Tears of Other People – Evie M. Ippolito

The Tears of Other People is an attempt by author E. M. Ippolito to make sense of her alienation from her hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Both local history and personal memoir, the book explores the history of discriminatory programs on the New Hampshire seacoast, from gentrification to European colonization, charting personal and political connections across decades of urban change. Dispossession has an infamous history on the beautiful Portsmouth waterfront, where in the 1960s a colonial museum called Strawbery Banke displaced the working-class neighborhood of Puddle Dock. Decades later, former resident Evelyn Marconi remarked, “You’ll never build anything successful on the tears of other people.” Beautiful or not, every American city is a settler colony built on racialized class conflict, and stolen land, and the tears of other people. To cultivate community in a place defined by displacement has always been an act of resistance.

Evie (E. M. Ippolito) was raised a settler on unceded Abenaki-Pennacook land in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She is a trans writer of fiction and nonfiction living in Brooklyn, Lenapehoking, where she pursues a degree in library information science.