In Defense of the Cold, Sterile Archive
By Amy Hull

I

I have the right to be remembered.

If my body is an archive, do not let me go gentle

Avenge my death and let my memory be for a revolution.

Use my bones as tools to etch promises in the Earth

And sharpen them enough to tear into the flesh of capitalism.

Hold me in an acid-free box and routinely display me in glass

But do not let me sleep.

When the library at Alexandria burned down
I lost my grandmother.

When the Nazis burned books on sexuality and gender
I lost my friend.

My grief is preserved and contained

But it is untranslatable.

I am the memory of an ancestor that haunts the concrete walls

Surrounding the birth of the future generations

The dust of my bones will fill their lungs and insulate their homes.

I have the right to be forgotten.

My purposeful exclusions are too a careful curation

I want to be ephemeral in the memory of the colonizer

Inaccessible to the minds of fascists

And gone with the wind of change.

I am but a pastiche of those who came before me

I am not an individual or an icon

I am an ancestor of an ancestor of an ancestor

A thread in the tapestry of the universe.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

II

I once met God on a hot summer day. Sweating profusely and sitting in direct sunlight, He waited for me to approach Him. I was a volunteer at a festival celebrating a culture not my own.

I asked him if he required any assistance, and he requested water.

I’d already received a stern warning not to use my meal tickets for anyone other than myself. So, I used my pocket money to buy him a water bottle. He waited patiently while I walked to the other side of the festival ground and purchased it, and brought it back to him, the condensation on the outside of it piercing through the sun stricken skin on his hands. “Here you go, uncle,” I said.

He thanked me and turned his attention away from me, though I couldn’t take my thoughts away from him. I walked all of 15 metres to the reserved tent space and asked if the gentleman sitting out in the sun could come sit in the shade. They didn’t know who I was talking about. I turned around to point to him, and he was gone from my sight.

III

Yet if I live forever, what purpose does the memory of me serve?

You’ll never find what you’re looking for

If you’re looking for something to begin with.

The archive doesn’t exist to deliver citations to me

It’s my responsibility to carry what’s within

To the students of my classroom

And carry the legacies of those who came before me into relevancy.

They have the right to be remembered.

Yet my body is not an archive outside of metaphor

And it’s not yours to access, flip through, or take out on a loan.

My body will die. And my memory will not, if the archive of the masses doesn’t let it.

My corpse will decompose, or it will be burned in a fire or dissolved in a tank

I’ll turn white, then purple, then black

There will be nothing metaphorical about the way I’ll rot

There will be nothing Freudian about the way my brother will grieve.

Philosophy born on the throne of empire will never be what it seeks to describe

I will never be condensed.

Through objectified, I am no product.

I am not a poem, and poetry is not me.

Yet wouldn’t it just be so poetic to say

That every martyred woman in Gaza was an archive

And every starved child in Congo was a repository?