Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture &amp; Social Justice Issue 45.2 (2024) Special Issue: Take Back the Future: 2023 WGSJ Conference Literary Work

future forgetting fragments
by Alanna Veitch

from the song, I pluck out memories of

the before

displaced by

a mother’s need to

escape—in the dance;

in

her three daughters

she raised

from the crack that became

a hallowed chest

of dreams and nightmares

and mostly realities

Her mother only loved her

more because

her father was

indifferent

indifferent indifference

an apathetic body to the womb

for, how does one care without car(ry)ing?

She loved large perhaps too much so it undid the I that was she, as she lay folded up into him removed of herself to become us and no one more

A ghost now haunts the corners of her mouth opening slipping out into dreams of a respectable body but what respect could a woman be given for blowing apart the house

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that held her hostage? a house that she took part in building
and erasing to no longer see herself in it

Lines erased lay still, visible
the she she was became a ghost of the past that now she must forget
must forge a path – any! into the future

Forget the fragments

that pain you

just

forget

fragments in relation

Relation never came up. It came before, a long wakeing of bodies and subjectivities1

But, relation never came up

nothing to anchor the telling to

not knowing

the fragments pressing together

lacunae2 making

gaps of

power and

silence

but

What survives out of relation? What memories take action to service who?2 Who will wake to substantiate the void? What language
should we use?

Relation never came up

a silence of the care work holding

together the fragments

of stories,

w/resting in the shadows1,2

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Endnotes
1. Glissant (1997); Sharpe (2016); Siebers (2017); Titchkosky (2007): Relation bears significantly on how words come together—in the poem, in the way bodies are made and remade, in the change of emotion. Relation is aesthetic, a part of the revolutionary thrust forward out of the past that keeps one mourning and w/resting in the shadows.
2. Jayawardane (2022); Morrison (2021); Shildrick (2005); Simpson (2007); Troeung (2022): In the shadows awaits that which is left unattended, leavin
Works Cited
Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, USA: Ann Arbor. 1990. Jayawardane, M. Neelika 2022. “‘This is not the correct history’: Lacunae, Contested Narratives, and Evidentiary Images from Sri Lanka’s Civil War.” In Cookie Jar 1 - Home is a Foreign Place, edited by Pradeep Dalal and Shiv Kotecha. New York, NY: The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Morrison, Toni. 2021. “The Site of Memory.” In The Source of Self-Regards: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, 233-245. Boston, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. New York, NY: Duke University Press. Shildrick, Margrit. 2005. “The Disabled Body, Genealogy and Undecidability.” Cultural Studies 19(6): 755-770. doi.org/10.1080/09502380500365754. Siebers, Tobin. 2017. “Disability aesthetics.” In Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader, edited by Jos Boys, 57-66. London and New York: Routledge. Original edition, 2006. Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: the Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67-80. Titchkosky, Tanya. 2007. Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Troeung, Y-Dang. 2022. “Cripping the Kapok Tree and the Cambodian Genocide.” In Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, 107-134. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Alanna Veitch is an emerging disabled poet-scholar currently living in Ka’tarohkwi (Kingston) Ontario. She is pursuing a PhD in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and has a master’s in health science. Veitch’s work grapples with female embodiment, disability, temporality, crisis, social justice, and hope. She has had the pleasure of performing her poetry at Artfest Kingston, and has had pieces published in Devour: Art &amp; Lit Canada and “More than a Gathering,” an anthology from Poets@Artfest 2023. Veitch uses poetry to assemble a self, inviting the reader to reflect alongside her with patience and curiosity.
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## Références

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, USA: Ann Arbor. 1990.

Jayawardane, M. Neelika 2022. “‘This is not the correct history’: Lacunae, Contested Narratives, and Evidentiary Images from Sri Lanka’s Civil War.” In Cookie Jar 1 - Home is a Foreign Place, edited by Pradeep Dalal and Shiv Kotecha. New York, NY: The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Morrison, Toni. 2021. “The Site of Memory.” In The Source of Self-Regards: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, 233-245. Boston, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. New York, NY: Duke University Press.

Margrit. 2005. “The Disabled Body, Genealogy and Undecidability.” Cultural Studies 19(6): 755-770. doi.org/10.1080/09502380500365754.

Siebers, Tobin. 2017. “Disability aesthetics.” In Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader, edited by Jos Boys, 57-66. London and New York: Routledge. Original edition, 2006.

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: the Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67-80.

Tanya. 2007. Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Troeung, Y-Dang. 2022. “Cripping the Kapok Tree and the Cambodian Genocide.” In Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, 107-134. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.