Remembering Ida

This is Ida. She is from the south side of Chicago.

She is my grandmother. Like so many others, she passed away prematurely when I was four years old.

We didn’t have much time together, but our connection was immediate and strong.

I do not remember my grandmother’s house, but on some overcast mornings I can feel her living rooms.

I do not remember what my grandmother liked to eat, or if she was a good cook. But sometimes when I eat oatmeal it smells and tastes like she made it. I do not know why.

I cannot remember what my grandmother’s voice sounds like, but when I listen to Esther Phillips I imagine her voice.

An archive of haunting is what connects me to my grandmother, and so many others I love.

When I was 19, I returned to Chicago for the first time since I was 4 — on the occasion of my father’s release from prison.

My father had not been home since before Ida, his mother, had passed.

It was the first time I had been in my father’s presence outside of prison walls. It was the first time he had the relative freedom to visit his mother’s grave.

It was Thanksgiving.

On a day that is meant to celebrate white settler colonialism and genocide as discovery and inter-ethnic cooperation — we headed to the cemetery to pay tribute.

The gates were open, but being a holiday there was no one working. We had a plot number, only to realize it was not clear which one was Ida’s.

Turns out that when she passed, no one could afford a grave stone. There was no marker. We could not find her.

We had to return home without. And I cannot articulate how it felt, how it feels — after decades of separation from incarceration, surveillance, state violence and the difficulties of finding intimacy through that — to not be able to complete the act of symbolic communion.

Access is a complicated thing.

This moment, and several others, make it plain that memory work is a fraught endeavor in the context of racism and other forms of oppression.

I enter here, looking for language to acknowledge that we all have stories, things that we cannot remember, archives that haunt us.

There are deep sadness’s and persistent hopes that in one way or another keep us searching the past.

Lost in that cemetery, I wondered what it is to remember Ida. A mother who was not only meant to bear children but carry the weight of their vulnerabilities too.

Is she better off hidden in the sovereign folds of our forgotten when the chastisements of Moynihan still echo in the work of so many foundations, nonprofits, and activists?

“It isn’t US, it is black mothers who are to blame for the conditions of our every day!”

Do we even dare memorialize her smile, much less acknowledge any sense of her erotic? What are the consequences of mis-remembering our loved ones to our own projects of living?

Looking for my grandmother I realized that our survival and becoming are themselves tribute to the dead behind us. A redemptive remembrance. That existing in ways that challenge racial capitalism, enabling spaces where freedom is possible — if only temporarily — is ultimately more meaningful than commissioning gravestones.

But back then I did not appreciate what it would mean to move through this world.

I did not know that today I would be this tired. I did not know how disappointed I would be. I did not know that I would still be this angry. I did not know that I would fail so badly, and so often.

My idealized project of being has suffered.

We all share asymmetrical relations to power and privilege.

There are harmful histories that I embody and have been responsible for articulating out of carelessness and privilege.

In my dismay, I have not always maintained the stamina required of compassionate critique.

I have caused pain, and been pained.

I say this now, not as confessional, but as an offering.

This is a critical moment for the field of archival work in particular, and the communities we work with in general.

Navigating the present will require that we both stay connected to the archives of love and absence that brought us here, and that we lead with our complicated and compromised humanity.

We cannot name the contradictions we must find a way through otherwise.

We cannot challenge each other to be our best selves, to do our best work, if we fear upsetting or harming one another.

Our collective becoming should always occur in a context of care — but transformational work is nothing if not painful.

Our communities are suffering poverty, environmental toxicity, incarceration, deportation, and so many other violence’s.

Whether we realize it or not — our archival practice is already in the thick of it.

Just like so many mothers, we will find ourselves carrying the weight of memories heavier than we planned for. And just like so many mothers have shown us, we are capable of what is required.

With love to Ida, and all caretakers

happy mother’s day