There is, by the way, no clear definition of ‘personal archive’ other than an archive which exists in opposition to the institutional, or collective, archive. It is not a documentary record of oneself but rather a narrative. Not, then, a disconnected assemblage of facts, or truths about that person, but a life’s worth of needs and desires, dreams and illusions: a record of their mutual misunderstanding with the world.
Maybe I imagined that I would find what Sue McKemmish, in ‘Evidence of Me’, terms the complete personal archive: what belongs to any writer whose life has intersected with enough events (and other writers) to generate documentable transformations and layers of experience, enough to accumulate significantly over time, enough so that, onion-like, it can later be peeled back and exposed. Conventionally, the importance of any given personal archive derives from the achievements of its subject or, say, their social and cultural status; it can even derive from the conflicts which arise between those who seek to impose their authority over what can be accessed and what is to be redacted in the personal archives of the dead.
—Iman Mersal, Traces of Enayat, tr. Robin Moger
