Myths on nationhood help no one, manmade boundaries, flag waving patriotism is destructive, as we are living under a flag tyranny now.
We choose art and narrative because it delivers the heart and emotion, it evokes the place and memory, the factory or the road, the house or the ship, the church or the room to not only show what was but also what could be. Saidiyah Hartman’s work is also pivotal to us thinking about diasporic archives.
You know the saying (Achebe) “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Dig is the lion, telling its own story, it is the hunt that was the lie. Dig is not about kings and queens but ordinary people who end up in the archive as fragments of a will, notice in a newspaper, play bills or a baptismal record, a clip of film.
This work feels particularly important now.
…as a child, when the history being taught at school was not the same history that was taught at home. I learnt to, as all diasporic communities do, manoeuvre through the gaps, through the silences.
Here I am in a way, representing silence.
…diasporic archives are a site of harm, ‘tools for cultural violence’ and continuing colonial erasure practices.
I don’t need the whole picture and neither do you.
The questions are, as ever, a part of the story, and so is silence.
But what is the nature of silence? Silence reflects us or allows ourselves to reflect upon ourselves. Very often silence is supposed to be where God is, if you believe, it’s viewed as a golden virtue, a privilege and a demonstration of power or the powerlessness. Silence is often gendered.
We sometimes understand sound in relation to its absence; when it’s not there, this activity is what happens in the silence. As a writer and curator of archival work, knowledge work, memory work, contemplating silence is where I live, it’s where the knowing is.
But silence is grounding.
Black archiving means we will always sit with ‘who is not there’ and the agony of thinking about ‘who is never going to be there’. In this knowledge work, it’s also difficult to move away from what we mean by knowledge, uncategorisable, instinctive, gut led, body led (which is also its own archive), emotion led, trauma and grief, joy and acceptance led, heart led, Black archiving moves us away from westernised knowing practices.