End of the Semester Essays

I've finally gotten to it: here are some of the essays I put together in the waning days of first semester. Two of them are fairly large in scale, the Warhol essay perhaps my best non-fiction piece, the homelessness essay perhaps my most bizarre.


The Persistence of Difference in Warhol's Marilyn Diptych

The message is clear: accepting the reality of time opens up both a host of possibilities and a host of problems, accounting at once for Marilyn Monroe’s fame and her death. Accepting the right panel, that of change, is accepting the trappings of freedom. The very existence of the right side questions the power of the left: the persistence of time despite our attempts to evade it. Warhol forces us to grapple with the two universes, side-by-side.

In the Wake of Genocide: Designing A Constitution for Rwanda

The Hutu-Tutsi ethnic divide at the center of the Rwandan Genocide is old but not ancient. The two ethnic groups, ascriptively and culturally similar – sharing physical semblance, language, heritage and religion – provide a textbook example of how ethnic division can be made salient by institutional design, and then made violent by political opportunism. From the 1930s to 1961, Belgian colonizers created institutions that specifically allocated political power along ethnic lines: using a card-based identification system, they stripped Hutus of their land, created a shadow extraction government headed by the Tutsi aristocracy, and gave them exclusive rights to tax collection power and state-funded education. Then in 1960, at the eve of Independence, the Belgians held an election in which they endorsed the Hutu politician Dominique Mbonyumutwa, affecting a precipitous change in political power that uprooted the monarchy headed by Tutsi aristocracy (Lec. 8.1 Levitsky). It is the major intention of this report to consider ways to reverse the very institutional incentive for ethnic identification that helped to create and perpetuate the myth of ethnicity in the first place.

Warning Out: Then and Now

The most exhausting piece of writing I've ever attempted, begins in this way:

You might know what dispossession feels like if you’ve ever jumped into the Charles River at night. I felt something like that, I think, throughout the year of 2008, when I was living alone. And then again, having come back to my town but seeing nothing there. And then when I left again. September 8th, 2008 the first night I slept at Harvard University, I could have told you that dispossession feels something like black water, like drowning beneath the lights of a city in September, and like feeling totally alone.

I had met a girl named Joyce who was real shy. She said her father was a diplomat so she never stayed in one place for more than a few years and never had many friends. We walked together from the Yard to the River, the lights of Dunster Street glowing as if very wet and totally yellow, like they do. We stripped off our clothes on the dock – I remember feeling very cold – and danced a little – I spun her – and then we jumped into the water. Whooo ahhh I shouted. Someone else, a boy’s voice from the road beyond the grass, said Yeeeehaaaa. When we got out of the river, we folded on the grass and sat there, in total silence, with the air, light and brilliant – the air was very light that night – mixing with the lights of Boston beyond the river, and me, I remember thinking something like This, this is the day your slumber breaks…She asked me: Are you just going to forget about this? I smiled and she smiled too and I said: Nothing counts, you know – it’s Freshman Week.

That night, I guess, rounded something off for me. It was the first time that I wondered, real hard, whether I hadn’t just walked out the front door, when I could have walked out the back. It was that night, my looking at the city from that place on the banks, thinking about place, to be one thing and not another thing, thinking that I am a small part of something much bigger, more complex and totally indifferent, that I first began to think about homelessness. I can’t say that I know what dispossession feels like today, but I could tell you that night. Tramping back to the Yard in the soaking clothes, I thought Whooo ahhh Yeeehaaaa, what a thing it is to be here.

I go on to explore a set of laws about inhabitancy rights that early settlers brought from England:

With this came the first class of American untouchables. From the middle of the 18th century to its completion, more than nine thousand people were warned out of Boston, with more than two thousand people in the year 1791-1792 alone. These numbers not only reflect a propensity for warning out, but a need to do so in the first place, a reflection of a class of migrants that had emerged in America, traveling largely from the countryside to the cities in search of labor. When they entered a city and were warned to leave, many of them did. Forty percent of those warned out in Boston in 1780 were not there in 1790. Entire families were legally expelled from towns, left to wander in search of a fixed abode. Such a class has never left us.

The piece ends reflexively:

I feel like shit about it, but that alone does not mean I have failed. In fact, that’s the only success I’ve had in four months since I jumped into the Charles. I feel ashamed – good, piercing, shame.