What are Archives of Survival?
Throughout the last half century, theorists have laid out the multitude of ways institutional and government archives function as hegemonic instruments of state power, “structuring structures” as Bourdieu called them. The only way to find the silenced voices of the marginalized and oppressed, if they exist, is to carefully “mine the archive,” as Foucault said, to attempt to excavate “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” More recently, critical archivists and archival theorists have forcefully demonstrated how traditional institutional archives often perpetuate violence through policies and practices founded on silence, exclusion, and dehumanization. Here, grossly myopic readings of the past and present are, by design, distant and detached from the stories and experiences of the dead and the living, and the violence happening everywhere outside its walls. This archival violence is compounded when the “subject” of the collection is historical or contemporary violence against the marginalized and oppressed; there is no interest in our survival, only in the power of authority and self-preservation as guardians of the dominant narrative.
These institutional archives are what Tonia Sutherland, following Randall C. Jimerson, calls “carceral archives,” archives that “fundamentally serve the interpretations of state powers.” Sutherland juxtaposes carceral archives with the sociocultural imaginary of “the carceral archive,” where “oppressed people cannot escape the historical memory and historical trauma that is codified, reinforced, reinscribed, and reified in the documentary record as part of the work of maintaining dominant cultural narratives. For oppressed and marginalized people, the carceral archive is an embodied carceral reality — a lived experience that stands in opposition to liberation and reinforces historical notions of inferiority and disposability in the present.”
The subservience of institutional archives of violence to the power structures of white supremacy imbues a static despair and hopelessness upon us — codifies, reinforces, reinscribes, and reifies, as Sutherland says, cultural narratives of defeat and invisibility that we are not supposed to escape. Community-based archives and documentation projects that have emerged as a direct response to state violence happening in our communities in real time reflect life, energy, and resistance in the face of this violence, annihilation, and erasure. Here, there is no need to mine the archive for silenced voices: the insurrection of subjugated knowledges is the archive. This memory work of violence and survival is part of a long history of communities using stories, images, and subversive art to build counter-narratives and counter-archives.
In a recent essay, I say that TAVP’s collection of stories can be seen as an archive of survival for those whose stories we document: the loved ones of prisoners executed by the state, murder victim survivors, the loved ones of people killed by police, and the loved ones of people who died in jail or prison custody. In another essay, I expand the reach of the power of archives of survival to include all communities that are marginalized and oppressed by police and the prison system, and symbolically annihilated in mainstream media and institutional archives and thus in the construction of memory and narratives. Sutherland’s thinking about the carceral archive — and the work and writings of many other activists and archivists — has inspired me to continue thinking through the importance of archives of survival as essential manifestations of liberatory memory work in the context of state violence. What are archives of survival? What are their contours? What is their political and ideological architecture? And perhaps most important: How do we build them?
For those that share their stories with us, survival is rooted in their unyielding perseverance, their will to go on despite the unimaginable tragedy and loss they have endured. It is rooted in the honoring of the life of their loved one lost to violence, reflections of the lives they lived, the lives they could have lived, and the hope that sharing their stories will help prevent future violence and help other families that have lost loved ones to violence. Survival also manifests as embodied understandings that emerge from the pain of loss and have the power to liberate us, not only from despair and hopelessness but from our carceral reality.
In an oral history we conducted last year as part of a collaboration with Texas Advocates for Justice, Mignon Zezqueaux, a community activist and mother of three sons, tells of the tragedy and hardship her family endured after one of her sons was murdered in 2008. Her son’s death was particularly devastating for her youngest son, who was very close to his older brother and looked to him as a father-figure. “The trauma that we went through from the murder of my son triggered so much emotion that it changed his behavior,” Mignon remembered. The loss of her son also meant a loss of financial stability for the family. The family lost their apartment and became homeless. To help the family, her youngest son started selling drugs, was arrested, and funneled into the juvenile justice system. “He felt like it was his duty to make that up,” Mignon says. “He was trying to relieve a burden off of me by taking a burden on to himself.” After her son was charged with burglary, Mignon did not have money to hire an attorney to fight the case. The state charged her son as an adult and a court-appointed defense attorney coerced him into pleading guilty to a felony. At only seventeen years old, he was given a six-year prison sentence.
Mignon’s experiences losing one son to murder and another to the prison system inspired her to become a criminal justice activist and advocate for incarcerated people and their families. “The system is about mass incarceration,” she says. “I see trends that make me realize the way that it was set up. When you talk about the history of mass incarceration, you have to talk about slavery. This has been going on in America for centuries.” And yet, despite experiencing personal tragedy and loss and fighting against a ruthless carceral system with its roots in slavery and white supremacy, Mignon finds strength and survival in honoring the memory of her son, whose spirit she sees living on in her youngest son, and seeing the ways her son’s presence lives on. “I believe that if he was alive he would have been one of those teachers that took a busload of students to protest in Ferguson,” she says. “He wanted to take care of the kids from the inner city. He related to them. He knew what they were up against. He knew the pressures. He wanted to make a difference, and I think in a way he still is.”
Mignon’s story shows how the transformative power of liberatory memory work emits far and wide and in all directions. For those of us who see the stories of our own lives reflected in the stories of others, survival is cultivated in this relational dialogue of mutual understanding. Even if we have narrowly escaped the bullet or the cage ourselves, stories like Mignon’s remind us that for black and brown people, for undocumented immigrants, for trans people, and other marginalized and oppressed groups, survival is not guaranteed. It is a daily achievement. These stories are also reminders that we must continue to fight for justice and liberation every second of every day. It never stops. For archives of survival, measures of success are not funding, citations, or clicks, but the distinct role they play in radical anti-oppression activism, organizing, and culture change.
Stories like Mignon’s also show how just as there is a relational dialogue between storyteller and witness, archives have the power to create virtual dialogues between storytellers and their broader communities. The archive is a mirror. It reflects what we were, what we’ve become, and where we’re headed into a future that is assumed by the very idea of archives but is nonetheless fragile, tenuous and, paradoxically, undermined by the stories of violence archives house and protect. As the antithesis to the carceral archive, archives of survival implore us to confront urgent yet difficult questions about violence, accountability, and community healing on the path toward justice, abolition, and collective liberation.
