Name: Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory
Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780648987581

Leah Jing McIntosh (Editor)

Adolfo Aranjuez (Editor)

Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory

from 'Death & The Devil', by Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh

stephanie

I am an older sibling, if nothing else. Right down to the bones. Further, even.

When we speak, [my mother & I] often talk past each other, smudging our translations of breath. Cadences fall; empty echoes leave residue. Memory is stored as tension.

From 'Whole Bodies', by Ryan Gustafsson. 

thinking abt the song 'still life' by namjoon...

...an archive must build not just knowledge of a past but a route to writing oneself into the present.

nabs

As Toni Morrison reminds us the very serious function of racism [...] is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art, so you dredge that up.

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. 

To put something down on paper carries a hope that someone else will pick it up.

This is the crying that comes when you've been holding it in because everyone around you wants to be held, but nobody wants to hold you even though you need to be held most of all. 

To thrive after arriving is soothing to white guilt, without much effort required. 

My father is a man of few words, a gentle, self-sacrificing man, but for as long as I have known, he carries the form of silence that is withholding, where the movement of thought is visible behind his long pauses. [...] Perhaps this is why I have always been frightened by the gap that exists between the unsaid and the said - the tension that hovers between what is felt and what we might try to enclose through language.

We live out our last times all the time without even knowing that's what they are. Would we do things any differently if we did? 

It's a strange thing when somewhere is both your home and yet not: you don't do the normal tourist things; you occupy a strange limbo between everyday routine and the novelty of travel. 

In this collection of new essays from the Liminal & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize longlist, First Nations writers and writers of colour bend and shift boundaries, query the past and envision new futures. They ask: How do we write or hold our former selves, our ancestries? How does where we come from connect to where we are headed? How do we tell the stories of those who have been diminished or ignored in the writing of history? How do we do justice to the lives they lived, or to the people they were? 

From the intricacies of trans becoming, to violences inflicted on stateless peoples, to complex inheritances and the intertwining of tradition, politics and place, this prescient collection challenges singular narratives about the past, offering testimony and prophecy alike.

ESSAYS BY André Dao, Barry Corr, Brandon K. Liew, Elizabeth Flux, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, grace ugamay dulawan, Hannah Wu, Hasib Hourani, Hassan Abul, Jon Tjhia, Kasumi Bocrzyk, Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn, Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Lur Alghurabi, Mykaela Saunders, Ouyang Yu, Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh, Ryan Gustafsson, Suneeta Peres da Costa and Veronica Gorrie

loved some of these essays, but others...not so much. I loved the diversity of voices and wide range of essay forms featured in this collection. the essays that I didn't like much were ones where the author used frustratingly superfluous language which made their essay very difficult for me to read and extract meaning from. however, I'm thinking that if someone were to sit down & spend time realllyyy dissecting those essays, then they'd probably appreciate them much more than I did. overall, still a great collection imo!  

Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory

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