the major hurdle for a new magazine is that it lacks the decades of accumulated pedigree which older Yale publications have. “We have open calls [for contributors], but some people don’t know it exists. We’re missing some of the talent at Yale because people don’t know where to look,” Gers said.

FUSE has modeled itself for a specific audience: the style-driven, artistic Yalie. FUSE gives student writers and artists the chance to publish work that isn’t confined to the style or editorial perspectives of older publications–and creates space for an existing audience that is eager to share this aspect of student life.

MORE THAN THE DAILY——NEWS AT YALE AND BEYOND

When a student thinks about publications at Yale, the Yale Daily News is typically the first to come to mind. Across its many desks, the News covers the city and the university, as well as churning out student-run podcasts, and video content. The WKND desk and this very publication (the YDN Magazine) also publish creative pieces. The YDN is attractive, in part, because of its prominent physical space on campus: the building at 202 York Street, where editors can be found at most times of day.

Alex Ori ’24 is an editor for the WKND desk, which she describes as “a home for off-beat entertainment pieces, where writers can explore their own bounds of creativity.” WKND is its own editorial island, but it stays in conversation with other desks. “Being tied to the YDN is really exciting for writers,’ Ori said, as the “wider breadth is inevitable.” Andrew Cramer’s piece on selective clubs at Yale had 24,896 hits last spring, as the YDN is not read only by students, but also by professors, alumni, families, and even those with no Yale affiliation.

For writers who wish to cover matters even less tethered to student life, The Politic—a political journal founded in 1947—offers a compelling platform. The organization has been a home to editors and writers who later ran magazines like Foreign Affairs and Slate, as well as become CNN hosts and policy advisors. One of The Politic’s two Editors-in-Chief, Bryson Wiese ’24, said the original idea of the journal was as a place for students to express political opinions.

“The interesting evolution that has happened, at least since I have been involved, is that we emphasize long-form journalism over opinion writing,” Wiese said–while they do publish some opinion pieces, “our bread and butter is journalism.”

“[The Politic] is one of the only major publications at Yale that doesn’t focus on Yale,” Wiese said. “That appealed to me. I wanted to write about the world.” Wiese explained that they are building a search engine optimization and indexing system so that The Politic’s articles will appear following related searches. Because of this, the journal has become a resource. The readership is broad because their coverage is not directly related to Yale. Despite its wide issue focus, The Politic is still an undergraduate journal. Wiese explained that the student reader is a good “proxy for the typical reader that a publication like The Politic would be targeting, which is a reasonably well-informed person, but not a person with particular expertise in what we’re writing about.” For the editors of The Politic, Yale student readers are informed individuals who just so happen to go to Yale. Campus publications can serve both as a training-ground for journalism careers, as their own free-standing journals, and as creative spaces for students to try their hands at writing.

WHY DO WE WRITE? WHY MUST WE READ?

“I wrote pretty much all of my high school career, and I was really excited to write at Yale, but I felt really daunted by the process of writing,” Fuse’s Gers commented on her first year. “There’s already such an established process.”

At Yale, if you want to write, there is a space for you to be published, provided you are persistent and able to navigate publications’ particular bureaucracies of pitching and submissions. And if there is no space, there are always people who will want to create one.

What Yale has are many interested writers, many available publications, but a lack of students regularly engaging with what is offered. Students face an array of relevant periodicals to read, but enduring information and availability struggle. Alongside a possible over-saturation of material, many publications’ circulations are limited. Yes, niche and narrowly targeted writing builds consistent foundations of readership, but what must happen now is reading across one’s defined interest and “demographic” in the sense of relationship to Yale. As students, we should read more student-produced work about what happens outside of the institution and New Haven, those outside of the undergraduate population should try to read the works of traditionally student-focused groups like the Herald.

Students can change this culture through deeper engagement—through sharing their peers’ work in the P-set group chat, sending their published work to their professors, and reading more peer-edited poetry; it’s better than you might think!

Beyond this, perhaps there is solace in considering that Yale’s publications are as much training grounds as they are legitimate magazines. Writing for one’s own edification is, at least, one kind of end in itself.

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Within the first few pages of her second novel, Motherhood, Heti shatters this image. A loosely autobiographical protagonist complains of a boyfriend who insists that she must choose between having fun in New York and staying home to write. She thinks to herself, “I’m not the sort of writer who sits in her room and writes.” Reading this, I was baffled. What other kind of writer is there? 

I entered the interview with that question—what kind of writer is Sheila Heti? Heti, who spent last semester as a Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, has penned ten books, among them Motherhood, How Should a Person Be?, and Pure Colour. It was clear by the end of our conversation that Heti, despite writing in her room, is, in fact, not the kind of writer who sits in her room and writes. Of course, she writes a great deal, and her writing is serious. But Heti doesn’t write to observe the world passively—she writes to live better. 

—— 

Heti did not write very much during her fall 2022 semester at Yale. She spent much of her energy adapting to life in Niantic, a town about 45 minutes outside of New Haven, where she stayed with her dog. She has always wanted to live by the sea and was happy to find a place on the shore. In Niantic, she went on walks, learned where to shop for groceries, and collected some notes for her next book. 

It is normal for Heti to pause work for weeks or months at a time. When she is excited about a project, however, she can work all day. She writes according to where she is and what she is thinking about; she does not have rituals. As a teenager, she read interviews in the Paris Review to learn how authors write, but the only consensus she could find was that there was none. While all writers center their lives around writing, that center may take endless forms. 

That is not to say there are no patterns to her craft. Heti prefers typing on a computer. After having written on one all of her life, the computer “feels like a part of [her] body.” Her raw material comes out in short, sporadic bursts that last no longer than an hour or two. “I mean, you kind of empty yourself out!” she explained. “Or, at least I feel like I empty myself out and need the day and the night to sleep to fill myself back up again and have something to write about the next day.” 

She edits more than she writes–it’s her favorite part. It’s like cleaning without having to “move around the house and get your hands dirty.” In our conversation, I added that the pleasures of a well-structured essay may correspond to those of an orderly room. She agreed. 

Knowing that Heti thinks of her computer as a third limb, works in short, intuitive bursts of creativity, and needs to “fill” herself back up again before returning to her work, I had to wonder—is writing something of a natural process for Heti, one intuitive as breathing? When I asked her about fears of loneliness surrounding the profession, she said that the concern of solitude had never occurred to her; being a writer has allowed her to prioritize doing the thing she loves most. 

Heti has written plays, compiled an anthology on fashion called Women in Clothes, alphabetized her diary entries for the New York Times, and collected and published her dreams about the 2008 Democratic primaries. In her novels, her narratives oscillate from meditations on the pursuit of the truth to accounts of kinky sex. Her passages regularly alternate between polished prose, streams of consciousness that last for several pages, and pure dialogue. 

Critics have classified Heti’s writing as autofiction, memoir, theology, and everything else in between. But if you ask Heti herself, the answer is simple: she is a novelist. She may not be the most conventional one, but her books are essentially novelistic in that they follow characters moving through time and space. “I think I want to write a conventional sort of narrative,” she confesses, “but I just don’t. I probably don’t believe in it…You can’t really write what you don’t believe in.” 

Heti has found a form that, in declining to follow the structure of a traditional story, transcends it: “In the missing of the mark,” Heti reasons, “the literary interest happens.” She makes a distinction between the books that imitate the novel and the one that imitates life itself. Her own novels, I think, belong to the latter category. 

—— 

The seminar that Sheila taught during her semester at Yale, Fate and Chance, included a scene from RuPaul’s Drag Race in its syllabus. In the episode, the contestants were tasked with making an outfit out of garbage. Ultimately, the winner was not the drag queen with the most high fashion, but the one whose design retained a resemblance to trash. The class came to the conclusion that, as Heti recounted to me, “somehow transforming [the material] utterly, so that it no longer shows the trace, is not as beautiful or interesting as those transformations which retain the trace of what it was.” 

Later, I realized that this must be true—the past gives us dimension. Maybe that is why Heti’s books often make reference to their own processes, capturing a series of motions and experiments leading up to their product. These experiments are, in themselves, substance. 

Heti’s novel, How Should a Person Be? recounts both conversations between Heti and her friend Margaux and the moments when Heti sets out to record those conversations. In Pure Colour chronicles the divine creation art writ large. In Motherhood, she involves the reader directly in her artistic decisions, tossing coins and asking questions. She wonders if the book is good, if art requires an audience to make it worthwhile, and if it even matters in the grand scheme of things. 

—— 

All of Heti’s books follow her as she works through something specific in her life—the question of what life is and what it means to be a person. “At different ages,” she explains, “that question can center on different problems.” It might have to do with a desire to be famous, the meaning of womanhood, or what one owes to one’s friends. But these issues all circle back to that same, central, notorious conundrum. 

Around the time she wrote How Should a Person Be? Heti was especially confused about her duties as a person.

“I just feel like I didn’t understand any of that,” she told me. “I didn’t, no one taught me or something, or maybe no one knows. But I felt like there were some things about living that other people took for granted that I couldn’t, I didn’t, for whatever reason.” 

One thing Heti has found difficult to understand is love. She used to think that love was like an exercise. She assumed that the success of any given relationship was by who a person was, rather than who they were with. You can love anyone if you are a good person, she reasoned. 

Heti’s understanding of love has changed, but still she maintains that there is something mysterious and impossible about it. “I haven’t heard firsthand of a lot of experiences of love that overflow the heart permanently,” she remarked. She asked me if I had. I hadn’t. Love, as she described it to me, always leaves some part of us unfulfilled. In her books, though, as gritty and confusing and difficult as the central relationships are, there is never a point at which the characters give up on love entirely. 

——

Heti convinces me that writing isn’t a radical sacrifice, nor are writers fundamentally separate from anyone else. Art is just one way, among others, to live and learn. The wisdom she imparts to her readers, though often brilliant, is not resolute. When I asked her if she had hopes for what readers would take away from her writing, she replied: “I don’t have that feeling.” 

Writing carries Heti through the challenge, confusion, and beauty of her own life. As she moves on from her semester at Yale, she will doubtless pursue new sites of disorientation, interrogation, and discursive engagement. This is all part of Heti’s process. As she puts it, “I’m not looking for answers. I’m looking for resting places.” 

The post Staying Home to Write: Talking Process with Sheila Heti appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Pulling Back the Curtain

Out of my bondage, sorrow and night

I have played enough, pull me out of the fight

I feel no joy, my eyes have no delight

In this miserable game you have made my life

Quiet I have kept the sorrow of my days

The dullness separated from the sun’s rays

Withering in the shadows of your construction

Out of my shameful failure and loss

I wanted to know, I paid the cost

I have seen and felt, but now I am lost

For my blood, sweat and tears I am rewarded with exhaust

Out of unrest and arrogant pride

Free from your shackles, I will rise

You have done your worst, now step aside

Where you tried to kill my spirit, my limits died

Great problems you made, solutions you hoard

I paid the price of silence too long, I cannot afford

My voice will be heard, your hearts I implore

Not through charm or whisper, but jarring chord

Tugging on your heart strings, do my cries entertain?

If I pluck too hard, would it be in vain?

All my life I have known the rain,

Hear my song and be consumed by its pain.

Artist Statement

This painting was originally inspired by a research paper I wrote titled “Science, Race and Yale: The Perpetuation of Slavery through the Intellectual Fortification of Racial Capitalism,” which explores the history of Yale University’s support and upholding of slavery. In my paper, I found that many of the pervasive ideas and stereotypes regarding race were validated and disseminated from the men who founded this university. “Pulling Back the Curtain” alludes to the moment in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy finally reaches the wizard and sees him for who he really is. The mystery is unraveled, the illusion is shattered, and the truth is seen clearly. 

I originally intended for the scene in the poem and painting to illustrate a person walking into the Yale Corporation room to reveal what goes on behind the scenes at this institution. But I have since shifted my focus. Rather than wasting my creativity on dead men, who have made it clear that I, as a person of color, would only make the pages of their stories as an inferior subject, I have decided to paint a scene of Love. A scene of expression. A scene of community. A scene of life. 

After hosting The Speak E-Z, a revival of the Afro-American Cultural Center’s open mic scene, I was inspired to pull back a different curtain and reveal the scene that we occupy in spite of those who would rather see us dead and dying, in spite of those who seek to silence us and reduce us to diversity numbers and in spite of the University that is actively trying to dismantle our peace. We will speak, and we will be heard. 

Pulling Back the Curtain is a painting of a scene where someone opens the door to Otherwise, an alternative reality of the universe where the person in the painting no longer has to fixate on the pain that they initially pulled back the curtain to. It is an invitation to escape. The painting represents the feeling of disbelief in finding something that you were looking for but believed to be gone. It tries to capture the moment when you finally see something worth seeing. 

While painting, I tried to channel my own pain from the heart-wrenching history I learned while researching Yale and its perpetuation of slavery. I was saved from much of this pain by moments with my classmates, sharing our visions of Otherwise and discussing how to hold Yale accountable for its actions to make up for the wrongs it has built itself on. 

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Face 2 (top), Face 5 (bottom)

Face 2 and Face 5 are part of a series titled “Face” that works to reimagine my relationship with my body as a Black woman. Inspired by Japanese television, these photographs highlight key sites of tension such as my lips, nose, and eyes and deal with the complex relationship between body hair and womanhood. “Face” is a declaration that my body is mine — mine to love, mine to change and mine to show. 

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This piece reflects the somewhat unreasonable — yet at the same time, somewhat reasonable — desire to forcibly sacrifice the past and present for the future. Perhaps it’s a justified feeling; after all, such a mindset is commonplace among many of the communities I belong to, such as the immigrant and FGLI communities. But maybe it’s merely a product of selfishness and greed, making the choice to chase an unpredictable future, all while blinded to the benefits of having a non-burnt out lifestyle.  

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