Love

I remember the day when I visited your open studio someone walked in and exclaimed, “it’s echoes of your memory!”

Stewart

I remembered that too because I thought it was such a great way of putting it. My paintings aren’t direct memories. They’re built up, day by day, moment by moment, year by year. Something had to happen once, right? And then, there are outward rings from that moment. Our memories do echo for a while. I’m not painting the actual place where the memory happened. It’s different but is able to hold the memory. Through the painting process it becomes something else.

Love

Are you traveling backwards and forwards at the same time?

Stewart

Yeah, I think so. It’s kind of like the two are married—the past and the present. And the memory is directing the painting. It has to show me something.

Love

What do you mean by that?

Stewart

These are great memories, but I’m compelled to paint them, make something present, make something visible. I think there is something else going on. The memory is driving something and helping me to find meaning today.

But the painting, in the end, it’s more than the memory. It brings something invisible and makes it visible. Something about who I am and who my voice is. It feels good to be able to find that in the painting.

Love

What do you think it is about paintings that makes the invisible visible?

Stewart

I think there’s something I can only find in the process of painting. I’m with these paintings for a long time. They take months. Some of them take years. So I’m really getting to know their internal structure. These decisions about symmetry, these decisions about color. How do we expand the space to a world inside them?

Love

Would you say that your paintings take a series of mundane gestures and turn them into something grand?

Stewart

That’s how it started. The technique is based on a natural arm movement—something that the arm does easily. There is something interesting going on with the layering of the lines. Every time you make one mark of a line, it opens up space around that line. Each mark, for some reason, opens up space. And I love that shallow space in a painting that I can kind of inhabit.

The repetition of the swooping lines in my work speaks to me about the continual feeling of the passage of time.  Or the continual movement of time.  Something that is always present, and the work, through my daily process documents that.

Love

Do you associate your paintings with people?

Stewart

This brown painting here. My dear friend who is also a painter, Riley, wears this big brown coat in the winter. The name of that painting is Brown Bear. Whenever I think of that painting I think of Riley and his brown coat.

The little green painting, whenever I look at it, I’m reminded of an ex-boyfriend that I had. While I was painting it I needed to get over that relationship and forgive him maybe, forgive myself. That was processed while painting that.  

Love

Do you associate your paintings with the time you spent working on them?

Stewart

They’re a record of that period of my life. That makes it hard to part ways with them.

Love

How do you know when you’re finished?

Stewart

It’s really hard to know. Especially with paint because it takes a while to dry. And my paintings are so light sensitive and delicate on the surfaces. I can have a painting and think, that’s it, it’s done! But I’ll come in a week or a couple days later, when the paint has dried in, and think, what happened? That happens all the time. So I’ll keep painting.

I’ll have a painting that could be done, but I kind of know that it isn’t quite where I want it to be. So I keep going and going and going, almost to the point of questioning—what am I doing, this is crazy, why would anyone paint this way? And then finally the painting won’t let me do anything else. I feel it in my core that some paintings are done.

The post Echoes of Memory appeared first on Yale Daily News.

that gold, velvet durag that shined
like ingots polished by her fingertips.
you took back her nightmares of the gold coast,
she looks and is reminded of Ghana.
the Motherland would be so proud.

you seized the Land of Gold and
it shined over that brown forehead
and below it, those
Black beautiful cornrows
swam in waved parts,
she could drown in your fashion

you yielded the Land of Gold
and the memories came flooding
like generational curses:
the Motherland and her trauma
falling to the hands of her children,
to their children, to their children,
we feel the ripples in bittersweet tides
and you wore them. and they tasted a little sweeter.
the Motherland was so proud.

she continued to drown, gracefully,
submerged head to toe in your fashion.
she fell in self-love with the way
you complemented her history,
what she felt was her worst parts,
she felt healed and complete.

she fell in love with that
gold, velvet durag complemented by
those Sahara-colored Jordans,
them gold chains kissing your collar bone,
bro your body is the continent, and
your fashion drew her glare.
you felt self-love too,
and hers

her gold fingertips were the coast
you gave back to her—her own Land of Gold,
her brown skin, her parted braids in
tandem with yours like curved rivers
that have no ends and flow
into one another like
ancestral ties
or the oils dripping to your ears—
like liquid gold, those Black beautiful braids
—those African curved rivers never dried out,
and never stopped shining

you fused with the motherland
and the ancestors you never knew
but felt in your blood.

you embodied the Motherland
and the love she felt for you.
the Motherland was so proud
and she loved you, her sweet, golden child

JAMAR JACKSON is a member of the class of 2028 and lives in Pierson College.

The post His Durag appeared first on Yale Daily News.

brought back school lunches untouched, let food rot
i can be so patriotic
Kerouac touches America and this country gleams
he does it so much better than me
football boy with white teeth and blue eyes and red lips
he will always do America better than me
better than the girl with a name that takes time to say
inefficient in a country where god lives in the coal fires and gas stations
and sometimes i wish i were not so afraid of the world
sometimes i wish road trip was not my parents hugging too tightly,
their hands, beggars, pressing prayers into my chest
sometimes i think they must be afraid every time the phone rings
i wish
and wish and
wish and
wonder
if a country could ever love its daughter back
so i tell jack kerouac i hate his book → kick him out for the fifth time, tell him to never come
back
i hate and it is so much easier
i hate and it feels as though i’ve lost nothing at all
i hate and
i have never been so american

FAVEN WONDWOSEN is a member of the class of 2027 and lives in Saybrook College. 

The post Birthright of a nation appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In August of my freshman year, I made my first visit to Dee’s Bait and Tackle in Fairhaven. I’ve been fishing all my life, and I had spent many slow afternoons at my sales job back in Kansas on Google Maps, ogling the lakes and streams of southern Connecticut and reading trip reports on the state’s stocked trout streams. I knew about Dee’s, too—I’d found it on one of my boredom-driven virtual sojourns—but I just stopped by to buy a license. I had brought all of my gear with me.

Dee’s occupies a south-facing storefront at the triangular intersection of Blatchley Avenue, Monroe Street, and Clay Street. It doesn’t look like much: the rest of the building appears vacant, and even the storefront windows are so scuffed and dusty that it’s hard to tell that there’s anything inside. 

But the drab storefront conceals a lively scene: there’s almost always a line at the register. A bulletin board near the entrance is covered with pictures of grinning customers and their fish; if they weren’t all tacked on top of each other, they’d paper the whole room. At the register, Pete DeGregorio, one of two brothers who operate the shop, asked if I wanted a combined freshwater and saltwater license. I told him I’d prefer to save the five dollars; Pete wouldn’t let that slide. The fall striper run was just about to start up, and he didn’t want formerly-landlocked me to miss it.

Every fall, he told me, striped bass—“stripers,” colloquially—migrate south from the colder waters off Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to the warmer waters of the Southeast coast. Along the way, they run upriver from Long Island Sound into Connecticut’s shallow tidal estuaries, looking for baitfish like Menhaden that school in the riverbeds. Fishermen follow closely on their heels, hoping for a chance to battle the hard-fighting sport fish, which usually range between 20 and 35 inches in length. You can catch stripers all year in Long Island Sound, but the fall and spring runs make targeting them far easier and more exciting for shore fishermen: at no other time can you catch fish so big in water so small. 

The lecture worked: I walked out of the shop with a saltwater license, a brand-new ten-foot rod, and a few bags of rubber swimbaits. Pete had told me that’s all I needed to hook a striper. I had big plans for that fall.

But when I started my freshman year, I got busy and forgot; the saltwater rod gathered dust on my dorm room wall.

***

I finally picked up the rod this October, after another conversation with Pete DeGregorio convinced me to get my act together. In my first three years at Yale, I certainly hadn’t avoided fishing entirely—I’d caught plenty in freshwater lakes and rivers outside of New Haven—and I’d been back to Dee’s for the occasional gear resupply. But still, I told Pete, I was too intimidated by the salty waters closer to my doorstep. Again, he didn’t let that slide. It would be easy, he assured me, if I did what he told me to do and went where he told me to go.

I began my first night of striper fishing at the first spot he recommended: the Sackett Point Road bridge over the Quinnipiac River in North Haven. I arrived at 3:30 AM, but a fisherman in a battered Dodge had beaten me to it. He hadn’t caught anything that morning and was on his way out, but he suggested I throw my swimbait upriver where a streetlight lit the incoming tide—“the fish seem to like the light.” I tried a few times, working the lure quickly through the murky water, feeling a bit silly about the locale I’d chosen: I was perched on a rock between a dingy pool bar and junkyard, and the water smelled nasty. It didn’t seem like the place to find a trophy fish.

But on my fifth cast, I hooked a striper. I wasn’t ready—my drag was set far too low—and within a few seconds the fish had run far enough that I couldn’t see where my line met the water. I’d rigged a flashlight above my reel so that I could see the water, but it wasn’t much use once the fight was on and my rod tip started flailing: any cars passing on the road above must have been treated to quite the light show. After a minute or so of push and pull, though, I managed to land it. As stripers go, it wasn’t huge—probably 26 inches—but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

The next two hours made the first fish seem like beginner’s luck. After a while, I left the bridge and tried a few of Pete’s other spots: the bank behind the Target in North Haven, Q River Grill near Grand Avenue Bridge, and Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven. No dice. Still determined to find the fish, I headed to the last spot on my list: a bit of bank on the Mill River north of the old English Station coal plant.

 I could hear stripers in the river even before I made it to the bank of the Mill. The warehouses and auto shops and rail bridges of Fair Haven are quiet at 5:30 in the morning, but the fish come alive in the pre-dawn tidewater. I stopped in the dark and bounced my first cast against the eroded wall of the Amtrak rail bridge. Immediately a striper hammered my cheap rubber swimbait and ran upriver, nearly pulling me in with it. I fought it quickly, wary that the frenzied fish would find a way to weave itself through the industrial debris of the riverbed and break me off. Within a minute, I had it lipped, de-hooked, and back in the river. 

My hands didn’t stop shaking with adrenaline for the next two hours. From the same overhanging beam of the old bridge, I hauled in twelve more stripers from the same twenty foot wide stretch of river. By 6:00 a.m. my right thumb was scored and bloody, but I hardly noticed.

About the time the fish stopped biting and the sun came up over I-95, a New London bound train broke the spell, and I finally got a look at the spot I’d found on Google Maps the night before. In the light, I saw that I had been fishing from the remnants of a rotted-out beam at the base of an old wooden rail bridge. The tide lapped at my shins. Foul-smelling steam from a nearby sewer pipe cut through the cold morning air. On the bank, rats picked their way through oyster shells and shreds of muddy plastic. 

The sun and train had woken up neighbors that I didn’t know I had. Across the river, a half dozen people were stirring in sun-faded tents set up above the abutment of the old bridge. A woman tidying up the camp dumped the night’s refuse into the river, and the smell of urine drifted upstream. 

***

Regardless of NO TRESPASSING signs, steep banks, and stinking tidal mud, fishermen take advantage of every available stretch of riverbank in the New Haven area. Even when I find myself alone on a secluded bank, I always find signs of use: there’s always a rusty hook, a bit of line, or a few crushed beer cans to keep me company. When I run into other fishermen, they’re always happy to share real estate, as long as our lines don’t cross. Often I’ve stood feet away from strangers at three or four in the morning, exchanging tips and tricks and cigarettes and leads on the best spots. 

Earlier this fall, while looking for water around 2:30 a.m., I met a strung-out man in tattered clothes on Quinnipiac Ave in Fair Haven who saw my rod and offered to show me some spots along the river if I promised to give him some cash. “Those guys are always fishing behind the bar and grill,” he told me. “They do alright.” He walked me there, talking my ear off about the fishing he’d done as a kid. A week later on the same stretch of road, I ran into another man who stopped me to offer advice on cold-weather fishing. “There’s oysters down there,” he said of a bank downstream in the Quinnipiac, “so they feed year-round.” Urban fishing has its upsides: there are a whole lot more people around to wish you luck.

Many of the people I meet on the rivers of New Haven are hobbyists—they might keep the occasional fish, but they’re really in it for the thrill. They stop by the water for an hour or two, often on their way to or from work, and see if they can land a decent fish. I run into this category of fishermen at spots like Sackett Point Road, which is quickly accessible from I-91—at sunrise in mid-autumn, their cars fill the gravel lot by the bridge. Middle-aged suburban dads with neoprene waders and fishing vests cast beside chain-smoking old guys with surf rods rattling around in the beds of their battered work trucks. These hobbyists, myself included, are excitable and easily impressed, and they’re as quick as new grandparents to show you photos from their camera roll. 

Others are true sportfishermen: hooked on stripers, they’ll fish all night, armed with an arsenal of baits and leaders and rods. Back at Dee’s, the truly committed are household names, and serve as invaluable information-sources on the status of the run. When one such sportfisherman, a Fairhaven local named Jose, stops catching inland fish sometime in late November or early December, Dee’s declares the run over. 

Useful as these experts may be, Pete DeGregorio cares more for the newbies. “I want you to catch fish,” he told me one evening while he sorted sandworms. “And I go out of my way to tell you how.” Pete spends every day passing along advice. “There’s nothing like, you know, when somebody comes back and says ‘look what I caught!’ and you showed them how to catch it. And that’s probably the most exciting thing about it.” 

There’s no substitute, he believes, for the knowledge-sharing community that a local tackle shop provides; Walmart or Bass Pro Shops can’t fill the void. Without the tackle shops and the expertise that they provide, he says, beginners have a harder time catching fish, and the sport suffers. “They get a bad taste in their mouth, and they just don’t go out again.” I, for one, have avoided that bitter feeling of getting “skunked” largely thanks to Pete and his brother. On slow mornings, I call them up, and receive a much-needed course correction: “Try the Ferry Street bridge.”

***

But Pete sees a few ongoing threats to the health of the community. Especially for beginner fishermen, access is a problem. Some of the best fall striper fishing in New Haven can be found in dilapidated stretches of post-industrial water, hidden behind chain-link fences or obstructed by highway interchanges. “It makes it tougher,” Pete told me, “because I’m skeptical of who I send where.” Although New Haven is built around its waterways and oriented towards its harbor, industrial development and urban renewal have alienated the city from its water. Now, many of the New Haveners who use local waterways access them with difficulty or even illegally. Fishermen at the popular Long Wharf Pier, for example, have to pass a sign that reads “NO FISHING AT ANY TIME” on their way to the water. 

From Pete’s perspective, strict regulation of the recreational fishery in Connecticut also poses a threat, particularly to low-income and immigrant communities in New Haven. To protect the overall health of fisheries in Long Island Sound, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection imposes a complex set of regulations, updated annually, that limits the recreational harvest of fish. Fishermen can only keep one striper a day, for instance, and it must measure between 28 and 31 inches.

For many fishermen, annual adjustments to these take restrictions can be life-changing. Especially along waterways within the city of New Haven, many are just trying to put food on the table. But it’s these fishermen who take greatest advantage of the city’s waterways.

Subsistence fishermen are some of Pete’s most reliable customers: they fish in any weather, and their habits are less tied to the migration patterns of sportfish like stripers. It’s these low-income subsistence fishermen, Pete says, who are hurt most by the complex and changing list of regulations imposed on the recreational fishery. Although he sells more licenses than anyone in the state, for example, DEEP never sends him enough regulation booklets. “They expect everyone to go online,” he said, “but a lot of people can’t go online.” 

He told me that regulations on the recreational fishery fail to take underserved communities—and the value of subsistence fishing—seriously. He cited limits on porgy implemented by DEEP  as a particularly glaring example. Porgy, he explained, are mostly targeted by Black and, increasingly, Latino fishermen in New Haven. They aren’t an exciting fish to fight, but they’re easy to catch and good to eat, so they’re a staple food source for some families. For years, there were no minimum size or daily creel limits on porgy harvest. Pete fought tooth and nail against porgy limits, in part because he thought that the state was taking the wrong people into account: “Is it a class thing? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing: it’s awful funny that they attack the porgies.”

If anyone needs to cut back, he said, it’s the commercial fishermen. Commercial outfits must also follow stringent regulations, but their methods—particularly draggers and gillnets—catch and often kill fish indiscriminately. Pete thinks the commercial fishery is given more regulatory leeway because it’s viewed as a food source. But the recreational fishery, he reminded me, feeds many of his neighbors. He knows that not all of the subsistence fishermen follow catch limits, but he struggles to blame people for it. “You’ll see people taking small fish. But they’re feeding their families. It’s not right, but you know you see the commercial guys . . . what the commercial guys destroy is unbelievable.” As long as the water is there, people who are hungry enough to hop fences and breathe a bit of sewer gas will fish it.

***

On a recent November morning, I drove over to a little unused scrap of tarmac on the West River, just north of the Kimberley Avenue bridge, to try my luck. I’d been fishing since midnight with relatively little to show for it—I’d hooked three undersized stripers—so I figured I’d use my last bit of energy on a new stretch of river.

I parked in a spot that seemed public enough, next to an old boarded-up structure with a sign that read “COAST GUARD AU—”—the rest had chipped away. While I was setting up my rod, two old men puttered up in a battered Suzuki Grand Vitara, handicap tag fluttering beneath the rear-view mirror. They produced a few surf rods from the trunk, rigged them up, and started making their way down the trash-covered, unmaintained trail through the underbrush by the high-tide line. The older man, maybe seventy, picked his way under the bridge with a wooden cane, clutching two surf rods in his free hand and struggling on the slick rocks exposed by an outgoing tide. The younger man, maybe sixty, carried buckets.

“What are you looking for?” I asked. 

They responded in good but rarely-practiced English: “Stripers, blues, porgies, you know, anything. Something for dinner.” 

They set up by the water, threw out a few lines, and waited. I tried my luck for a while, didn’t get a bite, and left them to it. I’d caught my fish for the day. They would probably be there a while.

The post FEATURE: Under the Rail Bridge appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Eleanor looked up at me with glossy, deep-set blue eyes. The corners of her pale lips were downturned, wrinkling the soft skin between her eyebrows. The rest of her body lay still on the thin mattress — the blankets remained neatly laid over her small legs, undisturbed since the nurse tucked her in hours earlier. 

I sat down on a chair next to her bed and introduced myself. For a while she didn’t look at me, so I settled into my seat and opened my computer. The room was quiet, and the sound of my keyboard filled the space. It wasn’t until I stopped typing that Eleanor finally gazed over to me. 

I closed my computer and met her eyes. The frown on her lips seemed to deepen, and I couldn’t help but feel that I had done something wrong. I smiled at her, and she weakly threw her arm toward me as if reaching out. 

Eleanor’s inability to verbally communicate made it difficult to determine the meaning of her tossed arm. I held her gaze for a moment longer, gently reassuring her that I was there to keep her company and not to disturb her, and I returned to my computer. 

The sound of my typing provoked Eleanor to reach out again, this time letting out a sigh. Eleanor was not my first patient to lack the ability to speak, but she was the first who struck me as frustrated with her disability. Her eyes held mine, this time unmoving and with a vehemence that willed me to feel her sadness. 

Eleanor noticed that I saw her heartache and threw her arm out again. I felt I understood the words she hoped to express: see me, hear me, be with me. I slowly reached my hand toward her, giving her the opportunity to signal that I had misinterpreted her expressions, but she leaned in, and her sighs ended when I held her hand in mine. Though I couldn’t be sure this is what Eleanor meant, I was compelled to believe it was the right action. 

From the hallway, the four hours I spent with Eleanor sounded like a one-sided conversation. Sometimes it felt like that from within the room as well, but quality care doesn’t end if I’m uncertain if the care is being received. I’ll never find out if Eleanor was comforted by my presence, but even a small chance that she felt seen was worth the time and effort.

When I saw Eleanor the following week, she had lost the ability to move as well. She lay still with only her chest slowly rising and falling with her soft breaths, gazing absently at the wall in front of her. I chose to sit quietly this time. I didn’t want to risk hurting her or pushing boundaries she wasn’t able to set.  

•••

As premedical students enter their careers in healthcare, their youth – and temporal distance from death – tends to create a belief that death is tragic which makes it confusing when a patient passes away quietly with no drama or pain.  The evident intensity of trauma and the quiet rage of silent battles are distinct kinds of suffering that cannot be compared because they represent two different phases of life: a life cut too short and a life long-lived, respectively. Eleanor, over 100 years old, had outlived her family and passed away without her loved ones to support her. Her efforts to communicate were subject to the interpretation of her caregivers at the hospital, isolating Eleanor from the world around her. 

I believe it is vital for family members, volunteers, and physicians to advocate for patients who struggle to advocate for themselves. The act of listening might seem insignificant in comparison to more concrete actions such as running diagnostic tests, administering life-saving medicine, and performing CPR. These exams can identify injuries or underlying biological causes for illness, but listening to a patient’s story can offer insight into lifestyle and habits that are developing or worsening symptoms and suffering. It is essential for patients to be involved in their own health outcomes by leading healthier lives, but caregivers cannot know if a patient is aggravating their illness through their lifestyle if physicians don’t stop to ask them. . 

Eleanor was silenced by illness, and it may have caused her more pain that she would’ve faced if she could communicate; other patients are silenced by treatment, injustice, and ignorance. Whatever internal or external battles a patient may encounter, listening to their words — spoken or not — ensures that both a patient’s outward and inward struggles are addressed to the best of our abilities as providers.

The post Dear Life #2: Words Unspoken appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Mine is, naturally, a bed of godly proportions. This is despite the fact that I have not grown a millimeter since I was a fleshy thing of sixteen. My left foot, caught in a silk whirlpool. Oil stains, some still wet. I try to think of nothing—there is no better aid for retention than the very attempt to forget. The centuries have taught me that bad memories are like thunder clouds. Nothing more to do than close your eyes and wait for the wind to sweep them away. 

• • •

Summer 2018. I sat at my computer, ready to turn an extremely minor character in the Greek mythological canon into a star. No time to waste. I had discovered him before the others, sandwiched between verses of epic poetry and hiding deep within the hyperlink webs of Theoi.com. A young Trojan prince of uncanny beauty, kidnapped by a sharp-taloned Zeus, made immortal against his will to be his personal cupbearer for eternity. There was a lot, aesthetically, to latch onto: the violent, ascension-like episode, the drama of bestowed-upon immortality, the idea of an attractive young man. Though Ganymede’s ordeal struck me as nothing short of horrific, a crasser part of me jumped at the opportunity: a gritty retelling, I thought, practically wrote itself. But to pen the definitive retelling of Ganymede’s story, I would have to write something quite spectacular. Competition had never been more fierce. 

“The Golden Age of Greek Mythology Retellings” can refer to two different, overlapping things. On the personal level, it is the era of my creative life that Ganymede was the flagship project for: this was the time when, between the seventh and tenth grades, I half-wrote at least a half dozen distinct Greek mythology-inspired stories. On the macro level, it describes a real-life trend that took hold in the late 2010s and early 2020s, as the aging BookTube and up-and-coming BookTok swelled up with modern retellings of the ancient stories geared towards young adults, to the delight of chronically online teenage girls like myself. The Song of Achilles, The Silence of The Girls, Circe, The Penelopiad… and these are just some of the ones I read, to varying degrees of enjoyment.

Granted, I was undoubtedly the target audience for this renaissance. When I was around seven years old, I received the Usborne Book of Greek Myths as a Christmas present. To me, it might as well have been the Gospel. I read it so many times I memorized it, illustrations and all—the image of Jason’s Argo with its great big sail rendered in watercolor yellow amidst a sea of teal-green tongues is permanently etched into my brain. I sat my Barbies and plushies down, stood in front of my little blackboard and told them about Pandora’s box and Heracles’s tasks. 

With a seemingly infinite amount of potential stories to tell, why insist on continuing to draw from the same well? Renaissance poets imbued the popular characters with Catholic values. Playwrights in Nazi-occupied France swaddled calls for resistance in colorful, familiar narratives. The authors of the modern Golden Age focused on Greek myths to criticize the oppressive power structures they see inscribed at the core of the Western literary canon. To them, adaptation was reparative: it was a scramble to find the next scorned woman and rescue her from the unforgiving maw of history. In the few stories where he made an appearance, Ganymede was an eternal victim, a silent, shiny prop. He seemed, at first glance, a perfect subject for an adaptation in this vein. 

But I was not trying to compose an adaptation in this vein. Despite the wider movement I was witnessing, I did not feel any sort of urge to correct. I was much more compelled by the fact that, occasionally, rich, beautiful displays of humanity were able to find their way into the classical texts. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Ganymede is, for the first time, given a voice of his own. Nearing the end of the Trojan War, he becomes extremely distressed by his impotence in the face of the destruction of his homeland—which, from the near-omniscient standpoint he has on Mount Olympus, he can tell is evident. He implores that Zeus spare him from seeing Troy fall. But the god, in what could be construed as mercy or mockery, only summons a dense fog to literally obscure the carnage from Ganymede’s sight. 

I cannot fully articulate what about this scene moved me so much. I was struck by the fact that it seemed to illustrate an eternal human condition—one that even a teenage girl in the twenty-first century could very intimately recognize. I read the Aeneid hot on the heels of my own crisis of adolescence: the arbitrariness of the world had become impossible to ignore and, in the face of it, I felt completely powerless. I found a strange comfort in Ganymede’s frustration over his inability to control forces incomprehensibly greater than him, the genuine and completely irrational pain involved in accepting the apocalypse.

As my goal was to capture a feeling, I played with loose and otherwise unconventional adaptations. An extremely self-aware Ganymede befriended an equally-implausible Psyche and received secret visits from Bellerophon’s winged horse up on Olympus. A sci-fi setting saw Ganymede subjected to a different sort of forceful ascension: crippling inherited debts forced him to take a lonely, soul-crushing job as station master at the sparsely transited space station located on the constellation Aquarius. In a more politicized retelling, a Latin American Ganymede struggled against the eagle-figured embodiment of American imperialism.

But, creative as they may have been, none of these experiments satisfied me. I had been drawn in by the poetic force of Ganymede’s situation, the romanticism of a few striking images—as a result, I had declared myself above canon-compliant clarification. But, as I discovered through more research, there was more to Ganymede’s story than that. Apparently, describing Ganymede as Zeus’s cup-bearer was euphemistic—there is a shared understanding among ancient sources that their relationship was meant to read as sexual. It is extremely likely that the purpose of the Ganymede story as a piece of mythology was to give a sort of divine legitimacy to the ancient Greek institution of pederasty—the practice through which an older man would offer mentorship and social influence to a young boy in exchange for sexual favors. With this context, I had trouble reanimating the innocent curiosity that had drawn me to the Ganymede story. A stinging sensation in my chest demanded that I do something about it, no matter how stupidly symbolic. I finally came to feel, even more than I understood, the urge to correct. 

But this unexpected burst of passion came at a cost—given my age and naivete, the responsibility of definitively doing Ganymede justice wound up crushing my creative spark. No matter how much I drafted and redrafted, I remained just insecure enough about what I was doing to never show it to anyone. I now regret that. I wish I had realized that a piece of fiction need not be genre-defining to be worthwhile. Regardless of whether it ended up christening me as a modern Virgil rising above the sea of horny mythologically-inspired webcomics or not, it would have been nice to give Ganymede—and myself—the closure of a place to land.

The post Cemetery of Forgotten Books #2: Ganymede, or The Golden Age of Greek Mythology Retellings appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Art by Anna Chamberlin

If my dorm room is my holy sanctuary, then my matcha cart is my fountain of life. Over this semester, empty matcha tins on the cart have multiplied.

In a way, matcha feels like a long-lost love that I’ve unknowingly ignored. My earliest memories came from my dad, who frequently ordered matcha lattes at coffee shops for my sister and me. My dad was an avid believer in the daily cup of joe. My mom never drank caffeine under any circumstance; she treated it like a forbidden fruit. And she insisted that coffee would stunt our growth, so this grassy concoction was the happy medium between them. 

Unfortunately, I grew akin to my dad, and matcha soon faded into the background. For most school days during my senior year of high school — when I was old enough to defy my mom’s anti-caffeine wishes without many consequences —  I’d fill my 30oz YETI tumbler with diluted black coffee. Lukewarm, unsweetened, no milk, made by a Keurig. It was tragic. But I drank it out of necessity: it was hard to keep my heavy eyes open. My days went school, then crew, then gymnastics, then homework. My days felt boundless and my nights were bounded by a maximum of six hours of sleep.

But after my college acceptances came flooding, I suddenly found myself craving something greater than Keurig coffee, which by this point was laced with high school anxieties, fears, and dreams. I had outgrown it, I thought. 

Moving on seemed easy. Matcha entered my life along with a sense of success and a newfound sense of self. Brewing that first cup in a quiet kitchen, right after committing to college, felt like an unexpectedly large ritual. I took a sip, steadying myself, and thought about how grown up I felt. The irony was stark: my inability to drink coffee as a child made me revere it as a grown-up drink, but now I associate it with adolescent oblivion. I was disillusioned by prohibition, craving something I never wanted in the first place. 

Still, I had a bit of a relapse: my first year at Yale became an ode to the espresso bean. Atticus and Willoughbys made frequent appearances on my credit card statements. It wasn’t just the ritual that gripped me; it was the bite of the caffeine, that sharp jolt of purpose. Albeit this purpose wasn’t a real call to action, but a call to work, mindlessly churning out deliverables for my professors and my delusioned self. 

Old habits die hard, but they can still die. 

Then, the summer before sophomore fall, my family visited Osaka and Kyoto. Away from a life gorged with school assignments, and my need for coffee diminished. And, after Japan, I reconsidered matcha — perhaps because of my nostalgia for my serotinal train ride to Uji or for quality time with my family. It could also be as simple as the fact that matcha—with its L-theanine and antioxidants, which are incomparable to coffee and its jitters— makes me feel good. Good, like getting-into-Yale good. Or traveling-with-family good.

I wanted matcha-feelings to never stop, so I put a matcha cart in my sophomore-year dorm to keep a constant stream of goodness; since then, I’ve made matcha everyday. 

Each time I whisk the matcha, purpose settles over me like an inevitable grace. This purpose feels different, almost raw. I’m whisking matcha because I want to. I’m flowing with a liquid consciousness, where I’m aware of every action and desire that billows throughout my body, dorm room, world. With each flick of the wrist, I feel as though I’m standing in the middle of the Jordan, not to be washed away, but to be reborn. Outside my window, York Street hums with the usual chaos, but here, with my cup in hand, I’m momentarily removed. I’m wandering through my own desert, where time slows and the world moves on without me, just a little longer. I’m sure getting into Yale or traveling to Uji didn’t directly give me this life-altering purpose, but it did clear the fog. Eyes-wide-open, I’m seeing, not for the first time, but in a sharper light, piercing through naivety like bullets.

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We are in the kitchen of the Grace Hopper Head of College House, where in an hour, Mick will be speaking to food aficionado undergraduates about her career, which has grown exponentially in recent years. As the executive pastry chef of New York’s one-Michelin-starred The Musket Room and French-Italian bakery Raf’s, she has earned a spot in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, Food & Wine Magazine’s Best New Chef award, and a semifinalist ranking for the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Pastry Chef—all in 2024. She is perhaps most well-known for desserts inspired by her Jamaican and Southern heritage. Her jerk ice cream, when paired with a goat tres leches, transforms the classic Jamaican method of seasoning and smoking meat into a complex dessert. She reimagines Southern sweet potato pie with roasted sweet potato mousse, smoked molasses ice cream, and aquafaba meringue. Even the creation in front of us, her version of a Yule log, is an iconic French confection turned into a Jamaican rum cake. Under her hand, seemingly disparate culinary narratives intertwine to say something entirely new. 

 Her habit of merging French pastry with her Jamaican culinary heritage is no radical departure from the globalised way that the French pastry tradition developed. “All France really did was go to these different countries [through] colonization and brought back all this information,” she says. Pointing out that similar culinary techniques exist across cultures, Mick reasons that the French pâtisserie tradition is a mélange of global influences rather than a unicultural movement. “The French were just the ones to write it down,” she says. In that light, her desserts, innovative as they are, reflect an existing continuity between global culinary cultures. 

It is a tenuous line to walk. French cuisine conjures images of pristine white tablecloths, impeccably-dressed waiters and intricate dishes, while Jamaican cuisine is often relegated to the realm of street food. Nonetheless, Mick resents the idea of “elevating” the cuisine. “It doesn’t need elevation. It’s beautiful in its own right,” she says. But how else does she describe her desserts destined for a fine dining table? “We’re just putting our own lens on it.”

Mick has developed a culinary repertoire as varied as Italian dolci to Japanese pastry. But there’s a more personal connection when it comes to her own culinary heritage. As a child of an immigrant parent, taking nostalgic flavours and twisting them into something new reflects, for her, a vision of the “new American family”— one that is all about integration and interrelation. In her kitchen, that also means uplifting black and brown voices.   

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Mick was born in eastern Pennsylvania to a Jamaican father and a Southern mother — both excellent cooks within their respective culinary cultures. Mick’s childhood dining table was decked out in sumptuous dishes touched by the traditions of the Caribbean and the American South. But Mick’s parents were not great bakers. Craving something sweet at the end of meals, Mick picked up the whisk and started baking with her mother. Soon enough, Food Network became regular programming in the household, and she would experiment with online dessert recipes. It became her calling—so much so that in elementary school, Mick started applying to pastry schools for fun. “I was a little devious,” she says with a grin, explaining how she would apply to study French pastry during computer hour. “[The schools] would call my mom and say, ‘We would like to talk to Camari and see how we can get her here.’” It fell onto her mother to explain that Mick was only eight years old. 

Though Mick nurtured her love for baking throughout high school, where she started selling her own pastries, it wasn’t always apparent that she would become a pastry chef. As a teenager, she wanted to be a forensic pathologist. “My dad was like, ‘Are you sure about that?’” she recounts. Today, Mick credits her parents for pushing her onto her trajectory as a pastry chef. Knowing that any other path wouldn’t fulfill her, they supported her passion for pastry, she says. Mick doesn’t take this support for granted. Being in no way pressured to go into medicine or law, as many children of immigrants are, Mick pursued a Bachelor of Science in pastry arts at the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College. From there, she worked at a number of fine dining restaurants by some of the most famous chefs in the country—including db Bistro Moderne by Daniel Boulud, the now-defunct TAK Room by Thomas Keller, and the three-Michelin-starred New York stalwart, Le Bernardin, by Eric Ripert.  

Still, working at these establishments was not as glamorous as one would expect. When I ask her about her experience in those kitchens, Mick pauses her spatula, leaving the Yule log half-covered in ganache. She gathers her words carefully. “I’ve trauma-bonded with some people [who’ve worked there],” she says. “It’s just one of those spaces where you will never feel seen.” She was often the only black person in the kitchen, and nobody would take her side if someone said something blatantly racist. Physically taxing days—”ten-hour days, six days a week”—were made more unbearable by a “cutthroat” environment laced with sabotage. Other chefs would replace Mick’s sugar with salt to get her into trouble, she recounts. Besides, the restaurants were so traditional that there was no room for ingredients such as jerk on the menu. “That’s fine, there’s a certain market and demographic for that,” she says, referring to the conservative palates that these restaurants cater to. “I just don’t fit into it.”  

To an extent, the lack of black and brown representation in the restaurant industry is a generational issue. “When you look at the generation before us, it’s all old white male chefs,” she says. “All the chefs that I’ve been miserable under have been white, straight men.” But the restaurant industry might just be a microcosm of larger social dynamics that Mick is no stranger to. Back in her “hyper-white” corner of Pennsylvania, the classroom was also a place where Mick was the only black person. Her family became an important community for her. As a chef, being in predominantly white spaces meant that she never explored her own culinary culture until much later. Tied implicitly to her culinary heritage were fundamental questions about her personal identity, which required hours of introspection, reflection and therapy. “How do I uplift the black community?” she asks. “Who do I want to be? What legacy do I want to leave behind? Who am I?”

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On the counter next to Mick’s workstation is a bottle of Ten to One dark rum, a rum brand owned by her friend, Trinidadian-native Mark-Kwesi Farrell. Three-quarters cups of that rum has gone into the Yule log, now fully coated in whipped crème fraiche and sprinkled with chocolate crumble, a concoction of baked flour, butter, and cacao powder. 

Whenever Mick needs to use rum, she reaches for the Ten to One first. In 2023, she started including it in desserts for events such as the International African American Museum’s opening, as well as a six-course menu celebrating Caribbean Heritage Month. Her collaboration with Farrell is an example of the mutual support that Mick tries to create within the industry. Indeed, she has found a community—or what she calls a “gaggle”—of black and brown chefs trying to bring their cultural cuisines into the dining scene. Collaboration dinners, where chefs join hands to deliver a one-off dining experience, are just one way in which community bonds are forged. Otherwise, it could be the rendering of assistance for a special dinner or event, or even a repost on Instagram. “It’s creating spaces in which we can highlight one another,” she says.

For Mick, this community did not materialize until she had a clearer idea about what her culinary style was going to look like. Her style might not have developed as quickly as it did were it not for the onslaught of the pandemic, which left her with lots of time on her hands to explore and bake. In 2020, Mick started running pop-up experiences, including Maison Yaki’s Black Entrepreneur Series, which featured black culinary voices in the food and drink industry. On the side, Mick also started selling donuts on Instagram. She hand-delivered pastries to her clients, one of whom happened to be Nicole Vitagliano, co-owner of The Musket Room with her sister, Jennifer. They called Mick in for an interview; she was hired on the spot. That year marked the first time that Mick had had the platforms to create her own menus, allowing her to experiment with her traditional pastry training and her Jamaican roots.  

As Mick discovered the joy of incorporating her culinary heritage into her creations, she — alongside other black and brown chefs during the pandemic — also started questioning the dearth of fine dining restaurants that highlight black and brown cuisines in the United States. Thus, “How do I grow our industry?” is a question that Mick asks herself often. 

Her answer is mentorship. A lot of chefs at Mick’s level have figures who guide them outside of the restaurant. Mick has had none — “especially one who looks like me,” she says — which spurred her decision to take on a mentorship role and “uplift black and brown voices in the culinary space”. 

That’s already happening at the Musket Room kitchen. Mick tells me about her first hire, Quilla Gamarra, a Peruvian cook who’s been working with her for four years now, and who recently had their own spotlight dinner with the James Beard Foundation. The fulfilling part, Mick explains, was not just seeing them grow; it was also seeing them explain their love and connection to the dessert instead of simply reciting the ingredients and techniques they used. “That’s what I always want to embed in people. There’s so much we can do with food. We can let it talk for us.” 

___  

Holding a fork in one hand and a meringue mushroom head in the other, Mick carefully makes a small incision at the head’s base. She picks up a meringue mushroom stem, dips its pointed tip in crème fraiche, and affixes it to the head. There we have it — little champignons dotting the Yule log. Complete, the cake revels in its playful artifice. 

The cake is a fine exemplar of her style, which she describes as “whimsical” and “perfectly unnatural.” But to Mick, substance is as important as style. Her eyes light up when she tells me about her newest dessert on the Musket menu: a cranberry bean mousse with huckleberry jam and bay leaf hazelnut shortbread. According to her, it is a riff on bean pie — a dish associated with the Black Power movement, when the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party would carry out free breakfast programs and after-school programs for Black communities. Eventually, Mick hopes to open a restaurant in Jamaica and establish programs that give back to the local community. 

Mick is certainly no stranger to how intertwined food is with culture and existence. While her desserts embody narratives of history, struggle, empowerment, and kinship, her endeavors outside of the kitchen strive to bring that community beyond the plate and into the dining scene. That is the kind of chef that Mick strives to be. 

The post PROFILE: Camari Mick’s Recipe for Community appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The last time I did sit on the patio with him, joining his nightly tradition, we were listening to one of those agonizing games in which play after play seems to mock you with its absurdity. Sinking into our faux-wicker patio chairs, we groaned and pulled our hair as the San Francisco Giants left another runner stranded at third, grounded into another flimsy double-play, dropped an easy fly ball to blow their once comfortable lead. We didn’t hear the Giants score even a run. As the night set in we had to turn off the game.

I hope my grandfather’s last game wasn’t like that one. I hope it was exhilarating. In my imagination, Mike doesn’t notice the porch lights turn on as daylight slinks to shadow; he is glued to his seat. Maybe Patrick Bailey nails a tag at home or Yaz drives in the tying run on a fluke triple. Like always, the television volume is on mute, and the radio broadcast booms around him instead. Why? Because his son’s voice is the one that narrates the twists and turns, the wild pitches and three-run-homers, of every Giants game. Mike takes his greatest pride in his son’s work, his art: when my father told Mike he wanted to pursue sports broadcasting, he offered no passive aggressive ultimatums. When my dad struggled, he held no judgment. He trusted his son’s work ethic, and now he gets to watch as his passion blooms into a life.

Over the radio my dad’s voice bursts with electricity and Mike beams. 

I’ve been thinking of my grandfather’s life in two categories recently: summer baseball evenings, and everything else. This is an extremity, of course. But when he wasn’t immersed in a scene so all-encompassing, teeming with emotion and absolute sensory presence, the events of Mike’s life were mostly in-betweens. Every Sunday night, he drove three hours to his job’s headquarters, where he’d stay in a small apartment away from home for the workweek. Eyes straight ahead, these commutes were a means to an end. If he spent the week working diligently, he’d get to return home come Friday afternoon. Back to his family, his wife, the cool dusk and the drone of lazy cicada songs.

I often worried that his in-between moments were as monotonous as they seemed. Repeat the same gardening tasks every week, reheat the leftovers after work, get out of bed before dawn again and again. He was alone most of the time. He never complained. But was Mike’s faithful tolerance contingent on the eventual gratification of a summer ballgame or home-cooked family meal? Was there nothing in those in-between moments that held marvel in and of itself? I now wonder if, on his weekly slog back to work, the Virginia interstate ever whisked him into melancholy. If he ever pulled over just to stargaze or take a nice deep breath, to soak in that particular side of the road. I wonder if he had a favorite stretch of highway.

On that June day where we heard the Giants’ pitiful fall to some middling National League team, my grandfather and I abandoned our patio seats to watch the bats that streak across the twilight sky in his backyard every summer. We used to play this game often; standing side by side, we’d search the dusk, racing to be the first to point one out. The exasperation of the abysmal baseball game faded completely, unimportant in the face of purple sky and the leathery beat of secret wings. Our excited whispers hung suspended in the air like thick smoke, swirling, enveloping, dissipating slowly. Our breath, silently aflame.

Our batwatching only ensued from a painfully mediocre ballgame, and maybe those tense baseball evenings were so sweet solely because of the dragging weeks of work that had to precede them. Although it was rare, Mike’s steady patience always led to something magical in the end. It was a matter of making it there.

But the morning Mike died was an in-between: the start to an average day in an average week that was supposed to float him somewhere momentarily perfect, not plant him on the apartment floor — the temporary place he stayed only to work, miles from his cherished home — forever. The image breaks me. To ease it I dream that he fled his flesh and flew over the interstate one more time. Whisked his soul back to the site of sublime baseball evenings, as his own twilight pressed its way in, all around, too steady to stop.

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