History, Time, Questions...

Do you believe history can be a type of salvation? Do you believe that without a sense of the past we can't build a new and better future? Does freedom dreaming require rewriting history from below? Is our desire for history connected to a search for some natal home? Why is collecting, documenting, marking time or saving moments important? I feel like it might be the best thing I have to pass down to future generations—stories, tales, and truths of past struggles, victories and losses. In a way my dissertation can be thought of as a letter reaching back to the Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic—my people who lived in the dark, in the ships’ bottoms. Yes, this project is a letter to my younger self who longed to be connected to a part of me that existed in my own body’s history.  How do I make love out of the present and past? I'm writing for the future. I’m writing for the right now and the yesterdays. The way time has been marked upon our bodies and our histories is often times not in sync thus the tales are said to be illegible or impossible. If you've ever edited film you'd notice that if you move the image without moving the audio track the story doesn't make much sense--it becomes distorted. Normativity dominates our world and our time—it encourages us to throw away distortions, but what if we used a different meter? A different time? Might we create a different place?  Periodization standardizes time as it marks clear beginnings and endings, winners and losers, but for those of us who were never meant to survive, those of us who were never supposed to have beginnings, and those of us who have beginnings that start in the darkness as aberrations—well, who can read us? Who can see us? Who can understand audio and visual that might be out of sync, but still in motion? This might be the beginning of a transgender of color analytic...