Book: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments - Saidiya Hartman.

I'm currently reading, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. It's interestingly written. The author seems to have poured through sheer tons of bureacratic minutae. Old receipts, notes from doctors' secretaries, arrest records, etc. etc. etc.

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm. -W. Benjamin

If there is such an angel, maybe Saidiya is its counterpart. Its aspiration. She took this rubble and pieced together what was smashed. She joined their voices to hers and made them scream.

Many folks would say that what this is fails some basic test. It's not 'history'. I expect most folks would say it's fiction. I expect the same folks would stand on some principle or another that essentially outsources their own personal knowledge to some dictionary or vaguely genuflected-towards common knowledge. I've met very few who were willing to entertain the basic notion:

The only true distinction between fiction and non-fiction are the truth-claims of the given text paired with the sincerity of the author.

And that's fine. This is not a value judgement of the folk. However, a different approach to history is not only possible but in my opinion essential to short-circuiting the panoptic realism we're all stuck with.

#books #history #pseudospeciesism