Published in Issue 62.4: Fall 2023
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is guest editor of our Fall 2023 issue Transversions: Archives, Testimony, and Reimagination.
I write to you amid what the World Meteorological Organization has named the hottest month ever on record, on the precipice of what is likely to be another hottest month, no end or solution in sight. On the air quality app I have learned to open over my first cup of coffee, a flurry of fire emojis surrounds my city, the smoke from which cares nothing for national borders. Once-dominant narratives have failed. Daily, crises surround us for which we lack consensus and adequate language, let alone solutions. We talk of the need for racial justice, yet anti-Black and anti-Asian violence continues. Of the reality of gender diversity, yet the onslaught of dehumanizing and violent laws against trans people continues. Of the impacts left by a pandemic that has not fully left us. Our narratives falter with the weight of everything unsaid, denied, erased.
Each day it can feel like urgency reaches a new level, yet all these crises have been building since before any of us was born. The history books failed to prepare us. So, too, did the genre divisions of our literature, the idea that nonfiction would be a thing uncontested, fiction the only needed place of imagination, poetry reserved for the poets. Genre, after all, shares a root with gender; no surprise, perhaps, that a fuller accounting of human experience, and human capability, turns out to require a loosening of division, an admission of nuance, emotion, memory, wish, and longing into the archive alongside documentation. We need new ways of seeing, ways that reimagine the past and our record-keeping of it to incorporate voices and lives that were erased. We must approach archives as living sites of story-making, aware of all that was once stripped. We must write our way into a new relationship with the narratives that shaped us.
For this special issue of MQR, the editors and I invited submissions that engaged with the theme of transversion, a word first proposed by nonfiction editor Laurel Billings. Fittingly, the word has meaning in multiple disciplines, but here we approach it as an invitation to transmutation, transformation, and transition. I have been thinking often these days about how “transition” is a word applied to members of the transgender community, like myself—but perhaps the fixity of that label obscures just how much every single one of us, no matter our gender, transitions over and over again in a lifetime. So, too, must our approach to the past. As Saidiya Hartman has written, “The past depends less on ‘what happened then’ than on the desires and discontents of the present.”
How, then, might archives be approached as fertile ground in which to find new perspectives, new hope, new possibilities? What can be recuperated from the past to reveal new ways of understanding the present, and thus envisioning the future? The work “Gospel,” by textile artist Tabitha Arnold, pictured on our cover, makes this invitation visible and tactile by using the traditional and labor-intensive technique of punch-needle embroidery to document modern fights for justice and liberation.
Some of the pieces included here highlight acts of suppression and denial. In Julie Lee’s portrait series “At the Head of the Class,” which opens this volume, Lee erases her younger sister from her sister’s yearbook photo to evoke the erasure committed by the weight of dominant narratives thrust upon her. In Jasmine An’s “Epithalamion for the Yellow Woman (For Myself),” a profoundly racist law becomes, slowly, the ghost-trace beneath a profoundly racist narrative in the present. Morgan Thomas, Liz Harms, and others use strategic erasure of present-day documents to highlight the power structures that underpin our world—a form of resistance that renders absence visible as presence.
Others illuminate spaces that the writers of history would leave vacant, imagining their way into the antecedent traces of what must, surely, have been there. In Clare Sears’s “How You Enter” and Nicky Beer’s “Object,” the archive becomes a place to search for restoration; in “The Agony and Ecstasy of Eric Williams,” Andre Bagoo imagines an intimacy foundational to a national narrative, yet wholly erased from it. Shuchi Saraswat and Kay Gabriel draw on images of the past to see, anew, themselves. The final story, Cal Angus’s “The Chlorophyll Library,” carries us into a new way of thinking about the archive, about time, and about the boundaries of any one human story. It gestures beyond the human narratives here assembled, toward a reminder that our timescales, our archives, are not the only ones.
All of the pieces engage in an act of faith that the past, despite its flattening in the history books, was as rich and complex as the present. This faith finds pictorial form in the collages by S. Erin Batiste that close this volume. Taking photographs of Black and mixed-race women produced by the carceral state and resituating them into the cosmos, Batiste’s images suggest expansively luminous alternatives, worlds that might have been and might still be.
We exist within stories, these writers and artists remind us. We exist in a constant refashioning of narrative and a constant refashioning of self. For each story, there is a storyteller and thus a vantage point; for each, the work is to remember that another, fuller perspective is possible. To recognize the layers of sediment that have built up beneath and behind what the state acknowledges can be difficult. It may bring grief we need to feel. But it also brings possibility. In that sediment lies the clay to fashion new ways of imagining, new ways of being, new methods of care and pathways to liberation.
Doing so is transversion. So perhaps transversion is also, simply and powerfully this: what it means to be alive in a world ever-changing, in selves ever-changing, holding deeply the responsibility to go on.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, Paris Match, Lire, Telerama, and The Sydney Press Herald, it has been translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Maine Arts Commission, the Eccles Centre at the British Library, and the Black Mountain Institute, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich is now a 2023 United States Artists fellow. They have written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper’s, and The Best American Essays editions for both 2020 and 2022. They are an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Their next book, BOTH AND NEITHER, is gender-bending and genre-bending work of memoir, history, cultural analysis, trans re-imaginings, and international road trip about life beyond the binary. It is forthcoming from Doubleday (US), Phoenix (UK), and Sonatine (France).
