Most anything can be made to fit under the auspices of the archive, a concept that has ballooned in both connotation and public interest since the 1990s. The so-called “archival turn” began in 1991, when George Landow threaded together Barthes’s infamous death of the author with Theodor Holm Nelson’s theory of “hypertext” to argue for a Barthesian lexia of intertangled texts through which readers produce discrete and additive meanings. Curator Ingrid Schaffner first elucidated the archival fixation in contemporary art in the essay “Deep Storage,” published in Frieze in 1995. Schaffner traced lineages through a suite of contemporary artists working in the interstitial space of mediated imagery, at once interpreting archival material and producing work which they hoped might one day be collected and archived. In the interceding years, this impulse has manifested through liberal interpretations and reactivations of archival materials, alongside increasingly broad theoretical definitions of “the archive,” into what Claire Bishop termed as “research-based art” and the citation-studded literature of contemporary autofictionists like Maggie Nelson and Kate Zambreno or the pseudo-histories of W. G. Sebald. In spring 2008, archivist Sue Breakell wrote that “Archives, it seems, are everywhere.”
Edited by Naima Yael Tokunow, the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive sets out to navigate the gaps and losses in our archives still left after thirty years of archival fervor. The recipient of Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellowship in 2022, Tokunow’s work is informed by the fragility of archives of the Black American experience. In consequence her editorial conceit is largely anti-“archive,” challenging the hegemony of the document-oriented archive tradition in favor of oral histories and communally-constructed memory.
In practice, this is articulated in both a reparative impulse to correct omissions in extant archives, and a preemptive impulse to create archival documents that will preclude further erasures and losses. The diversity of experiences drawn upon by the contributing authors range across the globe, negotiating language barriers, religious traumas and experiences of migration through the fabric of personal loss. The poems anthologized here exemplify all these varied impulses of the archival turn: some comment on the archive as site, concept, and primary source material; some offer new interpretations and reinterpretations of primary source materials; some lament the losses and gaps in historic records through frameworks both personal and political; some seek to serve as future-corrective historic documents themselves. Most of them mingle across and through these categorical impulses.
This breadth is part of the hypertext of the archive: that we are able to understand one loss, or one history, or one present, through the kinship of our own disparate and never-equivalent losses and histories and presents. As such, Permanent Record is Landow’s hypertext made manifest. Discrete poems build upon and engage one another, embodying different stratagems for making sense of lost histories that are comparable and yet completely incomparable. Networks of personal, historical and theoretical references web across poems and sections; the looseness of their affiliations creates new meanings and new entry points for understanding. Through poetics, they elevate the personal to the rarefied status of archival.
The human impulse towards self-documentation is everywhere once you start looking for it. In films like Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), viewers witness the efforts of the titular Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell, to self-document and self-perform while living off-grid among a community of grizzly bears in the Alaskan bush. In uncut clips, Herzog shows Treadwell shooting and reshooting his own b-roll, between takes muttering about what changes to make next time, what impression he is seeking to give as he walks past the camera over and over again, with a bandana on and then later with a different pair of Oakley sunglasses. Herzog, as the third-party documentarian, is then in the traditional role of the archivist seeking to interpret and make meaning out of over 100 hours of Treadwell’s posturing footage.
This is a little how it feels to write about this book. In this self-conscious engagement with the archive, the featured poets abandon the pretense of neutrality, flying in the face of traditional best practice. The work, per Tokunow, is to expand our understanding of what can serve as an ontological object, a memory device. The poets privilege garments, family photos, childhood homes, newspaper clippings, fruits, and phonetic building blocks as archival objects. Moreover, the poems themselves are often intended to serve as documents.
A professional body of archive discourse began to form in the nineteenth century, and took hold with Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s 1922 Manual of Archive Administration. Jenkinson posited that archives, in their own right and in their own materiality, “state no opinion, voice no conjecture: they are simply written memorials, authenticated by the fact of their official preservation, of events which actually occurred and of which they themselves formed a part.” In these traditional understandings, the archive is something that accumulates passively and indifferently, rather than being purpose-built. The archive is, in essence, just some stuff collected. In imagination it is almost invariably dusty. Supposedly indifferent documents, containing supposedly objective information such as births or immigration records or property’s changing of hands, are stored in repositories for future reference; or, the materials and effluvia of an important personage are assembled and conserved to be pored over by generations of scholars seeking greater insight into that personage; or any manner of material is compiled over any period of time. The object or material itself is not, however, consciously created as a document. Instead, any narratives presented in this raw material are something later uncovered through the scholar-archivist’s study and intervention.
In opposition to this positivism, archive theorist Terry Cook argued in “Archival Science and Postmodernism” that an ongoing “archival paradigm shift” toward an understanding of the archive as “a sign, a signifier, a mediated and ever-changing construction, not some empty vessel into which acts and facts are poured.” This understanding of flexibility and permeability makes everything an archive and everyone an archivist participating in the process of mediation. Rather than the archive considered neutral, Cook implores us to ask: “Who is worthy (of celebrating, or memorializing)? And who determines worthiness? According to what values? And what happens when the values and the determiner change over time? And who is deemed unworthy and forgotten, and why?”
These are, perhaps, the questions at center in Permanent Record. Invoking photographer Naima Green, Tokunow asks, “What pieces of the present are missing from the archives of the future?” The poets grapple with what it means to create a purpose-built archive and the ways in which this impulse counters the traditional principle of the archive, which is to organize and later make meaning out of preexisting effluvia. Because no archive is or can be complete, these associative linkages allow us to fill in the gaps.
The text’s four sections embody disparate understandings of the archive. The first of these, “Mothertongued,” reflects on identity and language, exploring the knowledge both held and lost in diasporic experience. “File Not Found” provokes the gaps of unknowing, and how these openings may serve as opportunities for narrative construction; while “The Map as Misdirection” most literally engages the archive, exploring the political ramifications of the archive and how we make sense of our records. In closing, the poems spiral into “Future Continuous,” speculating towards the archives of the future which we are producing in the present.
The passage of time which grants historic significance requires either the tender and careful stewardship of a conscientious caretaker, or the complete chance of disappearance and reappearance. In “According a New Recollection,” Lillie Walsh self-consciously applies the tools of archival praxis to negotiate a relation to personal objects. Of a ring, they note “an impulse to wear the exquisite into the ground.” This contradictory impulse illuminates the tensions inherent between the stasis required by the archive and the life of an object in the world. The myth inherent in collecting, be it institutional or private, is that of perpetuity. The conceit of this is to understand that archival material is not created as such, but rather becomes archival through preservation and interpretation, the application of external structures of power and definition.
In a similarly material thread, Stefania Gomez’s “The Keeper” is dedicated to Gert McMullin, the lifelong conservator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In perhaps the most conventionally archival poem in the collection, the materiality of this archive gives way to the loss and suffering which it holds:
One hundred thousand panels 60 tons unbelievable the weight of absence
Interweaving how to make a quilt, how to make a poem, and how to steward an archive, Gomez creates a memorial to the invisible care and labor that underpin the public Memorial Quilt. Affective adjacencies proffer new meanings on material, creating an ode to duration, communion, and tender loving care.
Rather than applying archival theory to the intimate, Lorraine Rice injects the archival with a newfound intimacy through something akin to Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation. Two poems circle around the 1884 will of William J. Reynolds in which he bequeathed his estate to the formerly enslaved Lavinia Brisbane and their shared children. The five-part poem “family history in abstract” takes as its starting point a collection of U.S. newspaper headlines from 1887; as Rice writes in IV. from The Newberry Herald and News, 28 Jul 1887, p. 4, “one blighted end is another beginning –.” Confronted with this task of archival (re)interpretation, Rice asks, “what anthropologist am I? Sifting / these blue-pronged brittle bits,/reading the scars of fracture — / parsing the meaning of repair.” This anthropology challenges the cultural hegemony of the archive, an institution which has historically accrued power by both restricting what artifacts and histories are admitted and limiting who has access to its contents.
Material accumulates that we don’t know what to do with, in the most literal and the most liberal senses of the word. After my grandmother died, I helped my mother throw away boxes and boxes of slides we weren’t equipped to project and photos of family members so far removed that no one could identify them. As the youngest of three almost identical daughters, I am always asking or being asked whether a photograph is of me. And in a family tree that grows heavy with dementia, loss and the threat of loss is as tangible as these materials. My mother tells me I remind her of her father, a man whose hand I held but who lost his cognition before I gained mine. As Chaun Webster writes in an excerpt from “Without Terminus,” “saying some names feels as though you are drawing a character, a sketch. always incomplete.” In this sketch, Webster maps relations across generations who are lost to one another, between the mythic figure of a long-dead maternal grandfather who worked for 25 years as a porter on the Great Northern Railroad to a child who loves to play with trains. Here, this missing ancestor becomes “the hollow place where others construct the terms of ontology,” “the supposed not-thereness of your kin that is as dense as the past.”
Lost memories gape like wounds needing stitches. Safia Elhillo opens “The Room” stating, “What bothers me today is that I cannot remember.” Mapping the specificities of a childhood home in Cairo, Elhillo renders this apartment as it lives in her memory: each room is occupied, painted in vibrant detail according to its position in her personal history. We are told of the brother’s room, “the first time I heard hip-hop,” “grandmother buying me Jelly Cola on the walk home, violin and Arabic and straightening my hair for picture day.” The hole in this mental image is the poet’s own room, begging the question of where our histories thin and turn threadbare. Perhaps the rhythms of loved ones are easier to recollect than the so-called emptiness of our own solitude.
The magic realism of Katharina Ludwig’s prose poem, “The Collection of Un-healing,” lingers between science fiction and a treatise, proposing a speculative architecture for an archive of archival failings, a porous building designed to hold these holes. In this overlap between having everything and having nothing, Ludwig holds up a funhouse mirror to Borges’s Library of Babel, questioning the point of an archive without access and without interpretation. Borges’s Library might contain every version of every book ever written, but the multitude and density of material makes the chance of locating any discrete work a mystic and mythic task to which one might dedicate one’s life. This work is precarious in its nature, a direct action of tenderness:
Unsurprisingly the Collection of Un-healing will be unfunded. Its economical situation will be as precarious as its structures and contents. It will be a labour of love and pain, direct action and resistance to sustain this collection.
Ludwig’s collection, in opposition, evokes everything in that it contains nothing, leaving its contents completely open to interpretation and endless addition.
The archival turn is a cultural moment that feels, largely, over. After thirty years of archival discourse and archival meta-discourse and research-based art, the question that remains is how to move forward. Traversing across continents, probing language and cultural barriers, the line threading through these disparate perspectives is the very impossibility of archival totality. Rather than a curative treatment, the provocation is towards a careful tending of gaps. Understanding the sources of these errors does not necessitate a need to compensate for them, but rather to attend to them as absences. All the while Permanent Record dreams a future archive that might be truly rhizomatic, composed and recomposed continually through contributions, interpretations and reinterpretations, a living archive constructed by hand, with care and a sense of mutuality throughout.
Megan Mckenzie
Megan McKenzie is a writer from Austin, Texas.