Caro || Issue 1

caro

EVERYTHING IN THIS ZINE WAS CREATED BY MARIE AN-
NETOINETTE, UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED
Issue 1: The Introduction
3 The End of All Things
4 Letter From the Editor
4 Mixtape: Starview Avenue
6 But You Can’t Stand to See Me That Way
10 The Girl I Am and the Girl You Want Me
to Be, Pt. 1
11 Let’s Talk About: ANIMORPHS
14 The Girl I Am and the Girl You Want Me
to Be, Pt. 2
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The End of All Things
I'm having one of those experiences; you know the ones: you're looking at a picture
of yourself in the past and thinking "I was small , I was cute, If I could
have seen myself then with the eyes I have now."
But I couldn't then and I can't now. Hammered into my mind are the same epithets
from 5th grade that refuse to be worn away by time: Hurricane. Tornado. Gorilla-
Godzilla. It's difficult to erase words associated with natural destruction. For
a long time I refused to acknowledge them at all; but while I was pretending
that I hadn't been called a disaster of epic proportions just because my body
took up more room. But an idea is an unkillable virus and as I grew (older and
fatter) the sickness took hold.
It was hard to feel my heart breaking on the rocks of an 11-year-old's words,
and more difficult to understand that the only reason his words were so effective
was because I believe them and continued to believe them.
The picture in this
poetic collage is
myself and it's not
my most flattering
or my best pose.
It's not artful because
I didn't feel
artistic. This is
just my body...
parts of it anyway.
But parts that are
unavoidably fat and
trouble to the rest
of me. For a long
time I've avoided
looking at them
while bemoaning the
fact that I have no
pictures of myself.
No more avoidance.
If I'm going to be a
disaster I'm going
to be a magical one,
answering unspoken
questions, and hiding
the answers everyone
already thinks
they know. I will
only allow myself to
be touched by the
pure-of-heart, by
those who mean me no
harm.
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Thank you for reading
caro! Caro is a perzine
in the truest sense of
the term; it’s a public
journal; a place for the
germination of my art,
academic writing, and
poetry; a conversation
starter; and—if you know
how to read it right—a
folded and faded map to
my innermost being. I’ve
included original writing,
collage art, and
the ubiquitous mixtapes.
(see right ->)
I’m reminded of a quote
from Book about Zines
here, “Sometimes only
the page will listen” As
a young poor Southern
Black girl, it was true;
sometimes I only had the
pages of my journal to
express everything I
felt and feared. But
while I enjoyed writing, the anonymity— the quiet— the
cloistered and private nature of journaling never sat-
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isfied my exhibitionist itch. I’ve been publishing
newsletters, zines, and chapbooks for family and close
friends since I was nine and I’ve been working on this
project for about four years.
While there may be contributions
from other
friends of mine who
love to share, most of
the art and writing you
see here will be mine.
I’ll be discussing my
personal perspective on
everything from family,
culture, race, class,
art, religion, entertainment,
fashion, gender
and sexuality, history,
philosophy… Honestly
anything that
comes to mind that I’d
like to share. I hope
you enjoy the experience
and don’t be
afraid to email me in
response to anything
you see here! My contact
info is on the
back cover and I’d love
to reason together. :)
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I know that the manic-pixie-dream-girl trope isn't seen as
very feminist but you have to understand that-to reference
Kerry Washington- it's not often that we as Black women get
to be seen as beautiful, delicate, eccentric, otherworldly,
and fey, even when we have those traits! So it's a step up
for me to even be considered a MPDG, you know?
There’s this...feminine persona that is widely appreciated
and I see that it’s a part me a part of who I am. I identify
with that narrative. But I also realize that few others
see this persona in me, the way I do. I caught and still
sometimes catch myself trying to massage away the aspects
of myself that stopped others from seeing the manic pixie
dream girl in me (my fatness, my blackness). I remember
walking in this park in my town after I'd gotten off work
and it was the perfect place to do a photo shoot. I was
seeing myself in different dresses and poses and honestly?
It was a lot of stuff that, I felt (feel) would never happen,
and even if it did it wouldn't look the way I planned
and would basically be an utter failure and I would be a
pitiable laughing stock. Not because the visual concepts
were shitty, but because I was too fat, too black, and too
broke to ever pull it off. And it just dropped into my mind
that I never got the chance to be the girl I wanted to be.
I’ve been using the phrase “the girl I am and the girl you
want me to be" over and over for the last few years, and I
finally understood what I myself meant by that. Between the
girl I am and the girl you--whoever “you” is; my mother, my
family, society at large--want me to be, I never got to be
the girl I wanted to be and... That was a hard revelation,
you know? I'm 25, I never got to be the girl I wanted to
be, and now that chance is completely gone. It hurt. I managed
not to cry but only just. That revelation felt like an
important part of my had died. After a while of trying to
keep my composure, I just thought, "Well, what about the
woman you want to be?" And I had to resign myself, you
know, and about face. That point in my life is gone and it
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hurts that I felt (sometimes, still feel) so unfulfilled.
But, I can still be the woman I have in mind, the woman I
really am.
It's true that this movie character trope is riddled with
sexist male-gaze tripe, but it's funny. I mean this dream
girl, basically a modern muse embodying every stereotype
about women's mental instability, fickle nature, etc.
wrapped up in one uber twee package. What should be appealing
about that?
I think that my favorite online discussion about this trope
is actually from two years ago on Racialicious and by Tami
Winfrey Harris* and the comments are mostly well thoughtout
and insightful though they come from several different
directions and perspectives.
On one hand the trope is particularly problematic, in that
it promotes a two-dimensional character that is really only
created for the purpose of helping a male character deal
with his problems and to better understand himself or the
world, and that it is also a part of this movement back to
harmless unaggressive traditional womanhood and promotes
the idea of white female infantilization.
However, what I've seen in more recent years—most notably
on social media outlets, such as tumblr—are attempts to
subvert or invert the idea of the carefree, diy, softgrunge,
pastel goth, manic pixie, hipster muse, and make
that adorable childlike girl the main character of the her
own story. The focus is shifted to her ideas, her feelings,
and her problems as a fully-fleshed out character, with the
intent of taking back all expressions of femininity and
womanhood.
That is not to say that there aren’t still a myriad issues;
much of the inversion/subversion is just as alienating as
the original trope, because even though the male-gaze is
being removed, the race, body, and class aspects of this
trope are never addressed: which, let's be honest, is not
unusual for mainstream (read: white) feminism. Black women
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are almost never acknowledged to be these women. And poor
(fat) black woman doing any of these adorable twee hipster
things are pretty much never seen as adorable or twee or
hipsters by the general media-consuming public. On some
level, this seems like a compliment; at least we aren't being
reduced to super-feminine stereotypes and being infantilized,
right? And I would agree until I realized what
this means is that as a Black woman, I was not seen as capable
of being feminine and pretty and dreamy or, or, or...
impossibly twee. A black girl dyes her hair unnatural iridescent
colors and she ends up on the Ratchet Mess tumbr. A
white girl does the same and she ends up on trending the
same media platform and pinned to Pinterest boards worldwide.
And not only that, but Black female children weren’t
allowed to be children, even in this context. They are labeled
as hypersexual even before puberty, where white woman
can and do embody the idea of sacred childlike-(non) sexuality
aka virginity. And while both of these are oppressive...
I'm not gonna lie, the grass looks greener.
This is a problem in the Black community, as well, though
the class, color, and body restrictions are slightly different
than in the white community. However, there is still
so much absorption of the white beauty ideal and the white
feminine ideal, even among Black women. It's been remixed
and refit to reflect the more of the African American aesthetic,
but it is not removed... I remember going to a
sleepover and apparently plenty of the girl had gas, we had
all had barbecue food earlier so yeah beans, you've all
been there. So the girls, the other girls, the thinner,
lighter-skinned, looser-curled, socially-accepted-asadorable
girls, fart and laugh at each other and think it's
so funny. They have none of the fear that I have, that if I
joined in, people (they) would look at me with reproach and
disgust. And they never wonder why it is they are allowed
to talk about their bodies and their bodily functions and I
am not. Not without losing all desirability and any credibility
as a “lady”. They burp the alphabet in front of
their boyfriends and everyone think "Oh she's so down to
earth and approachable, a cute girl who’s not stuck up at
all!" I accidentally burp as quietly as possible with my
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mouth closed and my hand covering my mouth and politely say
excuse afterward and... People’s faces change, they sneer,
they're distant, they don’t look me in the eye and I can’t
help but think they’re wondering why I was even allowed to
be at this party or in this group. They express the fact
that they are horny and the reaction is “Wow, a cute girl
who is open and accepting of herself as a sexual being;
that’s so awesome!” I express the same sentiment and—even
though I’m the one with the least sexual experience— the
looks of disgust return. Anything that strayed from the hyper-feminine
behavior expected of me sent me from being the
slightly invisible, supportive friend to the scary fat
black sex monster; a succubus ugly, utterly undesirable,
and frighteningly insatiable. But on the other hand, the
rest of the world is telling me that I had better not
strive too hard for that which is impossible, to be seen as
feminine and womanly and attractive or I would become the
butt of the joke, only worth noticing to note her failure
at being woman. I hold no bitterness (I try to hold no bitterness)
but these are my personal experiences, and many
other black girls and women can corroborate them with similar
experience.
What the MPDG critics seem not to understand is that it is
just as radical for a poor woman and/or fat woman and/or
woman of color to declare herself a girl, as always having
been a girl, as deserving of girlhood and the protections
and value that come along with that, as anyone else. They
don’t understand that it’s radical for a woman to say that
the things she does because she is poor (knitting, gardening,
sewing, biking, drink cheap beer, whatever) have just
as much, IF NOT MORE, value when she does them than when
someone does so because it's trendy and in. That the embracing
of the manic pixie dream girl role/aesthetic is not
to reinforce oppressive gender roles but to be human.
Yes. It's true. Sometimes, I can be impossibly adorable.
And *sorry, not sorry* everyone should recognize it.
9

A few weeks ago I logged onto tumblr (who
am I kidding, I just typed ‘t’ into my address
bar, I don’t log out and Chrome already knows
to take me directly to my dashboard). I
scrolled past the styling of my peers, rants
about when a post from fyanimorphs.tumblr.com
caught my attention: Animorphs had been added
to Netflix.
Animorphs was originally a book series
written by K.A. Applegate and ghostwritten by
several others for the Scholastic Reading
Club. The novel series was about four teenagers and an alien
from the Andalite homeworld fighting an invasion of other slug
-like aliens called Yeerks, who invaded humans brains with the
plan to take over the planet. The teens (Jake, Marco, Rachel,
Cassie, and Tobias) encounter the crashed ship of the Andalite
prince, Elfangor. Elfangor gives the teens the ability acquire
the dna o an living being and morph into it before he is captured
and eaten by Visser 3, the only Yeerk to take over an
Andalite body and therefore the only Yeerk with morphing capbilites
like the Andalites. The young adolescent Andalite— Aximili
Esgarrouth Isthill followed his brother Elfangor to
Earth. Ax is found by the teens and joins the them in their
efforts at guerilla warfare against the Yeerk invasion.
I regularly gathered my pennies, nickel,
dimes, and quarters to buy the Animorphs
books and checked out the ones I couldn’t
buy from the school library. For a good portion
of the students in my fourth and fifth
grade class, Animorphs and any memorabilia
associated with it was hot shit. Reminiscing
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over Animorphs brings back not only memories
of the books themselves but of furious
classroom trading to make sure everyone
who was interested go a chance to read
the latest novel.
I’ve been trying to buy the full set
of novels and spinoffs for awhile but the
money just hasn't been there and being
able to watch the series Nickelodeon produced
was the next best thing. I sat one
weekend for my usual binge watch and was
thrown back in time. I remember the profound mixed feeling of
excitement and disappointment: excitement at the prospect of a
long-loved favorite of mine was being realized as a television
show—one of the first in what is now a well-established trend
of turning YA novels into movies and TV shows—and disappointment
at the casting, the writing, the obviously limited budget,
and the overall execution of the series. I knew it wasn’t going
to last for that reason alone, and it didn’t.
Also we were just entering the world of creating actually
compelling series for teens involving real moral dilemmas, real
blood, and real character development. Animorphs was groundbreaking
as a Scholastic series and is known by its fans for
one of the few if not the only children’s series dealing with
the realities of being at war. It’s apparent that the TV show
attempted to capture the essence of the series, but the limitations
of a Nickelodeon budget at that time worked against what
could have been a mind-altering sci-fi premier for kids was instead
a parade of whitewashing, racial stereotypes, badly constructed
costumes and bad animation. Cassie is much lighter
than the medium dark brown depicted in the books, all the characters
are a older (not unusual nowadays with actors in their
mid-twenties playing fifteen year olds; fortunately it’s not
that bad), and Marco uses an amount of what the producers must
have thought was appropriate street slang I don’t remember from
the character in the books. His sense of humor also isn’t quite
the same and Marco's humor is one of the *highlights* of the
novel series.
However even with all those drawbacks the series still had
the power to pull me in. By the third episode the actors find
their stride and while there are some changes in how Yeerk bi-
12

ology is explained, for the most part the TV series is faithful
to the novels. I hope that the renewed interest in 1990s nostalgia
will prompt a television or movie series remake that
will deliver on the efforts of the Nickelodeon series and do
justice to beloved work of K.A. Applegate.
(Two) Animorphs Fansites
1. http://cinnamonbunzuh.blogspot.com
Cinnamon Bunzuh offers comprehensive and absolutely hilarious
reviews of every Animorphs book, incluing the Megamorphs series,
the Chronicles series, and the Alternamorphs series
with original graphics. The blog (run by Ifi and Adam) is a
great way to catch up on any of the books you’ve missed! Don’
t be afraid to drop by and leave a comment or two :).
2. http://fyanimorphs.tumblr.com
Fuck Yeah Animorphs is a tumblr that hosts fanart, pictures
of Animorphs fans’ collections, and pulls some of the most
pithy or poignant quotes from the book.
3. Honestly, there are many many more than this but you can find
them yourself! Enjoy!
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CREATOR/EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
MARIE ANNETOINETTE
marieannetoinette@gmail.com
ABOUT Caro
Sometimes you just need an outlet for all
the questions; caro is an invitation for
brain dump and discussion, to marvel and to
reason together.
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