Spectral Archives in Brandon Som, Mai Der Vang and Bhanu Kapil
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King’s Research Portal Document Version Version created as part of publication process; publisher's layout; not normally made publicly available Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Howe, S. L. (2019). "Library of Opaque Memory": Spectral Archives in Brandon Som, Mai Der Vang and Bhanu Kapil. In L. Anderson, M. Byers, & A. Warner (Eds.), The Contemporary Poetry Archive: Essays and Interventions (pp. 124-42). Edinburgh University Press. Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. 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Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 124 Sarah Howe Chapter 8 monument and museum. In their precarious journey from erasure to monumentality, the Angel Island poems point towards the shifting mate- rial and social conditions that influence a nation’s sense of what is worth preserving from the past. Joseph Harrington reflects, after Derrida, on ‘Library of Opaque Memory’: the political decisions archiving inevitably entails: Spectral Archives in Brandon Som, For Derrida, archive fever denotes the mania to define what’s in and what’s out. ‘But where does the outside commence? This’ Derrida asserts, ‘is the Mai Der Vang and Bhanu Kapil question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others’. The job of the archivist is not only to prevent documents from leaving the archive, but, Sarah Howe perhaps more importantly, to keep out those that don’t belong there. This is, of course, a political decision that involves repression and destruction, even as it involves preservation.2 Once called the ‘Ellis Island of the West’, the immigration station on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay began to operate in 1910. Unlike In the context of the Angel Island poems, Derrida’s emphasis on borders at Ellis Island, the majority of immigrants passing through Angel Island and boundaries draws an unexpected parallel between the archivist’s came from Asian countries, its main purpose being enforcement of the power to select documents and the immigration officer’s to decide who Chinese Exclusion Acts passed by Congress from 1882. Designed to to admit or reject at the border. Both are bound up with race and the stem the flow of Chinese labourers increasingly regarded as a threat to history of racial exclusion; in this respect, America has and has not low-waged jobs, the 1882 Act was the first federal immigration policy changed. In the last two decades, archivists and historians have become in US history to target a specific nation or race. In 1970, thirty years increasingly interested in the role archives play in determining what after Angel Island was abandoned, a park ranger doing his rounds of kinds of histories can be told – the way their holdings privilege some the buildings, then marked for demolition, stumbled across several walls stories and marginalise others. ‘This represents enormous power’, Terry covered in Chinese calligraphy. During their detention on the island, Cook and Joan Schwartz explain, ‘over memory and identity, over the which could last anything from a few days to three years, the Chinese fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values émigrés had composed poems in their native tongue and inscribed them are and have been, where it has come from, and where it is going’.3 on the barrack walls. These unsigned verses mostly employed classical What kind of archive are the inscribed walls of Angel Island? Derrida’s Chinese forms, echoing ancient poetic themes to speak of modern suffer- account of the archive as a site of political authority begins with the ings that included homesickness, filthy conditions, and unfair treatment word’s derivation from the Greek arkheion: the ‘house’ of the magistrate at the hands of the authorities. Paradoxically, the poems survived partly or archon, where records generated by the processes of power were thanks to the commissioner’s orders to cover up what was considered stored.4 Another kind of ‘house’, the Angel Island barracks were unques- graffiti. After the earliest inscriptions were repeatedly painted over, the tionably a symbol of power, but power over their unwilling inhabit- Chinese poets, unperturbed, stopped writing on the walls in ink or ants. Asian American literature had its origins in the carceral, offshore, pencil and began carving their words with a knife. Maintenance crews ambiguous space of the immigration detention centre, waiting in a limbo reacted by filling the indentations with putty before painting the walls between admission and deportation. If the archive is, according to one again, helping seal their wooden surface against further decay. With recent formulation, ‘an institutional space enclosed by protective walls’, passing decades, the putty shrank and the paint peeled, making the then the barrack walls at Angel Island reveal the ‘official’ archive’s poems legible once more. shadowy inverse.5 A spectral archive, Angel Island was a bounded space The ranger’s find eventually came to the attention of local researchers devoted not to the preservation of authorised documents, but to the and community activists who recognised the inscriptions’ significance suppression of its inmates’ attempts to create through poetry a record and petitioned successfully for their preservation.1 Study of the poems for posterity. The materiality of that record is strikingly foregrounded precipitated the wider scholarly recovery of Angel Island’s immigration by the detainees’ détournement of their means of imprisonment, the history, leading finally to the station’s opening for visitors as a historical walls themselves, as the physical substrate for their writing: their incised ANDERSON 9781474432436 PRINT.indd 124 27/02/2019 10:43 Brandon Som, Mai Der Vang and Bhanu Kapil 125 monument and museum. In their precarious journey from erasure to monumentality, the Angel Island poems point towards the shifting mate- rial and social conditions that influence a nation’s sense of what is worth preserving from the past. Joseph Harrington reflects, after Derrida, on the political decisions archiving inevitably entails: For Derrida, archive fever denotes the mania to define what’s in and what’s out. ‘But where does the outside commence? This’ Derrida asserts, ‘is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others’. The job of the archivist is not only to prevent documents from leaving the archive, but, perhaps more importantly, to keep out those that don’t belong there. This is, of course, a political decision that involves repression and destruction, even as it involves preservation.2 In the context of the Angel Island poems, Derrida’s emphasis on borders and boundaries draws an unexpected parallel between the archivist’s power to select documents and the immigration officer’s to decide who to admit or reject at the border. Both are bound up with race and the history of racial exclusion; in this respect, America has and has not changed. In the last two decades, archivists and historians have become increasingly interested in the role archives play in determining what kinds of histories can be told – the way their holdings privilege some stories and marginalise others. ‘This represents enormous power’, Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz explain, ‘over memory and identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been, where it has come from, and where it is going’.3 What kind of archive are the inscribed walls of Angel Island? Derrida’s account of the archive as a site of political authority begins with the word’s derivation from the Greek arkheion: the ‘house’ of the magistrate or archon, where records generated by the processes of power were stored.4 Another kind of ‘house’, the Angel Island barracks were unques- tionably a symbol of power, but power over their unwilling inhabit- ants. Asian American literature had its origins in the carceral, offshore, ambiguous space of the immigration detention centre, waiting in a limbo between admission and deportation. If the archive is, according to one recent formulation, ‘an institutional space enclosed by protective walls’, then the barrack walls at Angel Island reveal the ‘official’ archive’s shadowy inverse.5 A spectral archive, Angel Island was a bounded space devoted not to the preservation of authorised documents, but to the suppression of its inmates’ attempts to create through poetry a record for posterity. The materiality of that record is strikingly foregrounded by the detainees’ détournement of their means of imprisonment, the walls themselves, as the physical substrate for their writing: their incised ANDERSON 9781474432436 PRINT.indd 125 27/02/2019 10:43 126 Sarah Howe marks carry an affect at once elegiac and defiant.