Reflections on Archiving Smoke workshop by Alycia Pirmohamed and attendees
In the workshop, I allow myself to be vulnerable because I am tired of hiding my nerves, my anguish, my questions, my unknowing, my trembling voice, under the performance of scholarship. This workshop is for all of us, it is collaborative, informed by what we, together, decide to keep or say or do within the porous edges of our video call. The reading list brings together writers that mean something to me, to my writing practice – Sarah Howe, Bhanu Kapil, Jumana Emil Abboud, and M. NourbeSe Philip among them. An archive means different things to different people. A personal archive is boundless and slippery, ever-changing. Try and pin it down.
The archival space makes me anxious. Bhanu Kapil writes about the feelings associated with being present in an archival space. She notes down the physical attributes of the building itself rather than the materials within: “In an archive, I lean my head against the window at the end of the corridor. That is what I end up putting in the book, rather than the details of the research I have travelled so far, to the East End: to accrue.” Sarah Howe reflects on Kapil’s experience, captivating our workshop group with her term displacement activity: “The writing that comes out of [Kapil’s] spell in the archive has the quality of displacement activity – its own form of resistance.” The given archive makes me anxious. The archive with its quality of displacement activity is a corridor I think I could walk down.
Our desires to be in the archive, or write with the archive, or to know the archive stem from emotional fields as unique and borderless as the archive itself: the museum or the library? The ocean or the garden? The first writing prompt elicits shared work that, together, reimagines the archive as water, hues of blue, bodily sensations, neon lights, dancing, a rave. When we read an extract from Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, different voices take turns to say the words out loud and so many rhythms and interpretations come to the fore. The experience of reading together is special, again vulnerable – usually the most meaningful things are.
Together, in the workshop, we come to understand that we are, all of us, the poets and the poems, an archival space.
Screenshot from Zoom session
Helen Victoria Murray
Fluctuation (Spatial History of Two Archives)
1 I remember you in squares
lattice windows traditional tiles
chill even through rubber membrane
filing cabinet box I think inside
winter seeps into methodology
tangible in tips of fingers
when I can no longer feel the charge of proximity
I lose the thread obtain special dispensation
to wear the bottle under my shirt
breath a reminder: something living
has found its way in
2 summer is measurable here and graphed
even simulated cool found wanting
bend and lift to form a logic from the metal
drawer nearest paint-marked concrete
on my last ascension, angles where
sense meets object history
spin out, staggering in kaleidoscopic stepped
aisles beyond solid doors
forbidden bottle swig convulsing throat
coda when they ask us how we monitor
inconstancy we say
expansion and contraction are the enemies
alert to fluctuation corroding
material etiolation stress swell warp grow
always one weather eye
on the extremities of change
Rushika Wick
ANNEXURE TO FORM K (1969) - Department of immigration and emigration
For office use only
I give you wing-clippings - your languages in reduced font
Please glue on two photographs of size 3.5 cm by 4.5 cm (without white border)
without white borders
in the spaces below:
your detonated building your concealed insurgents
Do not write or mark anything on the Scanned Photograph
of your ancestors’ belongings, longings, songs
Scanned photograph:
- red earth. Palm fronds. A hand reaching.
Verification photograph:
- red earth. Palm fronds. REDACTION
Please place your signature inside both cages below
twin leopards are born in captivity
I certify that the above photograph is depicting the natural state of the applicant
sinkhole, slashed mangroves, throat-grip. What is natural?
without disguise or concealment
a blue devil-dance mask, loose in a suitcase
The above signature is placed by the applicant before me
and the applicant after me and the one after that and after that
Signature of the Attester
I’m unable to sign for myself
Jack Giauor
wartime media coupling
after karen mccarthy woolf
Teacher and student killed in US shooting
- BBC World News, December 16th, 2024
factories hospitals and guns and guns and men and women the day’s
tally of what is no longer i like to check the news
sometimes like to check where the blood and action will be
next and then look with wide and waking eyes
on the factories the hospitals and the guns and the
men and the guns and the women i am
no longer all the time i am the ghosts and their
smoking
trails of iron mist i am
Israeli strikes kill 50 in Gaza
- BBC World News, December 16th, 2024
always thinking of desert in the woods of
mountains in the desert there is and always will be
someone in a factory someone making guns and someone making
men and someone teaching a machine to make a
Israeli snipers fire at doctors in north Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital
- Al Jazeera, December 16th, 2024
gun to watch over the field and its precious carrion myself and my poems and
my iphone we think we are war and outside is a world that might still be there tomorrow
Children among 20 killed after Israeli forces bomb Gaza safe-zone
- Al Jazeera, December 4th, 2024
factories hospitals ring-like shapes in the mist hostages
and guns and hostages with guns that is war
that is not poetry that is justice /?/ the
young are no longer poets we are guns and men
Rebel fighters take control of Aleppo, igniting a new phase in Syria’s war
- Al Jazeera, November 30th, 2024
and a little bit women but not too
much and out of the night always come the explosions braiding
and unbraiding the threads of factories hospitals refugees
and men on one newsfeed or another i can
Syria’s leaders vow to secure chemical weapons
- Al Jazeera, December 11th, 2024
always scroll through war i am not my nation but
if on one newsfeed or another i can scroll through blood
and action then how can i claim the
nation does not tell me what happens in the
Threat of RSF invasion looms over el-Fashur in Sudan’s Darfur
- Al Jazeera, December 4th, 2024
desert on the mountain in the factory in the hospital
in the woods at night /?/
Israeli attacks kill two, wound six in southern Lebanon despite ceasefire
- Al Jazeera, November 30th, 2024
little children should be heard and not seen little children should
listen for the potential of bomb or missile burst lest they be
toppled over in the blast lest they too be called to look toward the
camera that glory-eyed ghost of curiosity lingering over everything that was ever
Ukrainian men face sexual torture in Russian detention centers
- Al Jazeera, November 30th, 2024
built if little children spend their nights listening for
the spark and roar of the guns then they are no longer
children then they are factories then they are men
*
Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water. Her other works include Hinge, Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative work, Second Memory, which was co-authored by Pratyusha. Her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing and is forthcoming with Canongate. Alycia currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s at the University of Cambridge. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics, and she is the recipient of several awards including a Pushcart Prize, the CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.
