PRISM is excited to share an excerpt from the powerful and imaginative essay, “Mad Fragmentations: Transmissions from the Lost Archives of Trans History” by KJ Cerankowski from our Fall 2023 issue: 62.1, available for purchase now.
Mad Fragmentations: Transmissions from the Lost Archives of Trans History
If my own body is an archive of mad fragmentations, then I come to
the pieces of archival collections in pieces myself. I search the mad, random
fragments in part to find a way to live in my own splintering. Although
archives generally hold the relics of the dead, I come to them as spaces of
survival. Survival, a thing some might wish against for a person like me.
You don’t have to look far in many parts of this world to find someone
seeking to snuff out transgender life, whether through legislation or direct
person-to-person violence. I need the remnants and revenants of queer
pasts to remind me not only that queer and trans people have always
existed and lived remarkable lives, but also to be reminded that where
there is a past, there is also a present to be lived and a future to be made.
In the archive, time collapses, ripples in its nonlinearity. Maybe the
past we imagine is actually our queer future. Maybe the future we imagine
is actually our queer past.
As places where the passage of a life has been kept and stored, that very
life lives on in the material preservation of the documents and objects that
tell its story. In the archive, I hold hands with ghosts as I caress the papers
and objects their hands once touched. I smell the bits of them that linger
between the pages, wafting gently from delicate envelopes. I hear their
voices in their pen strokes, the words they inked in the margins of books,
in diaries, and in letters to friends and lovers. I am with them across time,
out of time. I come undone, cracked and fissured; I live in the fragmented
shards and in the spaces between them.
KJ Cerankowski is the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming, published by punctum books. His poetry and prose have also appeared in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Sinister Wisdom, and The Account, among others. He is currently working on a book about object encounters in transgender archives,
which has received research support from the Newberry Library, Yale’s Beinecke Library, and Harvard-Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library.