The Advocate Building was erected in 1956, to much fanfare. On our ninetieth anniversary, we attached a set of pegasi wings to a white horse, affixed the poor horse to a giant dictionary, and had it chew through the ceremonial red ribbon to announce the opening of the new building. T.S. Eliot cablegrammed an ode, Donald Hall and President Pusey spoke. The onlookers applauded. “The dedication was followed by revelry,” the Crimson wrote.
Nobody said that us artists weren’t a dramatic bunch.
In the years since, our lovely Ma Advo has ebbed and flowed with the times. A Crimson article from 1982 describes the house: “A hole in a carpet, a lamp without a shade, a curious emptiness to the threadbare offices all evoke a feeling that good times have come and gone.” And yet, the good times kept coming. Forty one years since the article, the Advocate is teeming with life.
& this is the transient, cyclical experience of the college campus. Within four years, no one you thought that you knew would be there anymore. The rooms are empty, they are filled with young people you don’t know, the inscriptions on the wall are in the handwriting of someone who you’ll never meet and know and say thank you for the bit of poetry that you wrote in Sharpie on the wall. I think about it often, and I hope you are okay.
This semester, the Advocate thought deeply about places & their meanings. We’ve given our beloved 21 South Street a total makeover. We’ve rouged her lips, painted her face, made her insides all nice and pretty. We’ve furnished the interior, we’ve scrubbed, polished, swept away any blemishes. Within a semester, the Advocate has become a livable space, far from carpet holes and curious emptinesses.
In between midterms and parties, we thought about belonging & alienation, being of here & also not of here at the same time. Sazi Bongwe ‘26 writes about the magnetic rush of his hometown, Johannesburg, in “Nobody’s Paris,” while Maren Wong ‘26 ponders estrangement on the fall from Weekes Bridge into the Charles River. Frank Liu ‘26 talks to Peter Hessler about joining the Peace Corps and finding nostalgia and affection for Fuling, China, “a Sichuan river town known for pickled mustard stems and little else.”
In Victoria Kishoiyian ‘26’s interview with Hilton Als, she asks him what it was like to exit adolescence. “It was easier to be connected to lovers because you don’t have to be someone else in your own home,” he answers. I think often about the simultaneous freedom and tethering of the college campus. A sort of transition home, a perpetual first crack in the egg.
Imaan Mirza ‘25 summarizes the push and pull of one’s hometown beautifully. “I don’t think of it as home, not exactly,” she writes about her childhood city, Jeddah. “I could navigate the city blindfolded, but I couldn’t tell you if it ever was home to me.”
The Poetry Board walks through transitions with their selections this semester. Tracy K. Smith celebrates President Claudine Gay’s Inauguration in “Panoramic,” and Edie Meade contemplates creases in “Experiments in Folding Paper.” Danny Liu ‘27 dances with Gustav Klimt in his poem “Second.”
Richard Siken contemplates life from bed. “Time / passed. Day turned to night. I woke and slept. I drank, I ate a / bit, I slept.”
A lone girl screams in a cage of red in Ava Salzman ‘23’s self-portrait “Ava.”
O, what it is like to be a home that no one stays in for very long.
Juliet describes the sickly feeling of getting older: “I think the reason I could be friends with him is that the first time I met him he said he wanted to be a child again. That he couldn’t stand the homesickness,” Juliet Coe ‘25 writes. She’s writing about miracles just as Gina Gwen Palacios’ mixed media subject sits expectantly on her suitcase in “Esperando/Esperar I,” and the soft lines of her dissipating “Family Portrait.”
The Fiction Board was interested in imagined settings, of places that don’t exist but are still eerily familiar. Suphil Lee Park is nostalgic for a future Korea in “The Last City of Ours.” Dylan Ragas ‘26 takes us back to summer camp in “The Bison.” In “Pieces,” Serena Jampel ‘25 tracks a mother and her son, falling apart and growing older. Graeme Benzanson takes us “up the Waterway, through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, and back across the Gulf of Mexico” in “America’s Great Loop.”
This issue of the Advocate is bounded and finite on all four sides, just like a house should be. Just like our plucky white building, who will weather another sixty-seven years of hopeful students, walking in and out like a revolving door, looking for something, somewhere, where – just for a moment – they can feel at home.
The Harvard Advocate proudly presents: Fall / Winter 2023
2025