MEMORANDUM
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL WELFARE
FIELD SERVICE
257 Station Street,
Duncan, B.C.
TO Adoption
Placement Section,
Child
Welfare Division,
Department
of Social Welfare,
100
West Pender St.,
Vancouver
3, B.C. August
7th, 1969
RE:FRANKLYN, Virginia Athea
Please find enclosed Background Study of a
child being Relinquished for Adoption. The child is expected the first week in
September.
[signature:
“E. McKierahan”]
[signature illegible, “for”]
PETER H. CLUGSTON, District Supervisor
PHC:ey
Encl.
[stamp: “RECEIVED SEP 9 1969 CHILD WELFARE
DIV’N”]
I’m
fascinated by Vancouver poet, critic, editor and publisher Aaron Vidaver’s Counter-Interpellation: Volume One (North Vancouver BC: CUE Books,
2019). I’ve seen literary works constructed out of the archive numerous
times—poems and works of prose that directly utilize and incorporate archival
materials—but Vidaver’s latest is made up entirely of archival documents,
without editorializing or context, one that provides a fascinating portrait of
how one imagines self from the outside. The bulk of Counter-Interpellation: Volume One focuses on Vidaver’s birth, his
relinquishing and subsequent adoption, providing multiple and layered view into
how an archive, especially one as thoroughly researched as this one, creates a
portrait of an individual through what might otherwise be seen as cold and
disconnected letters, forms and files.
The
book is composed in eight sections—“Letter to Josephine Vidaver / from
Ridgeview Elementary School,” “Adoption,” “Birth Certificate,” “International
Certificates of Vaccination / Certificats Internationalaux de Vaccination,” “July
1972,” “Alien Registration,” “Collected Evaluations (1975-1995)” and “Hospitalization.”
The bulk of the book explores the details of his origins and subsequent
adoption, and finally move into his twenties, examining records around his
depression and subsequent hospitalization, which shifts the attention away from
immediate origins in a curious way (and suggest the book is a collection of all
of his official records, which simply happen to be from these two poles of life
experience—origins and adult depression). As someone who is also adopted, as
well as an author who has been sending boxes upon boxes of literary papers into
an archive at the University of Calgary, I have long been curious about the
kinds of portraits various archives and archive material might present of
ourselves, which in itself causes one to distrust the archive as any kind of
complete overview of anyone, instead providing exactly that: a portrait, one
that exists from a particular time and place, and one that might even have been
curated (or “edited”). What does the archive allow, and what does it leave out?
What might the archive, through no fault of its own, overlook, and how might
that affect the resulting portrait? The difference between a life lived, I might
wonder, and a photograph taken of you with your parents in church clothes. At the
end of the collection, in his “Note,” he writes that “Additional notes on the
work appear in the final volume of Counter-Interpellation,
with a glossary and list of abbreviations, a lexicon, a bibliography and
acknowledgments.” Given this is “Volume One,” I can’t presume how many more
volumes exist, beyond the singular (although a quick search discovers Daniel LaFrance’s review via The Capilano Review, that suggest three volumes to come), but I am curious to go through this work
and realize the purity of the archive being presented, without a single word or
phrase of editorial commentary by the author/archivist. While I might be
curious to know something from the author itself, I admire the purity being
presented here. It might be all the information I need.
No comments:
Post a Comment