The Breaks by Julietta Singh

Author:Julietta Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books

It may well be essential to our survival to track back through major and minor histories to select the legacies we carry forward. It may be our duty to collect from these embodied fragments, to study what has made us, then to decide willfully what of it is useful in pursuit of a future we might yet survive. It is no easy act to know history so as not to repeat it. Following Saidiya Hartman, choosing our inheritances in the wake of extinction necessitates gleaning from the past, gathering up those muted, stifled, or stamped-out possibilities of living that might teach us to endure. This is not the sanctioned work of trained historians, but of intimate material bodies. It is not merely a way of refusing the distinctions between political and personal history, but of inventing other informed channels by which to live against and even into extinction.

It is no longer possible to look backward or forward without considering your body. I revisit the past through your frame, invoking in your shape the little human I once was, and all the other little humans in struggle whom we will never know. I look forward in time to a world in which I have become another body, a world in which my presence for you will be an absence. I look at you in the here and now to fabulate the world after this one. For now, I watch you calculate your surroundings, puzzle together a planet in ruin. And I wonder over what strange and beautiful practices you might invent to build collective lives and make them livable. How you might live through the breaks, and everything that comes after.

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