As I read, I annotate. Annotation is a habit of relation – the relation between me and books and papers in which we are indelibly marked by our encounter. My schoolteachers would have disapproved, but given that many, or even most of them are no longer living – inhabit an ancestral realm – I imagine they have access to a bigger picture and are now more relaxed. I trust that they appreciate that annotation is a necessary and generative practice; a practice of curiosity and desire; a meeting of the need, as I walk with a text, to slow down and engage it in conversation. Much of my own writing – as those familiar with Unruly Therapeutic will likely know – begins here, in the seedbed margins of annotation. This note from The Annotator began as an R – a single letter added in parentheses to the title of an article in Therapy Today (June 2023) that frustrated me greatly. Without annotation, the textual conversation would have been impossible mainly because of the strong sense I had as I read, that the text was either trying to kill me or worse, had been written from and in a world in which I was already dead. The ‘Fictional Frame’ from the title of the piece became, with the first annotation, the F(R)ictional Frame. To be able to name the f(R)iction was a relief – a first, life-giving perforation of the article’s stifling failures of address. After that, the annotations flowed – a furious spill of resistance and refusal – and eventually became this; an account of the encounter between fiction and f(R)iction or between The Framer(the article and its author) and The Annotator who attempts – via a series of notes – an act of resuscitation.
Resistance
The Fictional Framer declares it and so it must be true,
‘…all stories are built on three fundamental blocks’.
The Annotator’s pen is raised; alert to the ‘all’ of all stories. In the Annotator’s world, all is a word that can perform the most casual erasure and which signifies distortion – the process of a very specific gaze appearing so much wider to itself than it is, that it comes to imagine itself universal. All as a vehicle for a gigantic, world-bending fisheye lens that literally takes The Annotator’s breath away as it enables the gaze that sees itself as All the gazes, and the only gaze. It then assumes, of course, that it is authorised to voice, and make declarations, for us All. Is the Annotator’s alert warranted? Does the word All always signal this trouble? The Annotator does not know the answer to this, but they do know that in this ‘All’ Black life is routinely disappeared. They do know that stories that don’t take the form of All the stories in The Framer’s declaration, are not included, not mentioned, not here. The non-con-forming stories are not here and therefore the knowledges, and ways of being they hold, and carry are also not here. Given that these stories/knowledges/ways of being are not here for The Framer to think with as he discusses his storytelling therapeutics, The Annotator – who is also a writer and *therapist working with creative writing – has trouble taking him seriously.
The Annotator, drawing from Elleza Kelley’s review[i] of Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes writes,
“Formal errancy has always offered writers a way to conjoin theory and method in the study of black life.”
These notes on form and errancy offer recognition; are another way of saying do not despair. The notes are reminders; as much as The Framer misses us, we know ourselves outside of his description. Our living is excess to his All and its attendant categories, genres, and sanctioned forms. The Framer ignores the note and continues – says that the ‘all stories’ statement is,
‘…as true for therapeutic stories as it is for blockbuster movies.’
The Annotator reads this claim on truth and – not recognising themself here – underlines ‘blockbuster’. They add a question mark which occupies the margin, symbolising a string of doubts and curiosities and calling – as some annotations do – for further research. The Annotator finds that the term blockbuster was popularised in the 1940s and originates from blockbuster bombs – so-called because they had the power to destroy an entire city block. Blockbuster is a term signifying wide impact which, in relation to movies, the annotator would not dispute. But how is it that The Framer can put blockbuster movies and therapeutic stories together in the same sentence, and then let them sit unremarked and unexamined? It seems to The Annotator that much like the bombs after which they were named, the impact of these movies was not necessarily therapeutic; not all good, and certainly not good for All of us. The Annotator references a debate in 1965 at Cambridge University. James Baldwin was a participant. His name is added to the margin and The Annotator listens again to the recording. The second person pronoun he uses in his description is an invitation to time travel and inhabit the moment again; You, he says, are a child watching Westerns. You are rooting for Gary Cooper as he kills off the Indians. You are shocked to discover that the Indians are You[ii]. The Annotator knows that you and that moment; knows the devastation of that impact on a life.
The Annotator wonders if The Framer would be one of those to play down the devastation and insist that the harm cannot be real because the movie is not real. It would not be the first time for The Annotator to hear that a movie, being just a story, should not be taken so seriously. Surely though, given that this article centres on the power of storytelling and stories as agents of therapeutic change, The Framer will not attempt to reach for this defence? The Annotator thinks (hopes) that they can agree, now that they are in the conversation – now that they have taken the time to register R for resistance – that the power of fiction to help cannot be assumed, and certainly not by ignoring its shadow, the power to destroy. The power takes many forms including, as we have heard, the destruction of a child’s sense of reality; including the imposition of a devastating set of epistemic conditions that consolidate the ontological hierarchy of whiteness. Other destructions and impositions, taking other forms, are annotated elsewhere[iii]; references for another day. For now, The Annotator’s proposition to the Framer is that fiction’s potency lies in the tension between made-up-ness (the ways in which it is not real) and making-up-ness (the ways in which it creates what then becomes real). This tension, as one of many complexities of being, can be lived. It is the splitting – the attempt to deny or escape the f(R)iction – that becomes deadly; that needs to be resisted. Before it can be resisted, it must be remembered. This is why The Annotator proposes the R. It is an aide memoire. It means remember; It means resist.
The notes for this section include Dionne Brand – a writer whose words are in every room of The Annotator’s personal resistance arsenal. The selected quote – on the subject of movies – is from the poem Nomenclature for the Time Being,
“They had the temerity to sell me movies and portfolios and terabytes of their lousy activities and I bought them, and it punished me to hear their awful news of their victories over me that made me laugh and love them as they insisted[iv]”
Refusal
The Framer says that stories,
“…convey lessons about how to survive in a sometimes, dangerous world”.
Here, the note from The Annotator is a question of who; Whose survival is being described? The Annotator also tries to imagine what it might be to conceive of the world as only sometimes dangerous; to not have to contend with, or live the fact of imminent and immanent death[v] that surrounds Black life? With this fact missing, the statement about the stories can only be refused – refused because something vital is missing. By vital, The Annotator means life-giving, for example stories we share with our children – often against the counsel of our hearts – about the other children we have lost. ‘The Talk’ is one name for these stories – stories that describe what we know, and what we need to know, about the folk who have been choked and shot, and strip searched in school[vi], and restrained to death?[vii] The Talk is dangerous. It is dangerous to not talk. Danger is everywhere. Fiction is incomplete without the f(R)iction. Not credible. Not liveable. The R here is for refusal; also for respiration, which is to say that the Annotator, because they know the reading hurts, wishes you to breathe.
The Annotator refuses the Framer’s version of sharing. According to The Framer, when we engage with a story,
“…we share in a collective experience that takes us beyond our own lives…”
The Annotator does not wish to pick holes, but The Framer will absolutely need to be more specific about what is and is not shared. The ‘we’ in the claim of collective experience will need to be discussed – even more urgently now that The Framer has gone on to repeat it with added enthusiasm,
“Suddenly” he writes, “we’re part of that novel, that movie, with all the drama and thrills those narratives might bring!”
The exclamation mark is annotation. It is not physically there in the Framer’s text but appears as a vibrational frequency which is to say that The Annotator has felt it; has registered the attempt to generate – with a fronted adverbial – collective excitement. They accept that it is possible sometimes, from one’s unmentioned, unrecognised, marginal space, to suspend disbelief; to, as Dionne Brand’s quote suggests, buy (into) these movies and laugh and love. The question of the we remains, how could this ‘we’ possibly survive such bloodied terrain – the supposedly shared ground – when it is strewn with what for some is drama and thrill, but for others dispossession and death? There are too many graves under the monuments. The ground is seismic; The ‘we’ long collapsed.
‘We is an aggregate already disaggregated…we is a doing already undoing’[viii]
The Annotator refuses the false aggregate – and what Ana-Maurine Lara calls an ‘assumptive we’[ix] – and makes black notes instead. Black note-making as a practice of speaking from a we already disaggregated. Black note-making meaning adding bell hooks to the conversation and talking back[x], and insisting on polyvocality because we are polyexistence which, in the words of Lata Mani, has
‘[d]iversity as its nature, relationality its grammar’[xi].
We are relation. This is a declaration of We that does not rely on erasure or murder. Though The Annotator recognises that inhabiting this relational We, fractured as it is with race and gender and other socially produced difference – often requires acrobatics not entirely compatible with life-full-ness. Included here is a reference to the peculiar skill of double consciousness[xii] – the ability to see oneself through one’s own eyes at the same time as seeing oneself through the eyes of others. This capacity, forged in the hot kilns of racism (and therefore born of terror and the need to survive it) is nonetheless a relational skill. The Annotator wonders if the Framer might consider it a potentially useful acquisition; a way to expand his gaze? Would he be interested at all in seeing himself through a Black woman’s eyes? The Framer is quiet. The Annotator is disinclined to expend further energy on his education. There is always so much work to do. Refuse this labour, is one note; Rest as Resistance is another. From down in the footnotes we hear Tricia Hersey calling, telling us to go lay down[xiii].
Resuscitation
When the Framer turns to the historical, The Annotator has to put the paper down – take a moment to chant down; come back later when they have simmered down sufficiently to be able to read the sentence again. Again it concerns a ‘we’, this time a ‘we’ who,
‘…yearns to know ‘what it was like’ to experience certain historic events.’
Which of these historic events does The Framer imagine that we – the ones who have been declared by his forebears to have no history – would actually yearn to know? The Annotator’s notes include a book title, Silencing the Past[xiv]. This is here to remind The Framer that he really ought to consider how power influences the creation and recording of this thing called history. The Annotator, sipping thoughtfully on black feminisms, is thinking with, among others, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe. From this location The Annotator could not possibly agree that slavery and colonisation can be claimed to be historical events or even in the past. There is simply too much evidence – everywhere – of their afterlives[xv] being lived.
‘Their history, my memory’
This is a note from NourbeSe Philip, referring specifically in this piece[xvi] to the historical monument known as Leopold’s Gate. Leopold’s Gate stands in Wales, not far from the Gladstone Library – a tourist attraction commemorating this King presumably because he is judged to be a figure for whom a historical record is justified. As the tour guide references the history, Philip remembers the terror – the people in Congo who lost lives and limbs and loves in this brutal invasion and occupation. Their history, my memory. The Annotator’s memory is filled with ships, holds, plantations, and prisons; a continuum. Hence our yearnings are largely not nostalgic and do not map towards this so called past or history. We already know what it is/was like because we are the ones with more memory than history. We remember that we have, for so long, had to resuscitate ourselves, not by yearning for a past but by imagining, and storying ourselves in the direction of marronage; in the direction of freedom; in the direction of how can I live[xvii]?
The Annotator underlines, but does not excise, the following assertion from The Framer,
“There is something about stories and storytelling that expands our awareness and gets us through life in one piece. They explain the unexplainable, calms fears, and make us feel safer”.
There is perhaps, something in this statement – though safety and the promise of getting through life in one piece stretch beyond the reach of The Annotator’s credibility. There is simply too much unsafety around for this statement to be swallowed whole; too many people who do not get through intact and are in need of respect. Zong![xviii] is the annotation. This is the title of narrative poem – an account of not getting through life in one piece that is both heart breaking and stunning. The Annotator would put it on every curriculum if they could. They would like us to remember between 130 and 150 African people on the slave ship Zong who were murdered – thrown into the ocean by the crew who feared that a longer than planned journey meant supplies running short. The writer – again NourbeSe Philip – knows that this is a story that must be told with care and which requires painstaking work amongst the fragments of lives, and the lack of regard for those lives. Philip refers to exhumation – retrieving bodies from earth – but cannot find a corresponding word for bringing them back from underwater. How to return dignity to those left to be forgotten in a liquid grave? The Annotator understands that in the (colonial) English language, the words to tell black life have to be continually (re)made. They appreciate Philip’s exaqua and the way in which the poem performs this return of bodies from the water. The poem is fashioned from words of a legal case (Gregson v. Gilbert) brought against the ships’ insurers. Philip breaks and makes these words and arranges them on each page with space between and around. In doing so, she creates space for breath and possibilities for breathing[xix]. The Annotator asks The Framer to respect the intention here, which could never be to explain the unexplainable (what terrible injury would be done in the attempt?) but rather to tell the story that cannot be told while taking care not to murder the dead all over again. This is, The Annotator would like to point out, writing in life-giving mode; something like resuscitation. Writing cannot provide a ticket to getting through life in one piece. It can perhaps though, be a part of the living and breathing that has space for the drowned and undrowned[xx]; and (because the past is not past, and the event not historical) space in which we might not look away from the ongoing drowning[xxi]. The Annotator looks toward The Framer, is curious to know what he is making of the notes. Does he see how each annotation is exaqua; a surfacing; a breaking through; a push, through a suffocating frame, toward life?
The Framer began his article with his own story of resuscitation, facilitated by a therapist who offers a writing exercise. The Framer is asked to first divide a piece of paper into six sections and then to write or draw in each section to produce what is described as ‘a complete, self-contained narrative’. The Annotator chose not to try out this activity. The proposition that the story should be self-contained and follow a ‘classic three-act structure’seemed to her to have room only for the individual who has the privilege of imagining themselves to be an individual. The activity seemed to have at the centre of its gaze, someone else – someone self-possessed and possessing, and economically independent, and somehow unattached from context; someone not affected by the bigger structural stories into which, when we are born, we arrive. This someone else can live in the given fictional frame; The Annotator, and the communities to whom they are accountable, cannot. The frame is locked with an airlessness created by what it misses; the missing address; the missing blockbuster destructions of reality; the missing the imminent and immanent death; the missing danger; the missing Talks; the history that misses the memory. Hence, while the fiction that it frames might be able to follow a linear path – introduction, inciting incident, rising tension, crisis, and climax/denouement – the f(R)iction cannot be contained. The f(R)iction is invited to absent itself; to remain below the abyssal line[xxii]; to become an Otherstory that only the Others need to care about; to spill untold into an infinity of the unsaid; to become immaterial; to leave the All of the fictional frame intact.
The Annotator sits back, studies the page that, with the f(R)iction now visible – the race and resistance and refusal returned – looks a little messy. The dis-order is the essence. This is what it looks like when you break (out of) the fictional frame that refuses (to see) you. The Annotator is committed to resisting a colonial lexicon that crushes and disappears Black life even as every page is saturated with the deadly fiction of race[xxiii]that it has made real in order to pretend this (dis)order is both natural and ineluctable. It is The Annotator’s belief that refusing the bounds of the All that erases us – seeing through it and imagining beyond it – is worth a little untidiness. Their intention is to intervene in the persistent care-less-ness and make room for the knowing, beauty, and joy of Black life. The Annotator recognises that ink in the margins is also inhalation; the sketching of tiny airways through dead and/or deadening and/or deadly textual zones; a way to survive being Black while reading. The survival means something because – like The Framer – The Annotator also believes in writing and stories and what they can do. They hope that what writing is doing in this moment is signalling otherwise – in the direction of the other ways to read that make other spaces to read in. And write in. And live.
[i] Kelley, E. (2023). Ordinary Allurements: Christina Sharpe’s Reading Lessons. https://yalereview.org/article/elleza-kelley-ordinary-allurements
[ii] https://teachrock.org/video/james-baldwin-on-gary-cooper/ .
[iii] Taylor, F. (2023). Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room. (including a brief telling of a story told in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI (drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s 1995 Essay, The Pope Must have been Drunk, The King of Castille Mad. https://trueleappress.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/wynter-the-pope-must-have-been-drunk.pdf
[iv] Brand, D. (2022). Nomenclature
[v] Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/15/child-q-four-met-police-officers-facing-investigation-over-strip-search
[vii] I recently visit the exhibition ‘Souls Inquest’ at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning and was reminded of that while navigating their own grief, there are people committed to showing us how to care-fully remember (and refuse to forget) lives lost to state violence.
[viii] Brand, D. (2021, March 11) What we saw: What we made. When we emerge. Kitty Lundy Memorial Lecture
[ix] Lara, A-M. (2021). Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty
[x] hooks, b. (1986). Talking Back. Discourse, 8, 123–128. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44000276) https://www.jstor.org/stable/44000276
[xi] Mani, L. (2022). Myriad Intimacies.
[xii] Dubois, W. E. B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk
[xiii] Hersey, T. (2023). Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto
[xiv] Trouillot, M. R. (1995) Silencing the Past
[xv] Hartman, S. V. (1997) Scenes of Subjection
[xvi] Philip, M. N. (2018) The Declension of History in the Key of If, in Hunt, E. & Lundy Martin, D. (2018) Letters to The Future
[xvii] Hartman, S.V. (2019). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
[xviii] Philip, M. N. (2008). Zong!
[xix] To anyone interested in writing in life-giving modes I would highly recommend reading the chapter titled Notanda, toward the end of Zong! in which Philip reflects on the process of writing, with care, over time and telling the story that cannot be told.
[xx] Gumbs, A. P. (2020) Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.
[xxi] I write this aware of the many lives being lost currently in ocean crossings to Europe, and in the same week that anything up to 700 people have drowned in Greek waters as authorities looked on, aware of the risks, and failed to act. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/20/the-guardian-view-on-danger-at-sea-looking-out-for-all-those-in-peril
[xxii] Santos, B. de S. (2018) The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South
[xxiii] Spillers, H. J. (2003). Black, White and In Colour: Essays on American Literature and Culture