Blank lines do not say nothing

I want to interrupt, I want to disrupt the narrative we have inherited surrounding the witch trials in seventeenth century Salem, Massachusetts — a story that has been redacted, reduced, and flattened with purpose.

History is re-examined only when we are faced with an interruption, a reason for remembering, a cause for wondering whether this truth may not be, in actuality, the truth, or the whole truth, or any truth at all. And so with this work I want to interrupt. I want to disrupt the narrative we have inherited surrounding the witch trials in seventeenth century Salem, Massachusetts — a story that has been redacted, reduced, and flattened with purpose.

I hope to invite an imaginative rethinking of evidence — not as neutral and unfeeling but as emotional and deeply subjective — as something shaped and formed by its namer. I hope to challenge the notion of one historical and authoritative truth; of history itself as authority. Instead I propose: history is a translation; it is human, it is emotive, it is unreliable and vulnerable to our wondering, to questioning, to asking: if “…no two people ever hear precisely the same sound” as Lauren van Haaften-Schick tells us so — then what does this mean for this thing we call truth? Finally, I hope to invite the following consideration: the logic of the trials does not live in history alone — it exists here and today. To name, to make knowable these systems of logic that shape-shift and disguise themselves in order to persist undetected is to reveal something touchable, something built by human hand and therefore vulnerable to unbuilding.

My own history — a story of flight, of fleeing — often morphs inside its telling into a tale of intrigue for listeners. And this distance, this separateness of fascination pulls me from my own life, my mother and I unbreathing characters in a narrative that is no longer our own story of freedom and loss — but instead a diversion, a distraction: entertainment. And so for years I stopped telling. Because to tell, to make our lives listenable, is to expose us both to flattening, to spectacle. But in its untelling: my mother and I are alive and full of blood and we are running.

Again and again I find myself turning toward — my work continually circling — people or places or events turned spectacle as spectacle myself.