I don’t know why I’m writing this
What’s the point of writing, really, in times like this?
It all feels pointless, doesn’t it, these words, this work? Like writing a poem in the sand on the beach before a tsunami, when you should have been fleeing, when you should have been building a wall to hold the waters back.
As though there were a wall that could hold back a tsunami, as though the tidal wave of history cared about your desire for control. History always comes back, doesn’t it, it always erases, it always sweeps us away.
But I want to talk about writing, and I want to talk about expertise.
I want to talk about what it feels like to have little to offer in a time of crisis, and what we do when all we have is words.
I wish I were an expert like a doctor, a friend says, or a scientist. Someone who could go on NPR and explain the facts in ways that were informative and actionable.
Stay inside. Use soap. Flatten the curve.
At times like these even a humanist craves certainty. Tell me what to do. Tell me what’s going to happen. Tell me what’s happening right now, outside the walls of this one bedroom apartment which I haven’t left, not really, in three weeks.
At times like these, the training that I have is the opposite of comforting. What I know about state power and how it operates; about inequity and its consequences; about misinformation and how it feeds violence; about trauma and how it tears us apart: these are things that leave me breathless.
To talk about these things in public is to spit into the wind. It is crude and gross and it always comes back to hit you in the face. I’m sorry. But you don’t want me to tell you that this crisis is going to be worse for some people than others, do you? Either you are others and you cannot stop it, or you are some people and you have spent a lifetime being betrayed by the state. My expertise can’t help you now.
And anyway, I am good at understanding power and systems but I’m not an expert in current events, not really. My expertise is so narrow it fits in a slot canyon, between the pages of a book. You want me to tell you about reprographic technology and its use in circulating colonial records? What a coincidence. I’m here to help.
Nothing like a cursory understanding of copying technology to ward off cataclysmic disaster. Nothing like transcription at the end of the world.
My friends run a transcription company and they tell me that transcriptions are up, up, up. Actually, people do want to make copies in times of crisis. There’s something comforting about shoring up history in a time of loss. Something powerful about getting words on the page.
What is it, this desire to reproduce in times of crisis? It’s a survival instinct, of course, obvious when we switch from replication to reproduction. We procreate for the survival of our lineage, our families, ourselves. Arlette Farge: “Recopying is time-consuming, it cramps your shoulder and stiffens your neck. But it is through this action that meaning is discovered.”
Michel-Rolf Trouillot: “The production of traces is always the creation of silences.”
We copy for the future, so that history can remember us, so that the stories that we believe in have a chance of survival.
We copy for ourselves, because we want to give our body to the creation of something that might, in the wake of all this, be a source of meaning.
And we copy for pleasure. We copy to touch the past. Arlette Farge, again:
The allure of the archives passes through this slow and unrewarding artisanal task of recopying texts, section after section, without changing the format, the grammar, or even the punctuation. Without giving it too much thought. Thinking about it constantly. As if the hand, through this task, could make it possible for the mind to be simultaneously an accomplice and a stranger to this past time and to these men and women describing their experiences. As if the hand, by reproducing written syllables, archaic words, and syntax of a century long past, could insert itself into that time.
Just a month ago, back before social distancing, I got a group together to participate in Douglass Day, an annual transcription event. We ate lunch and copied lines from the papers of Anna Julia Cooper, joining thousands of people from around the world.
In the words of the project organizers, Anna Julia Cooper was a visionary Black feminist. A writer and an educator. An activist right here in Washington D.C., where I live. A graduate of the college where I earned my undergraduate degree. The fourth African American woman, according to Wikipedia, to earn a doctorate.
I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say that I inhabited the body of Cooper, a founder of Black feminism, as I transcribed her letters. But Anna Julia Cooper believed in a humanistic education, like I do, and she believed in equity, and she believed in fierce language as a mode of activism. I know that when I copied her words some part of my faith was restored.
This is what my training, as narrow as it is, has given me.
When I find myself without words; when I find myself speechless in the face of the present, torn open with loss and fear; then I turn to the rote and solitary act of transcription. Because it asks so little of me, except time, which I have too much of, and some faith in the future, which I am learning to sustain.
Transcription projects you can join:
From The Page: a transcription platform hosting dozens of projects, from medieval manuscripts to civil rights archives.
Smithsonian Transcription Center: copy records from the Smithsonian, from the NAACP publication The Crisis to a collection of natural history documents from the Andes.
Zooniverse: crowdsourced data collection for the sciences and the humanities, with collections like the Anti-Slavery Manuscripts or Mapping Historic Skies.
Write me a note if you’ve got a transcription project you’d like to add.
