Erasing My Mother
Why on earth would I do something like that??
Above is a portion of the transcript from the first video interview I did with my mother. I’ve used a simple markup tool in MS Word to black out most of the text, selecting words that have resonance for me. In doing so, I’ve created new meaning—different from what is under the black bars, but true to the emotional experience of this project and my relationship to my mother.
Poets will recognize this technique as either “blackout” or “erasure,” which are both types of “found poetry”—that is, poetry you can discover/uncover inside text that isn’t meant to be poetic in the first place. Think newspapers, chemistry textbooks, your bank statement, etc. And while erasure has had waves of popularity, particularly in the last couple of decades, it’s not without its controversy. To be more specific, what gives anyone (me) the right to alter the verbatim spoken words of a dying woman? Of anyone, under any circumstances? Isn’t that committing a violence against a text? A person?
Yes. It can be. And sometimes that’s the point. This Guardian article from 2021 explains how poets can use blackout as an effective tool for political protest. But, too, they can run into serious ethical issues, as described in this 2018 interview with Chase Berggrun in BOMB Magazine. The writer says,
Literary appropriation is always a political act, and the politics of erasure is unsettling and frightening. It is dangerous. Erasing Dracula was a violent act. It was a text I believe I had a right to deface, but I am and always will be uncomfortable with erasure, which is the way it should be. I always recommend this brilliant essay by Solmaz Sharif, who says at the beginning: “The first time I confronted erasure as an aesthetic tactic I was horrified.” We must be critical of these kinds of forms, especially when they are forms that are dear to us.
Acknowledging who you are in relation to your source, and who wrote it, is essential, from the beginning. The idea that all art belongs to everyone, to do whatever they’d like with it, is an idea with roots in the toolbox of white supremacy. When this kind of mindset is unchecked, the result is the work of someone like Kenneth Goldsmith, or John Gosslee’s horrendous erasures of Hoa Nguyen’s poems. I highly suggest listening to this Robin Coste Lewis lecture on the history of erasure for anyone looking to learn more about the form.
The bolding above (which I added) is, for me, what the whole issue boils down to. And even though we’re not talking about another writer’s published works, and even though these transcripts also contain my own verbatim speech, I am still and always aware that I am taking something from my mother that I cannot be sure she would have freely given.
In the case of poetic erasure, particularly when the altered text is literary/has been published, the reader has the ability to read the source material in its original form as well. It’s easy enough to check Dracula out of the library and most of us read it in high school anyway. This knowledge adds a layer of meaning and complexity to the new text. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing I have a choice to make: do I show the original or do I leave it concealed from you? If I leave it concealed, what is that saying about a project that is, at its heart, supposed to be about honesty and transparency? This, after all, is what my mother wanted when she first asked me to interview her.
And still I haven’t explained why I’m erasing in the first place.
And that’s because I’m not totally sure. I only know that when I first saw the raw transcripts, this process immediately came to mind. I have always enjoyed the work of collage and assemblage in visual art, bringing together disparate sources to make something unique.
Erasure offers similar challenges and pleasures, though again with that added dimension of potential “ick.” My aim in this project is not to take my mother’s voice away from her and I think maybe the reason I feel okay about the poems (so far) is that I know they are only one dimension of the whole. I am also working with this material much more straightforwardly in prose. Ultimately it will be something of a hybrid work. I’m also teaching my graduate students about literary hybridity this semester, so the timing is good for me to really grapple with these instincts I’m having. They feel important and I don’t want to turn away from them.
So, in the spirit of the transparency I keep going back to, here is the un-erased, un-edited portion of the text which is where my mother was telling me about her mother and her mother’s siblings:
OK. OK, well, your mother was a Murphy. My mother was American. So tell me about her. My mother, Harrity and. Harriet and Theresa Murphy tell me something, they didn't give her the chamber a name. Everybody else got the chamber, women of the Harriet's, the chamber and the blood line that runs back to the Mayflower. Oh, yeah. Anyway, my mother was the youngest in her family of six children. You remember most of your aunts and uncles that were your mother, your grandmother's siblings. Your first was Anne-Marie. Got it on for. And then the next was Uncle Ed, who died well into his 90s. Actually, Uncle Ted was probably the first. And then I am a. And then there was Anthony and Anthony indicted a. And then there was well, now I should say that Uncle Ed was a Franciscan monk and that Avery entered the convent at the age of 17 or 18 because you raise your pride here. Right. Because too beautiful for life. Last to be. It was absolutely breathtaking and lovely and lovely. Well, you know, I was fond of her. Yes. We were all fond of her. Even when I yelled at, I when I was found. I think she gave you our time. I think she is terrific.
It’s hard to parse but not impossible, right? And the ungrammatical chaos of it charges the work with energy that, again, honors the emotional experience I’m hoping to capture. And remember, I do have transcripts that are much more cleaned up which I am relying on for the memoir sections of the project.
For now, let me use my poetic license & liberty to make some oddly beautiful art.
‘The idea that all art belongs to everyone, to do whatever they’d like with it, is an idea with roots in the toolbox of white supremacy.’ New idea for me; I need to think about this a bit
I much prefer to gray-out the unused portions of text for my erasures from Pepys, simply because I think it makes it more interesting for the reader if they can also read the whole text. Jen Bervin did this with Nets, her erasure of Shakespeare's Sonnets - that's where I got the idea.