#critical fabulation

[kyniklos]

a pair of critical fabulation poems i wrote about the Agora Bone Well

deeply indebted to Saidiya Hartman's writing about her methodology in "Venus in Two Acts," as well as the survey of the site by Maria Liston, Susan Rotroff, and Lynn Snyder.

the original poems have footnotes and around 2300 words of commentary, because they were written as part of a research paper. i'll give some of the most important details here, but i'll gladly send the full commentary to anyone interested.

most important is that the poems are built around actual funerary inscriptions from the (roughly) hellenistic period. the first is for Hymnis, daughter of Evandros, 1st cent. BC (Palatine Anthology VII, 643), and the second is for the midwife Phanostrate, mid 4th cent. BC (Athens, National Museum, 993).

the choice of a mother and a midwife as the subjects of the elegies was because of my decision to use funerary epigrams as the basis i wrote the poems around. one of the key tensions in critical fabulation is between calling attention to the gaps in conventional historical narrative and filling in those gaps. the goal of Hartman's critical fabulation is not to fill gaps and provide closure, that is when we risk writing to console ourselves rather than grappling "with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance" (Hartman 2008, 12). since none of the individuals buried in the well received any sort of conventional funerary rites or commemoration, trying to imagine through poems who they were would only be an exercise in consoling myself. instead, i wanted to write about those people who might've interacted with the well and who i could verify in funerary epigram, as well as those that Liston et al suggest might've made use of the well. by choosing to highlight those who were afforded conventional funerary rites and commemoration in epigram, I hope to highlight that those in the well were not, for whatever reason, be it age or low social status.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14.

Liston, Maria A., et al. “The Agora Bone Well.” Hesperia Supplements, vol. 50, 2018.

[dmdunamancer]

From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson

"Artist Ayana V. Jackson creates an undersea realm honoring those who jumped or were thrown overboard during the trans-Atlantic slave trade." (Smithsonian Magazine, 8 June 2023)

Where There Is No Origin But Memory I

The Self-Forgetfulness of Belonging Will Never Be Mine I

Consider the Sky and the Sea

Some People Have Spiritual Eyes II (featuring the dress which also appears as "Use the Stars to Fix a Celestial Navigation Point," with materials including Ghanaian currency, paste, cotton, raffia reed fans)

When the Spirit of Kalunda Comes So Does Kianda

Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I

Reliquary: The Sea Has Nothing to Offer but a Well-Executed Grave

It is Only When You Lose Your Mother That She Becomes Myth

I Summon the Voice from the Deep I

[images from the official exhibition website]

Also -- for those interested, many of these garments and models appear in video-works in collaboration with other artists! Very cool.

[bossymarmalade]

Film stills from Marisa J. Futernick, “I Never Learned to Play Mah Jongg” (2025)

[decolonizeyourfrickinmind]

Venus in Two Acts - Saidiya Hartman

“Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature (Hartman 1)”

Using the method of critical fabulation, Hartman evokes the haunting of “Venus,” a dual pseudonym encompassing the multiple identities ascribed to young African slave girls in historical as well as a specific slave girl briefly mentioned in criminal justice case. "What we know of Venus in her many guises amounts to “little more than a register of her encounter with power (Hartman 2).” The construction of Venus in Hartman’s retelling pushes the boundaries of the archive and illuminates the power structures and violence that constructed who or what we see as “Venus.” Hartman engages in narrative restraint and critical fabulation to “imagine what cannot be verified (Hartman 12),” attempting to grant these people as complete and complex of a personhood as possible. Silences are acknowledged and amplified within the text. Hartman attempts to take Venus from the grasp of hegemonic history and rebirths her within a Black counter-history that seeks to disrupt hegemony and create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.

Orphaned beginnings is an uncomfortably familiar topic to many Black people living within America, myself included. Hartman’s retelling of Venus is an attempt to reverse the processes of natal alienation by resurrecting her from her social and corporeal death. Not only is she disrupting the racial, sexual, and gendered constraints that are seek to erase Venus, Hartman creates a stronger connection to our ancestors, giving space for mourning. This disruption serves to bring the past to the present, illuminating “the intimacy of our experiences with the lives of the dead (Hartman 4). By bringing light to the too many ways that Black people have been subjugated we can see how those violent processes have adapted and persisted in our modern day.

We need to look and listen to what is and isn’t provided to us. We need to ask what is missing and why? Hartman’s emphasis on what can and cannot be restored provides a blueprint for how we should analyze future materials. We need to be able to deduct what the limitations of the archive are, whether it be general history or a piece or writing within itself, and see how the archive is disrupted. Acknowledging silence is a must.

I cannot imagine a future that holds itself accountable for its monstrous presents, but I hope to. Sometimes it feels that reparations is all we can be given.