The complete archive is mythological, possible only in theory somewhere in Jorge Luis Borges’s Total Library, perhaps, buried under the detailed history of the future and his dreams and half dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context.
When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves.
The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive-it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or-like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its “stumbling blocks”-a continent publicly reckoning with its past. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the “violence of the archive.” This concept-also called “archival silence”-illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories. If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide?
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