Before coming to this project, I had spent nearly a
decade thinking critically about the Black American record (or lack thereof),
and how my understanding of myself as a Black American, my family, and my
culture has been shaped by what I can, and do, know through searching archives.
These archives include materials from my family and the state, from papers and
oral histories, and from political and artistic recordings. Many records are
missing, misremembered, or unfindable. Some are full and jumbled, hard to decipher.
Most are couched in death, grief, and loss. This cannot be and is not the “full
story,” although we are socialized to understand records as such, rewarded for
reinforcing its “wholeness,” and often penalized for pointing to its deficiencies.
Many have written beautifully about the wound of not-knowing—our homeland, our
people, our tongues, our separation from culture.
[…]
And so, Permanent Record hopes to apply the kind
of pressure that turns matter from one thing to another by asking hard
questions: How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and
record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to health? How do we pull
blood from stone (and ink and shadows and ghosts)? What do we gain from our flawed
systems of remembrance? How does creating a deep relationship to the archive
allow us both agency and legibility, allow us to prefigure the world we want? Through
this reclamation, we can become the ancestors we didn’t have.
Permanent Record wants to reimagine who is
included in the archive and which recordings are considered worthy of
preservation, making room for the ways many of us have had to invent forms of
knowing in and from delegitimized spaces and records. In doing so, we explore “possibilities
for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity” (thank you, Trisha Low, for this
perfect wording). This book itself is a record. The book asks what can be
counted as an epistemological object. What is counted. Who is counted, and how.
(“INTRODUCTION: Archives of/Against Absence: exploring identity, collective memory,
and the unseen,” Naima Yael Tokunow)
On the back cover, the collection self-describes as a “visionary anthology that reimagines the archive as a tool for collective memory. Reflecting on identity, language, diasporic experiences, and how records perpetuate harm, this collection seeks to reframe what belongs in collective remembrance.” “When the ceiling drops / the rain stops / beating down but / now you’re beaten down,” writes Okinawan-Irish American poet Brenda Shaughnessy (one of only a handful of poets throughout the collection I’d been aware of prior), as part of the sequence “TELL OUR MOTHERS WE TELL OURSELVES / THE STORY WE BELIEVE IS OURS,” “though it’s the beat / that drops now / and we dance / in the rain / like sunbeams / made out of metal cloth, / tubes of blood, / and scared, sewn-up eyes.” The anthology includes writing by more than forty writers, most of whom are based in or through the United States and further south (with at least two contributors on this side of the border in the mix as well: Hamilton, Ontario-based Jaclyn Desforges and Toronto-based Em Dial). The work in this anthology is rich, evocative and very powerful, even more impressive when one considers that the bulk of the list of contributors are emerging, with but a single full-length title or less to their credit. Tokunow offers an expansive list of contributors from all corners, with an eye for language, purpose; one would think if you want a sense of the landscape of who you should be reading next, Tokunow’s list of contributors to Permanent Record is entirely that. Listen to the lyric of this excerpt of the poem “QUADROON (ADJ., N.)” by Em Dial, that reads:
QUADROON (adj., n.) language of origin: once again, linguists spit their bloodied air: from Spanish cuarteron, or one who has a fourth. i pinch the linguist’s tongue and gawk at the way they betray themselves. not one who has three fourths. not the haystack with a needle inside. instead, any drops of life in a sterile lake are isolated and named. the lake’s volume is doubled again and again and again and again until science feels faultless renaming them Statistically Insignificant.
The anthology is organized in a quartet of loose cluster-sections—“MOTHERTONGUED,” “FILE NOT FOUND,” “THE MAP AS MISDIRECTION” and “FUTURE CONTINUOUS”—each of which, as Tokunow offers in her introduction, “begins with an introduction of sorts—a lyric map legend to the work within, inviting you to pull the threads of the framework through the pieces.” The approach, as one essentially lyric, is intriguing, offering a collection of writing sparked by purpose, but driven and propelled by a core of stunning writing: Tokunow clearly has a good eye (part of me wants to ask: where are you finding all of these writers?), and knows well how to organize material around a thesis. The introduction to the final section, for example, reads: “We have your number and all quarters. Fortune folds us up—without a line to the dead we can hear the blood rushing, a cup against our drum. The gifts we make ourselves (destiny or doom) hold up in flat daylight, some familiar oath, some new contract: we are finger-deep in the sand, spinning and spiny, no new lines but this soft, fat earth. Still falling off the page, we ziiiiiiip. We hold the mirror slant—sky and her big feelings bounce. What can we mine of the future and if, oh not extraction, then what can we lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” As San Francisco-based poet Talia Fox writes, to close the lyric “NOTES ON TIME TRAVEL / IN THE MATRILINEAL LINE,” as held in that same closing section:
the curse is simple, and it begins with water
the water my mother bathed me in was crab
water (it is, after all, the water
alotted for soldiers and
the children of soldiers and their children and especially
their children)
like a spell, like a spell !
when i close my eyes i am
wading through a shallow river at evening. i come|
across a forest clearing
where bodies have been strung up, faceless, bobbing
in the trees
As I mentioned earlier, more than forty contributors, and I was previously aware of only a few, such as poet and translator Rosa Alcalá [see my review of her latest here], Jaclyn Desforges [see her ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview here], Em Dial [see her ’12 or 20 questions here], multimedia poet and author Carolina Ebeid [see my review of her Albion Books chapbook here], Phillippines-born California-based poet Jan-Henry Gray [see my review of his full-length debut here], Minnesota-based poet and critic Douglas Kearney [see my review of his Sho here], and Brenda Shaughnessy (all of whom I clearly need to be attending far better). The wealth in this collection is incredible. Or, as Brooklyn-based writer, playwright, organizer and educator Mahogany L. Brown writes as part of the expansive “THE 19TH AMENDMENT & MY MAMA”:
The third of an almost
anything
is a gorge always looking
to be
until the body is filled
with more fibroids
than possibilities
