Zoya Azhar ’20 | Associate Editor
When I told my friends I would be spending the summer at the end of my sophomore year in the Valley, all of them told me to brace myself.
After spending a stressful year in Northampton, complete with snow storms, I can understand why it isn’t the ideal place to spend the summer; one should be “getting away.” Besides, it would seem very easy to exhaust all that Northampton has to offer in a few days.
And so, I didn’t think about the actual advice too much; I just took it and started to mourn the small-town idleness that (surely) awaited me.
I didn’t have a terrible time, in fact, but I did struggle with the town in a way I never did during the year. I was forced to think harder about why the first piece of advice my friends gave me was to “brace myself.”
If you talk to anyone who has lived in Northampton or even passed through the town, there is an overwhelming sense of how interesting and rich the community is. There are interesting people around every corner, up in the apartments atop the shops and restaurants on Main Street and moving in and out of town every day. Yet, I also found that it is very hard to seek out interesting people and interesting conversations.
For one thing, I think when people say “interesting” they mean diverse, culturally rich and probably, of color. And I did not encounter many people of color within Northampton itself. Additionally, even though the multitude and variety of activities and events around the Valley in the summer is overwhelming, it is very hard to get to these places. Public transport routes failed me spectacularly in the summer. I had to miss so many small theater shows, art installations and lectures simply because the bus couldn’t get me there and I didn’t have a car.
Even when I had made my peace with the mobility problem, I found it hard to move through Northampton in the summer because it becomes glaringly obvious that the town is home to a very large retired community. They populate most cultural institutions.
I remember when my international friends and I attended a barbershop quartet performance in Forbes Library one evening and had to deal with racism in Northampton like we hadn’t before. One of the performers — a man well into his 70s — came up to us afterwards to ask where we were from and then proceeded to tell me why it’s okay for me not to cover my head as a Muslim woman. I wasn’t as alarmed by the racism as much as I was by the annoyance I saw in the eyes of other patrons when my friends and I showed up to the performance. I may even call it ageism, although I’m not sure. All older and primarily white in the audience, they seemed to think we — young, college students — didn’t belong in the room with them. And in extension, like I said earlier, most of the people populating cultural institutions and public spaces are behaving the same way.
I couldn’t understand why people were behaving this way, especially as Smith prides itself for being situated in a welcoming and tolerant environment.
The point of this article is to point out one reason why this problem might be persisting in the larger community outside Smith: I think the community just doesn’t see or interact with us often enough. While researching a news story on Forbes Library for the local paper, I realized the library regularly has programs which could be of great interest to the college community. But we never hear about it on campus nor does the community partake in college programming.
I think both parties stand to gain from interacting more with each other, rather than existing as isolated entities that happen to neighbor each other.
