The "Absence archive" centers on the memories, histories and narratives that are forgotten and deliberately erased within the archival practices.
Archive of absence is forged through rhetoric as it plays a significant role in how certain stories, histories, and narratives become the story of a community. It relies on linguistic crimes that alter our memories.
Mourid Barghouti argues that it is "easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick," an archive of absence is formed through linguistic tricks & manipulating absences. Mourid Barghouti
The focus on bodies portrays how bodies are recorded in archives, most often as extractable or rather natural in their extractability. Colonial enterprise has for a long time relied on the creation of docile bodies; it is this same ideology that transcends into practices of racial capitalism. It is crucial to understand how capitalism is by default racialized, and the recording of bodies in archives is essential for the naturalization of exploitation.
A prosthetic memory is a memory that is not our own. Stories of ourselves and others, told over and over again become etched in the memory. The altered memory creates a dismembering of a community's identity to suit the dominant narrative within the archive of absence.
The memory will be subtle and has an amnesiac power over truth and reality. They become akin to stories we hear about our childhood, memories that we cannot recall ourselves but told over and over again they become a part of our identity, and we eventually recall graphic details of a past that was once only real in another's memory.
The hands of the worker is a powerful symbol used on multiple platforms. In the Soul Sri Lanka website, they invite the tourist to experience and relive the "Day in the life of a tea plucker." The advertisement reads:
"By nature their hands are calloused [emphasis added] by constant picking and the feet are cracked as they do not wear any footwear as the tea terrain is steep and rugged in places." Soul Sri Lanka tourism advertisement
The phrase "by nature" implies that the bodily conditions (cracked hands) of hyper exploitation are natural. Naturalizing calloused hands and cracked feet, is also both naturalizing and denying the exploitation that creates those conditions.
nature does not callous hands, hyperexploitation does
Images: Thé Kahata — kahata.citizenslanka.org
Thé Kahata is an "Absence archive" by the community. For years their lives have been identified and named through their labor—"plantation workers". Their lives are more than the poverty and struggles. This archive includes photographs that reflect their culture, practices, and education.
Images: Thé Kahata — kahata.citizenslanka.org
The visual trope of the child-in-need as well as "womenandchildren", often used as compound noun, is employed to create persuasive imagery to support the humanitarian cause of charity. The iconic figuration of the child in the humanitarian cause creates an infantilized dependent calling for paternal power and protection from their own nation state (moreover from the national male figure). It is very rare for us to see a male figure in the call for aid, but we often see "womenandchildren"—the vulnerable in need of saving. The male figures that do very rarely make an appearance are "non-threatening" and aged. The images deployed by these charity organizations gets archived in societal archive of memory.
By abstracting the child from their community and depicting them against an empty background emphasizes the child's helplessness. This creates an erasure of both their community and their reality.
By creating an infantile image of the Other, the global narrative of the non-Western nations becomes one of innocence and dependence. The innocence is both political and economic, implying that these nations do not partake in modernizing, and also overlooking their developmental strides. Thus, as long as these nations are dependent and innocent, it allows the continuation of Western saviorism and work towards western-based development—a perpetual state of dependence.
Contrasting charity organizations with a movement of solidarity, the 2022 Aragalaya in Sri Lanka. This event took place against the corrupt leadership of Sri Lanka. Charity often overlooks the systemic issues that create the need for "help." Within the grounds of the protest/Aragalaya; the movement against corrupt governance, makeshift tents appeared on-site setting up a community kitchen, arts centers, exhibitions, a recycling center, memorials, legal aid office, library, and a people's university.
The people's movement was an act of survival, a realization that the structures that produce vulnerability are not normal.
The recording of memory here is the Absence archive that acknowledges the gaps and the memory in fragment, but also dismantles the flawed "archive of absence." The following images captured by different individuals went viral for representing the "womenandchildren"—they were no longer helpless but rather resilient and strong in their acts of solidarity.
Why do the famous die to be remembered and glorified & the extractable to be forgotten and unknown?
"If manhood was the precondition for the actualization of rights, 'boy' denied that status even to other men who might lay claim to it. In a region steeped in manners and terms of deference, no black man was ever old enough to age out of 'boy'; no white person was ever too young to toss it in his direction." When Boys Can't be Boys — Gene Demby
"A bullet found its way into the van and killed a 3 or 4-year-old young lady." SKY News (via Lowkey @Lowkey0nline)
C. V. Velupillai's epic, Born to Labor (1970) is one of the few English literary texts written by the community that narrates the memories of the community. Velupillai's text brings to focus the unknown and unacknowledged deaths and burials that took place. The songs quoted in the text were sung by the travelers and provides an intimate record of the suffering and emotions, and moves beyond depicting them as a "faceless migrant labor force".
The history of indentured labor is presented in factual ways and sees travel across nations through a modern lens of comfort. By beginning the story from the plantations, as if they are natural structures and did not require the sacrifice of natural landscapes and people, is to begin a story with "secondly."
"[in] yonder field/ strung with coffee pegs/ Where coffee plants sprout/ I lost my beloved brother" Velupillai 35
Velupillai satirizes this perception that the Estate Tamils are a part of the tea plantations, while raising morbid imagery to depict how the plantations have both consumed and incarcerated the worker:
"The plucker was as much a part of the tea bush, the daughter of the soil, who tended the tea with care [...] And so the coffee plant began to flourish on the blood and sweat of the planter and worker" Velupillai 35, 39
And when Muthiah is forced to leave the estates his dead mother, she lives on through "a handful of dust calling out to him from under the tea bushes" (89). The tea estates are recognized as unnatural structures of debility and death.
"Then they decorated their weapons and caps with body parts—fetuses, penises, breasts, and vulvas—and, in the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz, 'Stuck them on their hats to dry Their fingers greasy / and slick.'" Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne 124
Our archival practices will never be a full and complete representation of a community. We begin by acknowledging gaps and not utilizing them!
