Search Results for: The New Republic

The dark force in Syria is not the Alawi religion. It’s not exactly the cult of Hafez Al Assad, either. Only the aged and the infirm refuse to acknowledge his death. But love for the sacred sanctuary he invented, the one protected by the blue-eyed family of pilots and horsemen, has not died. The dark force in Syria is excessive belief in this realm of unreality. All those people who served in its police force, killed on its behalf, and kept the silence while the killing was going on carry its banner. This species of belief is a non-denominational phenomenon. It is enforced by the Alawis but Sunnis—and Kurds and Christians—are most welcome. For the time being, it is holding fast.

“The Cult: The Twisted, Terrifying Last Days of Assad’s Syria.” — Theo Padnos, The New Republic

See more #longreads from The New Republic

Featured Longreader: Amy Hordes of Phaidon Press. See her story picks from the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic and more on her #longreads page.

The Worst Case: How the Courts Might Decide On Health Care Reform

The Worst Case: How the Courts Might Decide On Health Care Reform

Jeff Smith Was a Rising Political star. Then the FBI Started Asking Questions About His Past

Jeff Smith Was a Rising Political star. Then the FBI Started Asking Questions About His Past

Marty Peretz in Exile

Longreads Pick

For decades, Martin Peretz taught at Harvard and presided over The New Republic—a fierce, if controversial, lion among American intellectuals and Zionists. Now, having been labeled a bigot, taunted at his alma mater, and stripped of his magazine, he has found peace in a place where there is little: Israel.

Published: Dec 27, 2010
Length: 22 minutes (5,549 words)

Doctors Without Patients: The Eritrean Physicians Stuck in American Licensing Limbo

Illustration by Carolyn Wells

Shoshana Akabas | Longreads | October 2021 | 16 minutes (4,762 words)

*Haben Araya was working in the local hospital when a farmer came in, bleeding from his gums. He was suffering from a snakebite — a case she’d seen many times.

*At the request of the doctors involved, some names have been changed.

Before Araya sought asylum in the United States, before she helplessly watched the COVID-19 pandemic tear across the country, and before she learned about what doctors must go through to relicense in America, she worked as one of a handful of physicians on staff at a local hospital in her home country of Eritrea. She was a general practitioner, responsible for everything from pediatric preventative medicine to minor surgeries and gynecology. She served as the regional appointed physician for malaria case management and the hospital’s Director for Tuberculosis Control. If a patient needed to be transferred to another hospital, she had to write the referral. Call the ambulance. Make sure the ambulance has enough gas. Find someone to fill up the tank.

Snakebite cases were heartbreaking for Araya because she knew the medication was prohibitively expensive: 840 Eritrean Nakfa for a single vial (about 56 USD). Sometimes four or five vials were required, costing more than many farmers would earn in a year.

The hospital insisted on taking some sort of collateral until the bill was paid, but Araya knew the farmers were good for the money. She also knew that they would likely sell their goats or sheep — whatever animals they relied on for their livelihoods — to pay for the treatment. And then, she knew, they and their children would return in a few months’ time with severe cases of malnutrition and a host of consequent health issues.

A nearby military clinic, where there was no on-site physician, had a stock of antivenom. In exchange for a free supply for her patients, Araya told the administrator of the unit that she would provide medical consultation and training. It was not a perfect solution, Araya admits, but her job was to do anything she could for her patients. “We have to do our best with what we know,” she says. “Every day we had to be more than a doctor.”

***

Doctors trained in resource-limited environments possess a unique skill set. They’re adaptable, creative, and work well under pressure. Yet, upon arriving in the U.S., internationally trained physicians like Araya must go through a licensing process so arduous it can take nearly ten years to complete. There are currently an estimated 165,000 internationally trained medical professionals living in the United States and underutilizing their skills. Many, like Araya, are sitting on crisis management experience the United States never thought they would need — until the pandemic hit.


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Eritrea has a single medical school: the Orotta College of Medicine and Health Sciences, offering a six-year medical program. With only 30 to 40 spots in each graduating class, the nationwide competition was fierce. “When I applied to medical school, my dad always tried to impress on me that I need to have Plan B and Plan C,” says Lily Yemane, an expat Eritrean physician like Araya.  But she couldn’t think of any other job she wanted to do.

In the United States, the pandemic forced many doctors who had never experienced shortages to make life-or-death choices about who would be given oxygen, but for Araya and Yemane, that kind of challenge was part of their regular work as physicians. “You have an idea of how a certain patient can be helped, but you don’t have the resources,” explains Yemane. “Two or three patients need a medication, and you have to decide who to give it to.” With only one or two ambulances per hospital, she often fought to convince the administration to deploy their ambulance for her patients.

Resource scarcity wasn’t the only issue. Living under the oppressive regime in Eritrea bled into every aspect of their personal and professional lives. “We don’t choose where we work, we don’t negotiate our salaries,” says Araya. “The government, basically they put our names in a fishbowl.”

Since President Isais Afwerki came to power following the country’s independence in 1993, freedom has been stifled. Afwerki’s extrajudicial executions, imprisonment of journalists and religious minorities, indefinite forced labor sentences, and other human rights violations have been documented by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Reporters Without Borders, on its World Press Freedom Index this year, ranked Eritrea last, below North Korea. There have been no presidential elections held in the country’s 28-year history. “ … You don’t get any say, you don’t vote. We’ve never voted in our entire life,” says Yemane.

When political prisoners were brought to the hospital for care — often for tuberculosis or scabies, the result of years in captivity — doctors were forced to defer to a system they vehemently opposed. Some prisoners were journalists; others had been caught at the border, trying to flee the country. “You almost never ask why,” says Yemane. “You don’t want to know.”

Each time a prisoner was brought for treatment, Yemane had to convince the guards to admit the patient to the hospital for necessary care, raising suspicions that she was on the prisoner’s side. Except once: Yemane supervised the care of a prisoner with kidney failure. When she went to check on him in the recovery facility, she was surprised to find the patient with his family, and the guards nowhere to be found. “He was free,” she says, “but they only let him go because they thought he was dying.”

There was no single moment that pushed Yemane or Araya to leave and follow their family and friends who had already fled to the US. Instead, the burden of oppression and persecution simply grew until they felt they had no choice. “My rights as a human being were being violated,” says Araya. “I did not have the freedom — that basic, basic freedom … we all deserve as human beings.”

 ***

Yemane did not arrive in the United States naive to American culture or to the challenge ahead. She’d read plenty of English literature and loved watching Oscar-nominated movies, from My Fair Lady to La La Land. But still, the culture shock was real. While waiting the nine months for her work permit to be approved, she lived with a family member and took an anatomy course at the local public college, working towards a physician assistant’s degree in case she couldn’t relicense. Eager to resume medical practice, she also began volunteering at a free clinic, which helped her to feel more at home as she gradually met more like-minded people.

Reporters Without Borders, on its World Press Freedom Index this year, ranked Eritrea last, below North Korea. There have been no presidential elections held in the country’s 28-year history.

When Araya reached the United States the following year, more than a dozen Eritrean doctors like Yemane — who’d fled in the months before her — warned her of the difficult road ahead. She’d have to have her credentials verified before she could sit for the three intensive U.S. medical licensing exams (USMLE) and apply for a residency program to repeat her training — the last step before finally being able to practice on her own.

For most refugees arriving with few resources, the financial cost — of translating educational records into English, covering the exam fees (nearly $1,000 each), and working a clinical internship (often unpaid) to help get a residency — is prohibitive. And the Eritrean doctors were struggling to get past the very first step in the process. For their primary source verification, authorized representatives from the Eritrean medical school would need to confirm that their documents, including their diploma and transcript, were authentic.

They’d contacted the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), a non-governmental, non-profit agency, responsible for primary source verification. Of roughly 3,500 operational institutions in the World Directory of Medical Schools, ECFMG accepts credentials from approximately three-quarters — including the medical school in Eritrea. But when Araya and Yemane’s colleagues applied for verification, the Eritrean administrators wouldn’t respond to ECFMG’s inquiries.

The medical school and placement system in Eritrea, like many countries, is controlled by the government, which has the power to withhold the records of anyone they don’t want to assist. “In the eyes of the government,” says Yemane, “we are traitors — which is not true. We served our country when we were there. I worked with very little pay, like everybody else in the country, for four years, outside of my hometown. And we did serve the people. We did our best. But the government was not understanding of that. So when we left, we were considered traitors.”

Kara Oleyn, Vice President for Programs and Services at ECFMG, was assigned to their case. ECFMG sees 20,000 applications each year, and Oleyn was no stranger to verification challenges. When ISIS infiltrated Iraq and medical school officials fled to the south, Oleyn’s team worked with the Iraqi Ministry of Health to track them down, so they could provide verification for their former students. In Crimea, where both the Russian and Ukrainian governments claimed the medical university, they had to determine who was actually authorized to verify credentials. “We do need to assure the public that the individuals who are going to be laying hands on them have the appropriate credentials,” says Oleyn, “and primary source verification is a big part of that.”

But Araya’s and Yemane’s cases — and the cases of their Eritrean colleagues — stumped Oleyn. “There was absolutely no information coming out of Eritrea,” she says.

Araya and her peers were devastated. “The fact that the government I left was able to affect me here — it was just heartbreaking,” says Araya. “America, they gave me protection to stay here, but the [Eritrean] government was able to retaliate and hold me hostage, even when I’m here.”

In rare cases where verification couldn’t be obtained — often for political asylees — the ECFMG used an alternate process: having three U.S.-licensed physicians who attended the same international school swear on their medical license that they have personal knowledge that the individual graduated from medical school. Unfortunately, the Eritrean medical school, founded less than 20 years ago, had no prior graduates working in the United States to provide testimony.

Oleyn’s three-person team relentlessly contacted any sources they thought might be able to share information. “We were trying to triangulate exams that we knew they took in Sudan with Sudanese officials, and we couldn’t get anywhere,” she says. Even the US Department of State couldn’t offer any contacts in Eritrea besides those already refusing to cooperate. Instead, the State Department confirmed what she recalled the Eritrean applicants had already told her: “They’re not going to reply to you, because they don’t want their physicians … their young, bright, educated people to leave their country.”

Yemane and Araya’s feeling of helplessness intensified as the pandemic rolled through their new homeland, and they watched as the news quickly became saturated with reports of hospitals running out of beds and doctors to care for COVID patients. When Eritrea went into lockdown, they feared for their friends and family left behind. Yemane would close her eyes and remember the limited number of beds in the hospital’s ICU, imagining them all filled. The staff was already underpaid and overworked before the pandemic.

“In a perfect world, when this happens, what do you do? You just go home and you help, and then you come back,” says Yemane. “We could not go back home, even to help, even to contribute.” And in America, she couldn’t help either. “… Imagine sitting with the capacity to do something but not being able to do anything … What was the whole point of your training if you cannot do something, even in a pandemic?”

Many internationally trained doctors have valuable experience working in the thick of SARS and Ebola epidemics, conflict zones, and other limited-resource conditions — not unlike the conditions faced by hospitals across the United States, as doctors scrambled for personal protective equipment. “When you have a shortage in supplies all the time, you get creative,” Yemane explains. “When we didn’t have ventilators, we could make CPAPs out of things that you can access at the hospital. So we have that kind of mindset.”

Jina Krause-Vilmar, the president and CEO of Upwardly Global, a nonprofit organization that provides career services to immigrants and refugees (including several interviewed for this story), says that, despite knowing the risks of COVID-19, their clients were anxious to help and “in tears about the idea that they were standing on the sidelines at a time when their communities were suffering.”

Unable to assist medical efforts directly, Yemane volunteered for a mutual aid society to help with cooking and delivering food to a local homeless encampment, but she wished she could do more. At the height of the pandemic, “that’s when it was most painful,” she says. “You see the hospitals running low on supplies, on skill[ed workers], and you’re sitting at home doing nothing when you could have been out there helping people.”

Yemane would close her eyes and remember the limited number of beds in the hospital’s ICU, imagining them all filled.

In a few select states, desperation finally bred change, and internationally trained physicians were given the opportunity to contribute. New York (home to roughly 13,000 foreign-trained medical professionals not able to make full use of their skills) joined New Jersey, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Colorado in adapting licensing guidelines to allow foreign-trained physicians to help with COVID efforts at various levels — but with limited success.

For some, the application was too difficult. Upwardly Global heard that in one state Russian applicants were deterred because the drop-down menu on the online application accidentally omitted “Russia” as an option for country of origin. Some, like Yemane, applied to the NJ licensing program but never heard back.

“These were emergency policies that were designed and implemented at a time of unprecedented need and at a time when states were trying to mount a response to a public health crisis like no other,” says Jacki Esposito, director of U.S. Policy and Advocacy for World Education Services Global Talent Bridge, a non-profit dedicated to helping international students, immigrants, and refugees achieve their educational and career goals. “So just by virtue of the fact that they were designed and implemented very quickly, there wasn’t the time and the space to consult all of the various stakeholders that would be consulted in a permanent reform process.”

For example, according to Esposito, some states require applicants to have active, valid licenses in another country, but many people — refugees especially — let their licenses lapse to avoid yearly fees and continuing education requirements. Esposito says the application could have required that a foreign license was in good standing when it was last active to accomplish the same goal — of weeding out those applicants with disciplinary actions on their record. “It really was a mix of getting the eligibility requirements right so that they maintain health and safety standards, but at the same time are accessible for applicants,” says Esposito. “Eligibility requirements must be workable for these policies to be effective.”

Without the time to be more intentional about the design of the application process, inform employers about the policy, or conduct outreach to applicants, the opportunity went underutilized. By the end of 2020, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners, which operated the most robust program for applicants without residency experience, had received approximately 1,100 applications for temporary medical licenses, but, according to a spokesperson at the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, they issued emergency licenses to only 35 individuals. And according to Gothamist, not all who received emergency licenses were able to secure positions. Many applicants who were eligible for similar programs across the country didn’t know where to look for jobs, and hospitals weren’t sure they were allowed to accept internationally trained applicants — or just thought it was easier to not employ them.

“When push came to shove, the hospitals would rather repurpose a plastic surgeon,” says Tamar Frolichstein-Appel, a senior employment services associate at Upwardly Global, who believes better outcomes could be achieved if healthcare employers, legislators, and NGOs work in partnership. Without buy-in from employers who are willing to hire from this talent pool, a license doesn’t make much of a difference. “It’s a missed opportunity that we have not, as a country, leveraged the immense talent that immigrant and refugee doctors and other healthcare workers offer,” says Esposito.

Amid the crisis, a door was cracked open for a select few. But, by and large, doctors like Araya and Yemane watched the pandemic unfold, stuck outside of a system they desperately wanted to be part of. “We got so antsy to do something,” Yemane says. “It’s a privilege to be able to help in that time, and we didn’t have that.”

***

As more time passed without any news of progress from ECFMG, the persistent uncertainty began to take a toll on the Eritrean doctors stuck in limbo. “A few of us went back to medical school again. But to go to medical school twice in one lifetime — it’s a lot to ask,” says Yemane.

After fleeing Eritrea, another doctor, Abraham Solomon, chose this option to avoid being at the mercy of a stalled bureaucratic process. But he couldn’t simply repeat medical school; he had to go back even further and complete up to 90 credits of undergraduate pre-med requirements before even taking the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). As he sat through freshman seminars for the second time in his life, he had a strong sense that this situation wasn’t fair, but he had to make peace with it. “What [I] had to do was more important than getting lost in the emotions,” says Solomon, who worked in customer service to pay for school. “At that point, you understand this is something you can’t control.”

Mohamed Khalif, who left Somalia as a refugee when he was two years old, moved around the world with his family before graduating medical school in China. While studying for the USMLE in Washington State, he worked as a security guard and then took night shifts at a pie factory so he could volunteer at a medical clinic. Khalif has valuable skills and is fluent in five languages, including Urdu and  Mandarin, but even after he passed the USMLE he failed to match with a residency program. The screening for residency programs filters out candidates without “hands-on” clinical experience in the United States: few applicants can afford unpaid internships, and few institutions are willing to take them on over U.S. medical students. The applications cost Khalif more than $6,000 each year, in addition to flights and hotels for interviews. After four years, he decided he had to go in another direction.

As the founder of the nonprofit Washington Academy for International Medical Graduates (WAIMG), he now advocates for those who face the same challenges and offers professional development opportunities through his organization. Through this work, he met folks with similar stories, like a Japanese neurosurgeon who married an American and moved to the U.S., but, even after passing the USMLE, was still working at Starbucks because she couldn’t match into a residency program. Khalif’s organization hired her for a job that would count as “hands-on” clinical experience to improve her prospects.

“Once she found this job,” says Khalif, “she actually cried. And I felt that. Because that’s what I’ve been through — those kinds of odd jobs — and I cried with her.” These stories keep him hopeful, even though he’s not able to practice: the fact that he’s making it possible for so many others.

 ***

The matching process is a major concern for Araya, Yemane, and their peers — not having their official transcripts or diplomas will likely pose problems during the difficult process of applying to residencies — once they even reach that stage. This year, only 55 percent of immigrant international medical graduates who applied for residency were matched to first-year positions, compared to 93 percent of U.S. graduates.

And every year Araya and Yemane have spent fighting for the right to even sit the exams has cost them: The more time that passes after a candidate’s graduation year, the harder it can be to secure a residency match.

“When you only consider somebody’s graduating year as a criteria and not know the story behind that, it hurts a lot of people. It hurts a lot of people who are really passionate,” says Araya. “To come here to fight for all these years to go back into your profession — that tells a lot about the persistence and the passion that person has for medicine.”

Amid the crisis, a door was cracked open for a select few. But, by and large, doctors like Araya and Yemane watched the pandemic unfold, stuck outside of a system they desperately wanted to be part of.

Khalif began to look for a solution that wouldn’t require physicians to repeat their entire residency. “Legislators did not know about this match process and this residency process,” says Khalif. “They thought people could apply for residency through Indeed Job Search or something.”

Members from Khalif’s non-profit met with legislators and eventually started gaining traction. “COVID really changed people’s minds,” says Khalif, and in May 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed into law SHB 1129, which allows limited licenses to be granted to internationally trained doctors in Washington who have completed their USMLE, without requiring residency to be repeated in the U.S. “Once you pass all your exams now, you don’t have to settle for an odd job, or leave the profession like I did,” says Khalif. “You can qualify for a license and work under the supervision of a physician, and you can take care of patients.”

The bill was overwhelmingly supported on both sides. Republican representative Mary Dye says that her small county of Garfield, with only a handful of doctors, has benefited from internationally trained physicians from Bangladesh and South Korea, who can work without the equipment, facilities, and large medical teams that most U.S. doctors rely on. “In rural America, we need people that have different experiences,” Dye explained. “We’re grateful to have … people that are capable of serving in these remote locations, under challenging conditions, with lots of limitations, and still provide wonderful medical care for our community.”

From the rural healthcare crisis to expanding medical access for at-risk populations, advocates believe internationally trained physicians could be part of the solution if given the opportunity. “I think they have a huge role to play in terms of health equity access, because of that cultural language fluency,” says Krause-Vilmar.

“We need to re-envision what the process is for licensure for doctors in the United States,” says Esposito, “so that we are not leaving out people who have 20 years of experience in a field where we know that we need more doctors.”

Without any change in legislation in California, the current residency hurdles are still daunting for Araya and Yemane, who hope that, when the time comes, institutions will consider their circumstances and give them a chance to prove themselves. “We are all a loss for our country,” Araya says. “I hope we’re not a loss here.”

 ***

One night, more than a year into the investigation process, Oleyn was working late in her Philadelphia office when she received a call from one of the Eritrean applicants. She detailed everything her team had tried — most recently, reaching out to the medical school in Cuba that had a partnership with the Eritrean medical school. But it was another dead end.

“Anything you can think of,” she asked on the phone that night. Anything at all.

In an attempt to leave no stone unturned, the applicants submitted lists of people they’d come into contact with during medical school — in the hope of providing a useful connection. As Oleyn’s team searched for leads through the lists of names, they found that one was a dean at a U.S. medical school. It turned out that a small number of U.S. physicians — faculty members of American medical schools like George Washington University — helped establish the school in Eritrea. The connection provided a glimmer of hope after months of coming up empty-handed.

A caseworker from Oleyn’s team contacted the dean; he didn’t remember the specific students but put them in touch with other American faculty members who had taught or helped design the post-graduate training curriculum in Eritrea. Oleyn’s team asked those physicians to verify the information about the applicants: the courses they took, which textbooks were used, and their graduation dates. They responded enthusiastically about the qualifications of each applicant and eagerly asked how they could help.

The alternate form of verification — with all the supporting evidence they had amassed — was presented to the ECFMG’s board of trustees, which finally granted approval in summer 2020. Araya and Yemane could move forward to the exam stage. When Yemane heard the news, she felt like she’d finally gotten her life back. “There was a time when I was too scared to be hopeful about that because I didn’t want to be disappointed,” she says.

Solomon had just finished a year of intro courses — Biology, Chemistry, and Physics — when the decision was released. He no longer had to repeat the rest of the prerequisite courses and medical school, and he was thankful to finally have some control over the next steps. “This is a challenge I can overcome,” he says. “An exam is just an exam. You study. You prepare.”

“It’s a good thing that we’re doing this exam,” Yemane says. “It’s a good way to revisit the basic sciences and to familiarize ourselves with what’s most important and most common in this country.”

The Eritrean physicians continue to stay in touch through their Whatsapp group, meeting occasionally, sharing job opportunities, and cheering each other on. Araya says she won’t stop rooting for their success. “Passing the exam, getting matched [with a residency program] has become more than even being a doctor: Just proving that the government back home, the school — whoever could not give us our certificates, credentials — that actually, there is justice in the world, and they could not dictate our professional pathways.”

This year, only 55 percent of immigrant international medical graduates who applied for residency were matched to first-year positions, compared to 93 percent of U.S. graduates.

In a thank you note Oleyn received an Eritrean physician wrote: “This shall also afford every graduate the privilege to revisit his/her oath to humanity, to summon his/her medical expertise, and to engage hereafter in the honored service of the people of the United States of America.”

It remains the most gratifying case Oleyn has seen in her 22 years at ECFMG.

 ***

On a warm Thursday in June 2021, Yemane traveled to San Jose to take her first exam. She hadn’t slept well the night before. Kept awake by nerves, she’d scrolled through Reddit, where other nervous exam-takers shared their anxieties. But in the morning, she pretended she’d had the best sleep of her life. “I think that worked,” she laughs. “I think I fooled my brain.”

The test center was familiar because she’d paid $75 to take a practice exam there earlier that week, but it was nerve-wracking all the same. “There was a lot of pressure on me, because I’m one of the first people taking the exam from my country,” she says. “And we begged for three years for this opportunity.”

She reminded herself that she was prepared. She’d done over 7,000 practice questions. She thought about a text her friend sent, telling her that the test outcome would not change her identity. She imagined her father and mother telling her, “You were created for this.”

When she finished the eight-hour exam, a sense of relief washed over her. This was the hardest test for her; the next one focuses on clinical skills, and she hopes to sit for it in spring 2022. After that, she will take the third and final test. The next challenge — applying for residencies — will be the final step in the long and expensive licensing process.

For now, though, she’s taking one step at a time. As she anxiously awaits the results, she knows that even if she doesn’t get the score she’s hoping for, she was brave just to take the exam after everything she’s been through. “That’s what I’m doing right now,” she says. “I’m celebrating the bravery.”

Shoshana Akabas is a writer and teacher based in New York. She primarily writes fiction and reports on refugee policy and issues of forced migration. 

* * *

Editor: Carolyn Wells 
Fact checker: Nora Belblidia

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 19: Theo Henderson from We The Unhoused podcast speaks from the steps of LA City Hall as members of Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing (UTACH), a newly formed tenant organization, held a news conference to demand humane treatment in Project Roomkey programs and request a meeting with city officials. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images).

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ciara O’Rourke, Haley Britzky, Alissa Walker, Julie Sedivy, and Arika Okrent.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. The Fugitive and the Chameleon

Ciara O’Rourke | Deseret News | August 2, 2021 | 6,154 words

“Mario’s father had gone by many names. Luis Archuleta. Lawrence Pusateri. The man the son knew as Ramon was just a fraction of his way into what may be one of the longest fugitive runs in U.S. history — a 50-year game of cat-and-mouse that played out across the West, from the streets of Colorado to the shores of California and many dusty, sun-bleached points in between.”

2. ‘We Are All Suffering in Silence’ — Inside the US Military’s Pervasive Culture of Eating Disorders

Haley Britzky | Task & Purpose | August 2, 2021 | 6,213

U.S. military service members develop harmful and unhealthy habits to maintain “body composition standards” that are outdated.

3. Theo Henderson’s Podcast Influences L.A. City Policy. For 7 Years, He’s Lived Mostly in the Park.

Alissa Walker| Curbed | October 14, 2020 | 2,505 words

“There are 60,000 unhoused people in L.A. County — (Theo) Henderson prefers ‘unhoused’ because he says ‘homeless’ has become a slur — as many as 40,000 of whom are considered, like him, to be ‘unsheltered,’ living outside the shelter system in tents, informal communities, and camps.”

4. The Strange Persistence of First Languages

Julie Sedivy | Nautilus | November 5, 2015 | 3,440 words

“Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.”

5. Typos, Tricks and Misprints

Arika Okrent | Aeon | July 26, 2021 | 3,401 words

“Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.”

Even the Steam Had a Shadow

Natasha Pulley | The Kingdoms | May 2021 | 1516 words (6 minutes)

***

1
Londres, 1898 (ninety-three years after Trafalgar)

Most people have trouble recalling their first memory, because they have to stretch for it, like trying to touch their toes; but Joe didn’t. This was because it was a memory formed a week after his forty-third birthday.

He stepped down off the train. That was it, the very first thing he remembered, but the second was something less straightforward. It was the slow, eerie feeling that everything was doing just what it should be, minding its own business, but that at the same time, it was all wrong.

It was early in the morning, and cursedly cold. Vapour hissed on the black engine right above him. Because the platform was only a couple of inches above the tracks, the double pistons of the wheels were level with his waist. He was so close he could hear the water boiling above the furnace. He stepped well away, feeling tight with the certainty it was about to lurch forward.

The train had just come in. The platform was full of people looking slow and stiff from the journey, all moving towards the concourse. The sweet carbon smell of coal smoke was everywhere. Because it was only just light outside, the round lamps of the station gave everything a pale glow, and cast long, hazy shadows; even the steam had a shadow, a shy devil trying to decide whether to be solid or not.

Joe had no idea what he was doing there.

He waited, because railway stations were internationally the same and they were a logical place to get confused, if there was ever a logical place. But nothing came. He couldn’t remember coming here, or going anywhere. He looked down at himself. With a writhe of horror, he found he couldn’t even remember getting dressed. His clothes were unfamiliar. A heavy coat lined with tartan. A plain waistcoat with interesting buttons, stamped with laurel patterns.

Most people have trouble recalling their first memory, because they have to stretch for it, like trying to touch their toes; but Joe didn’t. This was because it was a memory formed a week after his forty-third birthday.

A sign on the wall said that this was platform three. Behind him on the train, a conductor was going along the carriages, saying the same thing again and again, quiet and respectful, because he was having to wake people up in first class.

‘Londres Gare du Roi, all change please, Londres Gare du Roi …’

Joe wondered why the hell the train company was giving London station names in French, and then wondered helplessly why he’d wondered. All the London station names were French. Everyone knew that.

Someone touched his arm and asked in English if he was all right. It made him jump so badly that he twanged the nerve in the back of his skull. White pain shot down his neck.

‘Sorry – could you tell me where we are?’ he asked, and heard how ridiculous it sounded.

The man didn’t seem to think it was extraordinary to find an amnesiac at a railway station. ‘London,’ he said. ‘The Gare du Roi.’

Joe wasn’t sure why he’d been hoping for something other than what he’d heard the conductor say. He swallowed and looked away. The steam was clearing. There were signs everywhere; for the Colonial Library, the Musée Britannique, the Métro. There was a board not far away that said the Desmoulins line was closed because of the drilling below, and beyond that, elaborate iron gates that led out into the fog.

‘Definitely …

London in England?’ he asked eventually.

‘It is,’ the man said.

‘Oh,’ said Joe.

The train breathed steam again and made the man into a ghost. Through all the bubbling panic, Joe thought he must have been a doctor, because he still didn’t seem surprised. ‘What’s your name?’ the man asked. Either he had a young voice, or he looked older than he was.

‘Joe.’ He had to reach for it, but he did know; that was a thump of a relief. ‘Tournier.’

‘Do you know where you live?’

‘No,’ he said, feeling like he might collapse.

‘Let’s get you to a hospital then,’ the man said.

So the man paid for a cab. Joe expected him to leave it at that, but he came too and said there was no reason why not, since he wasn’t busy. A thousand times in the following months, Joe tried to remember what the man had looked like. He couldn’t, even though he spent the whole cab ride opposite him; all he remembered later was that the man had sat without leaning back, and that something about him seemed foreign, even though he spoke English in the hard straight way that old people did, the belligerent ones who’d always refused to learn French and scowled at you if you tried to call them monsieur.

It was maddening, that little but total failure of observation, because he took in everything else perfectly. The cab was a new one, all fresh leather and smelling of polish that was still waxy to touch. Later, he could even remember how steam had risen from the backs of the horses, and the creak of the wheel springs when they moved from the cobbles outside the station to the smoother-paved way down Rue Euston.

But not the man. It was as though the forgetfulness wasn’t so much an absence of memory, but a shroud that clung to him.

It was as though the forgetfulness wasn’t so much an absence of memory, but a shroud that clung to him.

The road looked familiar and not. Whenever they came to a corner Joe thought he knew, there was a different shop there to the one he’d expected, or no building at all. Other cabs clopped past. Brown fog pawed at the shop windows. The sky was grey. In the background, he wondered if the man wasn’t being kind at all but taking advantage of things somehow, but he couldn’t think what for.

Not far away, monster towers pumped fumes into that gun-metal sky. They were spidered about with gantries and chutes, and in the flues, tiny flames burned. On the side of an enormous silo, he could just make out BLAST FURNACE 5 stamped in white letters in French. Joe swallowed. He knew exactly what they were – steelworks – but at the same time, they filled him with the dream-sense of wrongness that the Métro signs at the station had done. He shut his eyes and tried to chase down what he knew. Steelworks; yes, London was famous for that, that was what London was for. Seven blast furnaces up around Farringdon and Clerkenwell, hauling steel out to the whole Republic. If you bought a postcard of London, it always looked amazing, because of that towering tangle of pipework and coal chutes and chimneys in the middle of it. It was a square mile that had turned everything black with soot: the ruin of St Paul’s, the leaning old buildings round Chancery Lane, everything. That was why London was the Black City.

But all that might as well have come from an encyclopaedia. He didn’t know how he knew it. He didn’t remember walking in those black streets or around the steelworks, or any of it.

‘Did you get off the same train as me?’ he asked the man, hoping that if he focused on one particular thing, he might feel less sick.

‘Yes. It came from Glasgow. We were in the same carriage.’

The man had a clipped way of talking, but his whole body was full of compassion. He looked like he was stopping himself leaning forward and taking Joe’s hands. Joe was glad about that. He would have burst into tears.

He couldn’t remember being on the train. The man tried to tell him things that had been memorable, like the funny snootiness of the conductor and the way the fold-down beds tried to eat you if you didn’t push them down properly, but none of it was there. He confirmed that Joe hadn’t fallen or bumped anything, just started to look disorientated early this morning. It was nine o’clock now.

Joe had to let his head bow. He’d never been scared like it. He opened the window, just to inhale properly. Everything smelled of soot. That was familiar, at least. On the pavements, droves of men in black coats and black hats poured from the iron gates of the Métro stations. They all looked the same. The cab stopped for a minute or so, waiting at a railway crossing. The train was a coal cargo, chuntering towards the steelworks. The whistle howled as the driver tried to scare off some kids on the line; there were ten or twelve, foraging for the bits of coal that fell off the carriages.

‘You’ll be all right,’ the man said quietly. It was the last thing he said; while Joe was seeing the doctor, he vanished. None of the nurses had seen him go, or seen him at all, and Joe started to think he had got himself to the hospital alone, and that the man had been a benign hallucination.

***

Excerpted from Natasha Pulley’s novel The Kingdoms, published by Bloomsbury.

Queens of Infamy: Boudicca

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2021 | 18 minutes (4,866 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

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* * *

She was tall — terrifyingly large, in fact. Her tawny hair fell in a “great mass” to her hips. She was dressed in a colorful tunic and cloak, her outfit completed by a giant fuck-off gold torc. Her voice was harsh, unfeminine. She had spent the last weeks murdering and maiming her way across the British countryside, and now she led a force of hundreds of thousands of Britons in a standoff against the occupying Romans. She had a rabbit hidden in her skirt for occult purposes. She was a bloodthirsty barbarian, devoted to a ghoulish religion, out to destroy the social order of the known world. At least, this is how historian Cassius Dio described Boudicca, a British tribal queen, over one hundred years after her death — every civilized man’s worst nightmare.

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But before we dive into the revolt that literally burned London to the ground, we need some context. The Romans had first cast their eyes toward Britain back in the good old days before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and got himself murdered. Caesar, who had been conquesting his way through Gaul for a few years, decided to take a break in 55 BC and invade Britain as a little treat, although “invasion” is probably a stretch since he didn’t do much more than visit Kent and then turn back. But it must have been a fun caper, because he returned the next year, this time managing to cross the Thames and score a few victories against the Britons. After that Caesar had to put a pin in it due to other pressing business; he had a republic to bring down, after all, and a back that needed stabbing. In the chaos that ensued, Rome more or less ignored Britain for the next hundred years until the Emperor Claudius decided to invade again in 43 AD.

Boudicca appears in the narrative about 17 years after Claudius’ invasion. Her husband, Prasutagus, was the ruler of the Iceni, a British tribe whose territory included modern-day Norfolk and parts of Suffolk. The historian Tacitus, who gives us a near-contemporary account of Boudicca’s uprising, wrote that she was of royal blood, but beyond that we don’t know much about her. Did she come from Iceni nobility or was she a princess from another tribe who had married Prasutagus as part of an alliance? Was Boudicca her given name, or since it’s believed to come from a Proto-Celtic root word meaning victory, was it a title she adopted? We don’t even know how old she was in 60 AD — she had two daughters by Prasutagus who were probably in their tweens or early teens, and if those were her first and only children, she could have been as young as 30. Then again, if there had been other children who had died or if, for some reason, she’d married later or hadn’t been able to conceive right away, she could have been in her 40s or even 50s. All we know about her life are the scraps that Tacitus and Dio left us, and those are the highly biased Roman accounts describing an enemy they considered to be primitive and sub-human.

BOUDICCA: I mean, the Romans barely consider their own women to be people

BOUDICCA: even the ones they allegedly like

BOUDICCA: you know, the ones who’ve mastered the skills of shutting up and spinning wool

BOUDICCA: neither of which are exactly my forte

The Iceni had allied themselves with Rome and been allowed to live fairly autonomously with Prasutagus as their client king in the standard Roman model. They were apparently quite wealthy and prosperous, even as neighboring regions were gutted by invading forces. As long as the Iceni kept bootlicking paying their taxes, everything was going to be fine. Or at least that’s what they believed right up until Prasutagus died and all hell broke loose.

BOUDICCA: my husband had a will, as all responsible adults should

BOUDICCA: if you don’t have one yet, close this tab and go make one right now!

BOUDICCA: anyway, he split his assets between our daughters and the Emperor Nero

BOUDICCA: the Romans, being always fair and just, honored that agreement

BOUDICCA: oh my god, I’m sorry, I can’t even say that with a straight face

BOUDICCA: of course they didn’t honor it

BOUDICCA: but seriously, you need a will if you don’t have one already

The fact that Boudicca was not named as one of Prasutagus’ heirs, even though she was his wife and the mother of his children and was going to rule as regent until they came of age, might be a clue as to what kind of person she was. Some historians speculate that she might have had strong anti-Roman sentiments even before shit went sideways — that perhaps her family of origin may have been involved in some of the earlier revolts against the Empire. Maybe Prasutagus had strategically left her out of his will as a way of reassuring Rome that he was on their side. After all, nothing was guaranteed to stir up ire like naming a possible insurrectionist as your successor. But, as it turned out, the Romans’ ire was going to be stirred no matter what. Prasutagus’ death was the perfect opportunity for a land grab, and the Romans were going to use whatever excuse they could to make it look legitimate.

All we know about her life are the scraps that Tacitus and Dio left us, and those are the highly biased Roman accounts describing an enemy they considered to be primitive and sub-human.

The Romans claimed that Prasutagus’ agreement with the Emperor Claudius was now null and void as both parties were dead. Since there existed no contract between Boudicca and Claudius’ successor, Nero (yes, that Nero), they were under no obligation to honor Prasutagus’ will. When Boudicca pushed back, the Romans turned violent. Their army plundered Prasutagus’ lands and enslaved various members of his family. They stripped the most powerful Iceni men of their land and possessions. Worst of all, they publicly flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. This last act was not only meant to terrorize the girls both physically and psychologically, but, from a Roman perspective, the soldiers were also marking them as damaged goods. One of the foundational myths of Rome involves a noblewoman killing herself to escape the perceived dishonour of having been raped — that was the only way she could restore her lost virtue. The assault on Boudicca’s unnamed daughters was a way to harm not only their present but also their future prospects as wives, mothers, or even just respectable women. And considering that the girls were the heirs of the King of the Iceni, it may even be seen as an attempt to curtail the future of the tribe itself.

BOUDICCA: I guess they thought they could break me

BOUDICCA: beat me into submission, that kind of thing

BOUDICCA: they weren’t used to women who fight back

BOUDICCA: or women who fight at all, full stop

BOUDICCA: which is why they failed to notice or care when I started rallying my own troops

BOUDICCA: told my daughters to get in the chariot, because we are going to burn this fucker DOWN

PASSING ROMAN SOLDIER: awww, it’s cute that a little lady thinks she has troops!

BOUDICCA: you see what I mean

Part of the reason the Romans were less than attentive to Boudicca’s casual fomenting was that they were distracted by a different British problem. Suetonius, the governor of Britannia, was tired of the turbulent British priests — the Druids — and decided to stamp them out. His official reasons? The Druids were sheltering anti-Roman political refugees on the Isle of Mona (modern-day Anglesey) and it was alleged they practiced human sacrifice. It’s honestly kind of rich that the Romans — who had only stopped ritually sacrificing people about 150 years before and who loved to, you know, watch gladiators fight each other to the death — were so hung up on the sanctity of life or whatever, but people can rationalize anything. Anyway, the real reason that Suetonius and his peers wanted to take out the Druids was because they held an uncomfortable sway over the British population and refused to be assimilated. Basically, the Romans were worried that they would stir up rebellion, and also they just found them kind of spooky.

Worst of all, they publicly flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. This last act was not only meant to terrorize the girls both physically and psychologically, but, from a Roman perspective, the soldiers were also marking them as damaged goods.

When Suetonius and his men arrived at Mona, they could see the Druids raising their arms and chanting, while a bunch of messy-haired women in black swung burning sticks around. Tacitus would later compare these women to the Furies, which might explain why the Roman soldiers were so uncharacteristically unnerved.

SUETONIUS: it was just, you know, so uncivilized

SUETONIUS: I had to … god, this is embarrassing

SUETONIUS: I had to remind my men that women aren’t worth being afraid of

SUETONIUS: anyway, we pulverized their sacred groves

SUETONIUS: we pulverized them GOOD

SUETONIUS: Druids delenda est and all that

It’s hard to overstate the level of desecration at Mona. It wasn’t just that the island was an important place of worship; in the belief system of the Celtic Britons, every river, every lake, every grove had its own individual god. By destroying the groves, the Romans quite literally killed British gods. The tribes were already primed for revolt, and as the news about Mona reached them, it must have added fuel to their fire.

Another result of Suetonius’ decision to take on the Druids at Mona — which was on the opposite side of Britain from the Iceni territory — was that the Roman governor was conveniently out of the way when Boudicca and the Iceni set off on their tear.

Boudicca found an ally in another local tribe, the Trinovantes. Like the Iceni, the Trinovantes had an axe to grind with the Romans, namely the colonia they had established in Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), and the rebels chose that as their first target. But before we go deeper into that story, we need to take a brief detour.

One of the Empire’s grifts was that legionaries who fulfilled their enlistment terms received a small parcel of land. So if you were an enlisted nobody from a poor family, you could pull yourself up in the world by serving the required 25 years and getting your own land grant (assuming you lived that long; plenty of legionaries didn’t). The problem, of course, was that land is a finite resource, and these land grants typically stayed in families for generations. This meant that to fulfill their promise to their veterans, the Empire had to keep expanding outward into the ether, annexing more and more territory. Of course, the Emperors had their own reasons for wanting to broaden the Empire’s boundaries! But a side benefit to all that growth was that it meant more available land for veterans — once they’d cleared out those pesky native inhabitants, of course.


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Anyway, back in the pre-Roman times, Camulodunum had been one of the most important settlements in Britain, serving at one point as the capital of the Trinovantes tribe. Naturally the Romans thought it would be the perfect spot for them to settle down. In doing so, not only did the Romans drive the Britons out, but archeological evidence shows that they forced the displaced people to live and work in brutal conditions while re-building the town to Roman specifications. According to Tacitus, the soldiers posted encouraged this abuse of the Britons, even though it went against Roman policy (this was, after all, supposed to be a peaceful settlement, not a battlefield); he noted that those soldiers saw their future selves in the retired veterans and hoped they too would be allowed to treat native populations however the fuck they wanted someday.

BOUDICCA: you can’t spell colonialism without colonia!

BOUDICCA: yes, I know that’s the point

BOUDICCA: I understand how language fundamentally works

BOUDICCA: root words, et cetera

BOUDICCA: but since my husband’s death I’ve had to take up the mantle of dad jokes in our family

As Boudicca travelled across the country, her following grew. Those joining her cause weren’t just warrior-type men from the Iceni and the Trinovantes, they were people of all genders and ages. Farmers abandoned their fields and women loaded their children into carts to join the throng. With every British settlement they passed, the mass of people bearing down on Camulodunum increased in size; according to Dio, by the time they reached the city, they were 120,000 strong. The Britons were done hedging their bets — they were either going to solve the Roman problem once and for all, or they were going to go down in a blaze of glory.

Meanwhile, in Camulodunum, strange things were happening. A statue of Victory fell over, apparently for no reason. Women went into a frenzy, speaking in tongues and making frightening prophecies. South of the city, at the Thames Estuary, people saw visions of drowned houses in the water and the North Sea seemed to turn the color of blood. But even with all these portents and the news of Boudicca’s approach, the leaders told the townspeople not to worry. It was just a rag-tag group of women, after all — and not just any women, but primitive, uncivilized British women. No big deal. There was time to evacuate, but why bother? The procurator of Roman Britain, Catus Decianus, ordered an extra two hundred men to Camulodunum and figured the problem was solved.

BOUDICCA: obviously misogyny sucks

BOUDICCA: and no one likes to be underestimated

BOUDICCA: but sometimes that kind discrimination is a gift

BOUDICCA: a gift called the element of surprise even though they saw you coming

Boudicca’s army did not just attack Camulodunum, they razed it. They slaughtered every Roman they could find, even children and the elderly. They defaced graveyards and set buildings ablaze. The head of a statue of Emperor Claudius was crudely hacked off and thrown in a river. Some townspeople barricaded themselves in a temple, but even that couldn’t save them — after two days’ siege, the Britons stormed it and killed everyone inside. The destruction was so intense and so fiery that the layer of soil from that period is a strange orange-red.

BOUDICCA: some people use the term “scorched earth” metaphorically

BOUDICCA: but I’d say I’m more of a literalist

BOUDICCA: some women just want to watch the Roman world burn, I guess

BOUDICCA: again, not in a figurative sense

One curious thing about Boudicca’s sacking of Camulodunum is that it seems to have left no bodies behind. There’s plenty of archeological evidence to show that the city was gutted, but there are no mass graves or deposits of human remains, even though everyone agrees that the Queen of the Iceni authorized wanton mass-murder. Some historians theorize that the Romans later came back and cremated the dead, while some wonder if the high death toll was a bit of exaggeration. Still others have suggested that Boudicca and her people removed the bodies to a nearby oak grove for darker purposes, perhaps some kind of religious rite to Andraste, a local goddess of victory. While Celts of all stripes did enjoy dismembering those they had conquered in battle — they would apparently embalm their heads and put them on display in their homes as trophies — this last theory is probably a little too far-fetched to be true. Then again, given some of the allegations Dio would later make against Boudicca, maybe not.

The destruction was so intense and so fiery that the layer of soil from that period is a strange orange-red.

After Camulodunum, Boudicca turned her gaze toward Londinium. Although it wasn’t a particularly big or important city, Londinium made sense as her next target because, unlike many of the other towns in Roman Britain, Londinium had likely never been a British settlement — it was a Roman enterprise, a trade outpost whose location was chosen because the river there was narrow enough for a bridge but deep enough to accommodate Roman seagoing vessels. By the time Boudicca went on her tear, the young city had already become a bustling centre of commerce, with goods from such distant locations as Spain, Greece, and Syria later uncovered in archeological digs. To strike at Londinium would, in Boudicca’s mind, have been like striking at the heart of the Roman occupation itself.

The Romans had, of course, by now figured out that this was more than a throw-two-hundred-men-at-it-and-call-it-a-day kind of problem. The IXth legion (or, at least, part of it) was dispatched to deal with the unpleasantness at Camulodunum, but they were routed by Britons just north of the colonia. Meanwhile, Suetonius himself, having finished butchering those old harpies on Mona, rushed to Londinium. He somehow made it there before Boudicca, even though he had to cross the breadth of the country and the Britons only had to saunter down the coast. That’s one of the benefits of travelling without children, I guess!

Suetonius had, at least according to Tacitus, initially hoped Londinium could be used as a military stronghold against the Britons. He quickly realized that Londinium was not fortified and was in no way capable of withstanding the type of attack that Camulodunum had suffered. He immediately abandoned the city to its fate.

SUETONIUS: look, I’m a real-talk kind of guy

SUETONIUS: I tell hard truths, and some people think that makes me an asshole

SUETONIUS: but I think it just makes me honest

SUETONIUS: so I honestly told them they were honestly fucked

SUETONIUS: I’m not a magician, I can’t make defences appear from nowhere!

SUETONIUS: so I told them I was going to make a last stand somewhere else

SUETONIUS: and I invited all the able-bodied men to join me

SUETONIUS: which I feel was very generous

It’s not known how many people took Suetonius up on his offer; it’s not even known how large the population of Londinium was at the time, although some estimates place it around 30,000. The residents there were Suetonius’ own people, they were Romans, they were the ones he was supposed to be protecting. But what are a few civilians — women, children, the elderly or disabled — worth when it comes to protecting the Empire? Not much, as it turned out.

Boudicca did to Londinium what she’d done in Camulodunum, but worse. Her brief presence there is also marked by a red layer of soil, about 13 feet below the surface. It’s full of smashed treasures, ruined food stuffs, and debris from the cataclysmic fires that swept through Londinium, which archeological evidence shows burned in excess of 1,000 degrees Celcius. The Britons continued to show no mercy, and slaughtered everyone they could find, sometimes in exquisitely cruel ways.

Boudicca did to Londinium what she’d done in Camulodunum, but worse. Her brief presence there is also marked by a red layer of soil, about 13 feet below the surface.

After Londinium, Boudicca and her forces descended on the settlement of Verulamium, which might seem like a curious choice, since it was neither a settlement full of veterans like Camulodunum or a Roman merchant town like Londinium. In fact, it was a town populated by Britons — specifically, Britons who were friendly to the Roman cause. Although Verulamium suffered the same fiery fate as the two cities that had been sacked before it, excavations of the red layer there show far less debris from personal possessions, which suggests that the inhabitants had time to gather up what was precious to them and flee. Still, according to Tacitus, Boudicca’s tear across the country had left 70,000 dead (although, again, many modern historians agree this figure is likely inflated).

The Britons didn’t just kill citizens of the cities they razed — according to Dio, they often tortured them first. The Roman historian vividly describes the gruesome acts the Britons were alleged to have committed: stripping the “noblest and most distinguished women” naked, cutting off their breasts and sewing them into their mouths, then “impal[ing] the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body.”

Was this another Roman hyperbole meant to paint the Britons in a savage light, or is there some truth to it? Again, dismemberment or disfigurement of enemies was not outside the realm of Celtic practices. If it is true, Boudicca might have found a certain poetic justice in the act of defiling Roman women’s bodies after the violence their men had inflicted on her and her daughters. Sure, these Roman women were innocent civilians, but to the Britons they were still the enemy — interlopers, invaders, colonizers. Hadn’t the British tribes been pushed off their own lands, defrauded, and even killed so that these women could live in peace? A passive beneficiary to violence is still, in some ways, an abettor of it.

The red layer of soil in present-day London has the same curious problem as that in Camulodunum, namely that it isn’t filled with human remains. According to Dio, the Britons followed up each round of sacking with visits to groves dedicated to Andraste and other “sacred places.” There, they held sacrifices and banquets and indulged in “wanton behavior.” It’s possible that the events he’s describing — if they happened at all — were little more than boozy victory celebrations, distorted to fit Dio’s agenda. At this point, who knows? What does seem clear is that Boudicca’s spiritual beliefs seemed just as fervent and uncanny to the Romans as those of the Druids on Mona.

Speaking of the Romans, what were they up to while Boudicca was slashing and burning her way across the country? They were making plans, of course. The Britons had numbers on their side — Dio writes that by the time of the final battle, Boudicca’s army had swollen to 230,000 strong. The Romans only had a tiny fraction of that, but they had the benefit of intensive training and organization, something their enemy sorely lacked.

In fact, the Britons’ whole escapade was a bit haphazard from beginning to end. They seemed more interested in killing and plundering than they were in actually engaging the Roman forces. They’d missed several key chances to attack Suetonius while he was travelling to and from London. Why hadn’t they set an ambush for him the way they had for the IXth Legion back at Camulodunum? Maybe, drunk on their successes (and, no doubt, actual alcohol), they believed themselves to be invincible, or maybe they genuinely didn’t realize that the absolute worst thing they could do was give the Romans more time. Maybe they just thought their uprising was just too big to fail. Whatever their reasoning, it’s possible that victory may have been within the Britons’ grasp and they fucked it up.

No one is quite sure where the final battle took place, although many historians think it was somewhere in the West Midlands. According to Tacitus, Suetonius chose a spot with a forest on one side and open fields on the other, and then positioned his troops so that they weren’t vulnerable to British ambushes. Tacitus also tells us that Suetonius had 10,000 men with him, which means that even if there were only half as many Britons as Dio says, their forces were still more than ten times bigger than that of the Romans. As the two sides arranged themselves on the field, more than one Roman soldier must have wondered if this was going to be a battle or a bloodbath.

Both Tacitus and Dio have Boudicca addressing her troops before the battle; this is where Dio’s description of her as a large, be-necklaced woman with a bossy voice comes from. He has her finish the speech by calling out an invocation to Andraste and then releasing a hare from underneath her skirts (the direction it ran was supposed to predict who would win the battle). In Tacitus’ version, she speaks from her chariot, riding up and down her lines with her daughters on either side of her, telling those assembled that “it was indeed usual for Britons to fight under the leadership of women.” Both versions of the speech give off a noble savage sort of vibe: together, the Britons would throw off the shackles of Rome! Their ways were superior and more natural than those of their invaders! It would be better to follow the ways of their ancestors in impoverished freedom than to live as slaves with Roman wealth! Of course, there’s almost no chance that either of these speeches could be accurate — Boudicca would not have been speaking Latin to her people, and the Romans who were present would not have understood the British language. The words that Dio and Tacitus put in Boudicca’s mouth say more about them and how they wanted to portray the Britons than they do about anything else.

BOUDICCA: I mean, my people don’t need me to explain to them that we don’t mind women leaders

BOUDICCA: especially not when I’m literally in front of them?

BOUDICCA: but I guess Tacitus’ audience needed to hear it

BOUDICCA: at least he didn’t say my voice was ugly, unlike some historians I could name

The battle was an absolute shitshow for the Britons. They might have been numerous, but they weren’t seasoned warriors like their opponents — don’t forget that Boudicca’s following was largely made up of random men, women, and children who had joined her ranks as she marched across the country. They were far more likely to be farmers than trained soldiers, and they lacked the weaponry and armour of the Romans. Not only that, but the Britons had stationed their wagons — packed with their animals and children — in a ring around the back of the battlefield, which meant that when the Romans started pushing forward, the Britons were effectively trapped by their own people. And push forward the Romans did, killing everything in their path — even the women and “beasts of burden,” according to Tacitus. He also reported that 80,000 Britons died, as compared to only 400 Romans.

The words that Dio and Tacitus put in Boudicca’s mouth say more about them and how they wanted to portray the Britons than they do about anything else.

Boudicca died too, although not in battle; Tacitus says she drank poison, while Dio merely tells us that she “fell sick and died.” It’s possible that the Romans had her killed — Tacitus never specifies exactly who administered the poison — but that wouldn’t have been their style. They were more a “dress our conquered enemies up in golden chains and publicly humiliate them in the streets of Rome” type of people. Then again, it’s possible that Suetonius knew that parading a defeated Boudicca around might not have the effect he hoped for. There would have been little glory in having bested a woman on the battlefield, and in showing off Boudicca to a home audience, there was a good chance that he was the one who would have been humiliated. What kind of man nearly has his territory wrested from him by a lady, and a barbarian to boot? This is why the size of the British horde had to be exaggerated, why Dio had to go out of his way to describe Boudicca as large and hyper-masculine — to have struggled so hard against a smaller number of backwoods savages led by a woman would have been emasculating in the extreme. That being said, suicide is the more likely option. Boudicca had seen first-hand what the Romans did to British women who disagreed with them. Like Cleopatra before her and, possibly, Zenobia after her, she might have felt that self-inflicted death was the least painful course of action.

What kind of man nearly has his territory wrested from him by a lady, and a barbarian to boot?

What about her daughters, the two girls who helped spark the rebellion? Neither Dio nor Tacitus says what happened to them, so we can only speculate. Maybe they died in the battle. Maybe Boudicca slipped them a dose of poison. Maybe the Romans captured them. Maybe they escaped, went into hiding, lived out the rest of their lives as farmer’s wives who, on cold nights, would spin tales for their children about watching Londinium burn.

It’s frustrating that so little concrete information about Boudicca exists, not just because it would be satisfying to fill the gaps in her story, but because the existing records reduce her to this one, brief period in her life. What was her life like back before she entered recorded history as a bloodthirsty warrior queen? I try to imagine her in quiet moments of bliss — on her wedding night, or touching her daughters’ hair as they sleep, or hurtling alone in a chariot down a track. I hope that even in her last days she had times when she felt happy, or at least powerful. I hope she enjoyed every second of those debauched victory feasts.

There is no record of where Boudicca was buried. Several theories have sprung up over the years, including one that says her remains are somewhere under Platform 8 at King’s Cross Station. English writer Jane Holland published a collection of poems called Boudicca & Co. in 2006, the final poem closes with the lines “The end/was confused. Some screaming, vomit./It hurt, I know that much./Nothing else. Just good British dirt/and closing my mouth on it.”

This is how I like to imagine Boudicca: somewhere deep in the rich, dark, earth, nothing but nourishment now. She is reborn again and again, in the stories that we tell, in the fires in our bellies, in every fight against injustice, even the ones that feel unwinnable. She is the opposite of those dead red layers of earth that mark her passing. She is nothing but life now.

LONG LIVE THE FUCKING QUEEN

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Previously:

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Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based writer whose bylines can be found all over the internet, including at the Guardian, the London Review of Books and, obviously, Longreads. She truly believes that your favourite Tudor wife says more about you than your astrological sign. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. You can find her on Twitter @anne_theriault.

Editor: Krista Stevens Fact Checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo Illustrator: Louise Pomeroy

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Illustration by Carolyn Wells

Jeanna Kadlec| Longreads | April 2021 | 2,936 words (11 minutes)

Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude.

But those are observations without analysis, which is to say: pointing out the obvious without asking why or how. The subtext of these clickbait articles and listicles is often: Disney codes villains as queer because Disney thinks being gay is bad. Which is one way to read it.

However, simply saying “Disney is bigoted” has never sat entirely well with me for one reason: In spite of what the Supreme Court of the United States may rule, Disney is not a person. Disney is a corporation that wields the power of a nation-state, and, consequently, has one central obsession — the preservation and expansion of that power, a theme that is prevalent and evident in every story they allow their employees and contractors to tell. 

If queerness is consistently coded a certain way, it has something to do with how Disney wants power to function — who can wield it, and how. 

***

Millennials are the generation whose childhoods were shaped by the stories of the Disney Renaissance, a period generally considered to have begun with 1989’s The Little Mermaid and concluded with 1999’s Tarzan. It includes favorites like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan — which, incidentally, are at the heart of the corporation’s “live-action” remake strategy, intended to further monetize a now-grown generation’s nostalgia for the stories that formed us, stories we can share with our own children (or group texts). 

The Disney Renaissance was birthed after a decade of HIV/AIDS ravaging queer communities; its height marked by political milestones such as President Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and the institution of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for LGBTQ+ members of the military. Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power. 

Indeed, there were so many queer-coded villains in this period that it’s hard to remember them all — let alone the different lessons they taught us. To wit, you probably remember Scar, Jafar, and Ursula, but you have probably forgotten Governor Ratcliffe from 1995’s Pocahontas: the fashion-conscious, social-climbing, crown-appointed governor in charge of the colonizing “mission” to the “New World.”

Pocahontas has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that’s generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’ father, saying “these white men are dangerous” has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film’s historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial’s “comfort film” rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn’t helped, either.) 

Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing queer villainy. But that’s the thing: Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film’s conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity. 

Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power.

Disney’s attitudes toward colonization and queer coding are, it turns out, inextricably linked. By using a queer-coded villain, the corporation entirely elides white responsibility in retelling a historical tragedy, letting the cowboy-type colonizers off the hook for any wrongdoing and, instead, reframing them as the heroes of the story. In Pocahontas, Disney pulls off the magic trick of telling a story about colonization and genocide where the only thing that’s actually punished is the “wrong” kind of masculinity. 

***

Governor Ratcliffe is not set up as the villain because he is a colonizer, or even because he is in charge of the mission to invade the Powhatan nation — or, as Disney has framed it, dig for gold. To criticize him for these positions would implicate and damage the purported “heroism” of every other white character on screen. 

Something else, then, must indicate his villainy, and Ratcliffe violates Disney’s favorite American norms — individualism, hard work, modesty — immediately. He wears bows in his hair and a literal feather in his cap. His twinky manservant, Wiggins, helps dress him, and is even in charge of bathing his dog … and let’s take a moment to discuss the dog. Unless fighting, Ratcliffe is rarely seen not carrying his white pug, Percy, who is always adorned in a collar that is fancier than anything the crew are wearing. Disney villains’ animal familiars tell us something about their personality, and Percy’s taste for luxury speaks volumes about Ratcliffe’s lifestyle. 

Ratcliffe prefers to delegate rather than do physical labor himself, a standard managerial practice, but not something heroes do. He belittles his workers when things don’t go well, seeing his crew as a means to an end and insulting them as “witless peasants” behind closed doors.

The narrative works to align the audience’s viewpoint with that of the other colonizers: in the words of one of the laborers, “Look at us! No gold, no food, while Ratcliffe sits in his tent all day, happy as a clam.” The audience is clearly meant to sympathize with the worker instead of Ratcliffe, the villainous manager, even if that worker is also occupying stolen land and explicitly fantasizing about killing Indigenous people. (What “audience,” exactly, is this for? You already know the answer.) 


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However, it isn’t just that Ratcliffe is a bullying, well-dressed boss in an environment where no one is impressed by designer wares. He’s deeply insecure and concerned about what other people think, as opposed to the naturally popular, carefree everyman that is the Captain of the ship (and Pocahontas’ eventual love interest) John Smith. In fact, we learn that this mission is something of a last-ditch effort to salvage Ratcliffe’s reputation with the king. For him, success means falling in line, trying to do right by the crown, to reap the reward. When he says “it’s not that I’m bitter,” we understand that he is, in fact, deeply bitter.

Ratcliffe’s real fantasy is power — bringing his enemies at court to heel, being so celebrated that “My dear friend King Jimmy will probably build me a shrine” — precisely because he feels so ironically powerless.

This is not the kind of chaotic, burn-it-all-down villain who has been canonized by drag shows. 

***

A casual Google search reveals that Ratcliffe does not even show up on most “Gay Disney Villain” lists. Something about him elides memory and decisive categorization as other, encouraging a certain slippage. 

He isn’t as easy to pin down as the Queer Villains of Excess: the Scars and Ursulas who you can spot by their muchness, their refusal to conform to rigid social structures, their wild desire to usurp the throne. Excess is the singular quality that usually drives queer-coded villains to crave power at all costs, their appetites monstrous and unnatural. 

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures — they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to do with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. “Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in No Future — the anthem of Disney villains everywhere. 

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film’s conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity.

The opposite of excess is moderation, and restraining oneself to fit into the boxes society has prescribed — well, this is assimilation. 

Assimilation is when a group of people assumes the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group — when something core and essential to one’s culture and sense of self and identity is lost in the interest of resembling the social majority. In the U.S., this has had many iterations around the suppression of non-English languages, the forced Christianization of Indigenous peoples, and more. For the LGBTQ+ community, it looks like our communities having been largely underground until the last 50 or so years, because social legibility meant imprisonment, exile, or death 

In many ways, for many people, various forms of assimilation are pure survival in a white, heteronormative, and otherwise profoundly difficult world. But assimilation used against one’s own community, assimilation used to turn the target off your own back and toward communities with less cultural power than yours, becomes an alliance with the oppressor. 

Ratcliffe is a queer-coded villain whose trademark is assimilation, not excess. This is why he slips and slides through millennial memory — hard to remember, hard to pin down. He isn’t an outsider, an icon to queer children everywhere, an individualist who has chosen himself at all costs, someone who we grew up both terrified of and wanting to become. No. He is trying desperately to fit in, to use the white supremacist system to his own benefit. But working for the system always comes with a price. 

***

There is a queer anxiety to Ratcliffe, because he knows his attempts to fit in are pretense. This is, as he says himself, “my last chance for glory.” Does he exile himself from the crew of colonizers because he thinks he’s better than them, or because he thinks they’ll see through him? Or both? Captain John Smith can have a beer with the guys. Ratcliffe, not so much.

Holding the title of “governor” in a servile bureaucracy doesn’t guarantee respect. Rugged masculinity and physicality — the kind Smith has — does. On a certain level, Ratcliffe both understands and resents this: “The men like Smith, don’t they?” he asks his manservant Wiggins. Even their voices tell the story: Ratcliffe is the villainous bureaucrat, complete with an English accent. Smith is the heroic adventurer — with Mel Gibson’s American accent intact and unfettered. 

John Smith has swagger — and a reputation that precedes him. “You can’t fight Indians without John Smith!” one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship. Depicted as a natural leader, he’s respected by his men for his physical prowess and bravery that borders on stupidity. Smith has a martyr-like willingness to put himself in harm’s way for his men that, while not explicitly labeled as Christian, is certainly coded as such. “You’d do the same for me,” Smith says jokingly to his companions, after leaping into the ocean during a storm to save a man who fell overboard. He is, in essence, exactly the kind of leading man that Mel Gibson, the actor who voices him, spent a career playing — the mythic American cowboy and ideal leading man of Hollywood cinema. (Complete with the domestic abuse and antisemitism bona fides.) 

Queer-coded Ratcliffe is trying to earn a place in the system by being its most traditional guardian, but he also represents a kind of masculinity that has long since gone indoors to the Royal Court, concerned with accumulation through relationship and intellect. Americans recognize this as the masculinity of the educated, high-born (or aspirational) cultural aesthete, anxieties about which would soon manifest in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s under the term “metrosexual.” John Smith, conversely, represents the rugged, individualist masculinity that defines itself not by social status but by a cowboy mentality, by connection with God, family, and the land.  

In many ways, Pocahontas is structured like a Western, and John Smith may as well be John Wayne. John Smith saves the man who fell overboard; Ratcliffe is the government lackey in a suit who hunkers down in his cabin and only emerges once the danger has passed, clutching his pug while his manservant shields him with an umbrella. Government intervention is often a primary conflict in Westerns, resented by white colonizers played by actors like Wayne, who have gone west and figured out a way to live (with varying levels of hostility to the local Indigenous community) outside of federal oversight. The men in suits have effeminate mannerisms, a lot of education, and virtually no physical strength (coded as natural, God-given virility), with very little idea on how to practically connect to the world around them. Set aside for a moment the well-documented historical phenomenon of white, Black, and Latino gay cowboys throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and apply the genre of American Westerns and their ideology of masculinity, expansion, and, consequently, who gets to have what in Pocahontas

What do the colonizers want, respectively, in Pocahontas? (Obvious question, but stay with me.) In Ratcliffe’s villain anthem, “Mine, Mine, Mine” — which is, and I cannot stress this enough, a duet with John Smith — Ratcliffe is singing about the gold allowing him to accumulate wealth and reputation and status, delegating the digging to the crew. Smith is the one actually singing about the land while climbing trees and waterfalls, activities which seem unnecessarily strenuous. But don’t they want the same thing: to take whatever land they land on in the interest of colonial expansion? Haven’t Smith and Ratcliffe already been shown to be very much on the same page about the murder and displacement of Indigenous peoples? But Disney’s edit would have you think otherwise. 

John Smith has swagger — and a reputation that precedes him. “You can’t fight Indians without John Smith!” one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship.

Beneath the surface, anxieties about all-too-contemporary masculinity and what constitutes manhood are relocated to the center of the driving conflict of Pocahontas — one that allows a corporation to elide reckoning with the violent historical subject matter of the actual plot. 

And therein is the issue: Ratcliffe becomes the villain because Smith, his fellow colonizer, cannot be. 

***

In the end, Ratcliffe’s men turn on him. At first glance, it might seem like they are doing so out of sympathy for Pocahontas and her people, as Ratcliffe had been trying to assassinate her father, Chief Powhatan. But this is not it — the other white men don’t try to stop him when he first aims his gun, not until he accidentally shoots John Smith, who is shown taking a bullet for the chief (which is, please note, a fictional event that did not happen). 

“You shot him!” one accuses. “Smith was right all along!” another cries hypocritically, as all of them had been worked up in a racist war song (“Savages”), fantasizing about genocide only the night before. The white colonizers mutiny in favor of the preferred masculine archetype: The Cowboy. Ratcliffe is tied up, gagged, and set to be tried upon return to England. 

It is deeply satisfying to see the avowedly racist Ratcliffe in chains. But is the colonizing and racist rhetoric what he’s being punished for? No. The other colonizers are still walking free, many of them staying behind to continue to build up their Jamestown settlement. 

Colonizing isn’t worthy of punishment in this film, nor is racism, otherwise every white character — John Smith included — would be in chains. The reality is that Ratcliffe is punished for failing to assimilate within the crew successfully, for not embodying the right kind of masculinity, for not reading the room, and attacking the much-respected cowboy-esque leader who the men ultimately mutiny for. This is his crime: not trying to assassinate Chief Powhatan, but wounding one of his own. Meanwhile, Thomas, a colonizer who explicitly murders an Indigenous warrior, Kocoum, is given … a redemption arc, complete with Pocahontas’ forgiveness. 

How tenuous the conditions of acceptance for white gays doing the bidding of white supremacy. 

***

Ratcliffe is, simply put, a Corporate Gay, a Log Cabin Republican, a Cyrus Bean, the Disney equivalent of (allegedly) that one senator from South Carolina. Ratcliffe has bought into the idea that serving the system will benefit him, and that if only he does its bidding, things will ultimately work out. But queerness renders you automatically suspect within any system of power, even white supremacy. What Ratcliffe, and other white gays like him, fail to realize is that assimilation is not acceptance; it is merely borrowed time. 

There is a savvy to the Queer Villains of Excess like Scar and Ursula, who understand that there is no utility in trying to fit in, who know that there is no box possibly small enough to cram your queer ass into. But, truth be told, even these villains have boundaries they won’t cross, only ever wanting to kill the king and usurp his throne — but never outright abolish abusive systems of power. 

There is no queer revolution amongst Disney villains, see. There is no abolition, no truly radical liberation within the fairy tales that ultimately serve to codify what “happily ever after” means, and for who. In Disney, queerness is only ever an imitation of the hetero original, never a full expression of itself. Gay villains are depicted as the dog who caught the car: Once they get it, what do they even do?

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Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells