Our current pandemic is shocking, and almost unbearable. I cherish Waterlily’s relatives’ refusal of isolation. For most of this year, I have quarantined and distanced. I do this for the safety of myself and others. I am fortunate to have work and a stipend; but still, there is much I yearn for. I don’t know when this will end.
Category Archive: U.S. Colonial Present
As I traversed this week’s readings, I recognized overlapping accounts of Black freedom struggle as a method of […]
Starting in July, Azerbaijan — backed by the Turkish, Israeli, and U.S. settler-states — has been attacking and terrorizing the Republic of Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh), a 95% Armenian-majority sovereign entity and an ancient Armenian stronghold where indigenous Armenians have lived since antiquity.
For the colonized, rumor is a double-edged sword, limited in its utility as the ambiguity or unverified truth of the rumor simultaneously causes both fear and restricted mobility. Nevertheless, it is the evasiveness of it that allows undocumented communities to organize, move, or stay put with some sense of authority over their bodies, bodies which themselves are often in a constant state of strategic evasiveness.
In seeing Varter Bogigian’s photo at Tsitsernakaberd that day, I recognized the universal link that unites all Armenians:our shared history. In that moment, I was reminded of the value of our words — of the stories of our grandmothers, of our grandfathers, of our mothers, of our fathers, of our sisters and our brothers.
Both (re)mapping and rememory enact a method of refusal toward the disciplinary imperatives of searching for transparent truths (as in the illusion of transparent space) and transparent experience, in the demand for verisimilitude (as required, contradictorily so, of the slave narrative, as Avery Gordon aptly demonstrates).
“Is this an African Dance course?”
My classmates and I were with our professor outside our classroom, waiting as the class prior to us filtered out when a well-intentioned woman, the instructor from that previous course, approached my professor eagerly, earnestly, repeating herself to ask, “Is this an African Dance course?”