With everything happening in the news that frightens me about the future of this country and world, I turn back again to the importance of the archive, storytelling and truth-telling for marginalized communities. Last month, I went to archivist and writer Joyce LeeAnn and researcher and writer Akeema-Zane’s workshop In the Middle of Things: The Poetics of Archival Praxis, which was part of Pioneer Works’ series Fact Craft.
“Fact Craft is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary program series that examines the ways “facts” are constructed, crafted, presented and disseminated. Each program invites a guest to facilitate a group action that intervenes in, questions, or subverts systems of ‘fact craft’ across disciplines. These actions address oppressive cultural systems by generating alternatives and jamming existing ones.”
This workshop focused on the central role of the archivist, researcher and poet/writer/storyteller in truth-telling and as time-travelers. Opening with a quotation from poet Steven Taylor, “the job of the poet is to tell the truth. An archive of poetics is an archive of the truth, or an account from the point of view of thousands of contributors of what the truth has been at various times, in various contexts, various definitions of truth,” it explored how people of color “write through time” and embody truth in their writing.
During the workshop, we were given three main texts, Steven Taylor’s essay “Remember the Future: Archival Poetics and the War on Memory,” which is found in the book, Beats at Naropa; essays “Black Time: The Reality versus The Myth,” “Beginnings: The West African Cycle,” and “The New Linear New World and the Balancing Act,” from Bonnie Barthold’s Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States; and Wilson Harris’ talk, “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas.” Together these three essays emphasized that the poet-storyteller (and that role can extend to writers in general, actors, dancers, visual art, music as the artist has a griot-like role connecting the current physical world to the ancient, ancestral and spiritual worlds) explores time and has understanding of various alternative times through an embodied archive of knowledge of all these times. This memory archive can be embodied not only in language but through body movement as well as Harris mentions the dance-game limbo carnival festivals in the Caribbean, and Vodou spirit possession rituals. This resistance is, as he calls it, Anancy-like, and shows our creative imagination to form gateways where others only see walls. Barthold called it Legba-like, the ability to balance between several modes of time, space and being, new and old worlds; an almost super-human ability to adapt and absorb the breakages into our cultures, and refashion them for our own empowerment.
One of the activities we had in the workshop was to watch a series of video segments and to write what was inspired from watching all of these film clips juxtaposed with one another. That activity reminded me of the Allen Ginsburg quotation attached to the end of Taylor’s essay and from which the title of the workshop came: You can see an eternity. We look out the window; that’s eternity, right?…You got it. This is the room. A room floating in that endlessness. But on the other side, there’s endlessness over there, too. So we’re in the middle of endlessness…this is right in the middle of eternity.” It made me think of Noah’s Ark and sailing through a sea of endless information, looking for a home or place to rest and that is what partially inspired the draft of the poem I wrote from the workshop below:
In Media Res(t)
(Nu Ark)
Toni was right
when she said
racism is an art
of distraction
head filled up
with too much
of the world
it is an art
to learn
to swim through
the chaos of
information
and misinformation
head entangled
like headphones
my head phones home
and there is no answer
home is unable to be
reached
too much static
too much loud noise
too much lies
masquerading
as truth
what is truth
but my own
dig
through my mind
sci/ence
ideo/logy
dog/ma
doc/trine
bo/oks
car/toons
mus/ic
stereo/
types
disclosing
disrobing information
like cane cutters
with a machette cutting
through paradise
is there paradise
or only plantation
and market of bodies
only face
pollution
is truth mine
or mined
America is dying
they don’t tell you that
they don’t tell you instructions
on how to live
Mother is dying
the earth is dying
Mother and earth pimped
are we too
can we steal back
what’s already ours
is it stealing
can we rattle the walls
can we dance around
dance through the walls
of social constructions
constructions of reality
who tells me if i’m real or not
i know what my fingers feels
i know my nerves dare to live
these packets of memory
absorbing the shocks of this world
i dance my memory through every crack
i can find
they don’t tell you to ask questions
they don’t tell you we need those roots
those routes back
i dance of my memory
when my head phones home
who is on the other receiver
reshaping over and over the emptiness
in this structure
claiming to have solved for my buried name
Sherese Francis: Futuristically Ancient 