Perhaps, the Flood:
Saving a Flooded Image
To survive is to revise. These slight adjustments.
If you can —dusting the page off — survive that.
— Laura Mullen, “Prose Poem (…)”
Archivist’s Note
If you are brought up in a flood-prone area, a storm becomes a part of who you are. If you grew up in a house safe from floods, the storm is something that exists on the outside— beyond portents, on the warning signs from televisions.
Consequently, a storm becomes a normal day: you elevate your possessions, wrap the furniture, evacuate, and wait for the storm to pass. After the storm, you go back home, clean up the mud, and wait for the next storm to come.
Dear River
Dear river, babbling smoothly. Where did you come from? Where are you headed? What have you done to the cattle and the people and our possessions that you have stolen away from us? Have you seen what remained in your wake? Now we stroll by the erected dike every day, all memories of your violence erased. You seem calm in your murkiness. Where are you hiding their bodies?
Storm
Declare upon us your innocence. Point us to the one who has blood in their hands. Every day you rove smoothly, and we cannot ascertain your guilt through the sheer murkiness of your mouth. Must you remember the days of our friendship, your sanctity, of how we used to lavish in your clear, open mouth: how we swam with you and washed our clothes and how we were able to hang them dry by the shore, clean and safe with certainty. Must you remember your eventual cohorts, the ravages they inflicted upon us, and how we mistook their touch for what we used to know as love. Must you remember: the day your cohorts arrived they wracked our bodies for gold; they caressed our frightened bodies in the guise of love. And we believed them: a flooded house is an emptied space; we believed that underneath this muck there remains something pure. Their touches roused trembles, quivers, panic—the things we find familiar. That our bodies were aquiver were the only things we knew for a fact; everything else proceeding that is language; interpretation.
Murkiness
Does a barren house make for a barren mouth? That our bodies are porous, that this skin, these pores, these annals of entry, the porousness of our skin; that your body, the throes of your pricks, the swarm of your touch; that your muddied caress, which was purported to be a blessing, upon touch, has consumed us, and in our want for survival, we had no choice but to be consumed in return. That these instances of touch are swarms of what you and we had touched; the junctures of our skin; the porousness of how our bodies coalesce. That the touches that roused you had not only roused you; that we are consumed by everyone else you have consumed, and we are doomed to carry that rot wherever we go, even to our bed, even in our dreams, even as we dutifully scrub our skin.
Archive
To come to writing is to claim mastery over the subject, yet I am nothing but an archivist trying to make sense of the ruins of this body archive. I am no one but an “I” attempting to catch something elusive. Suppose I was to reveal myself: here are the annals of my entry. Suppose I was to bare my weaknesses. Suppose I was to count your trespasses. Suppose I was to declare that these traces, these remnants of where your touches have lingered on my skin, are now a part of my perpetual becoming. Suppose you were to come back. What would you make of these naked battered bodies? As you may see, my body is already in itself an archive of ruins: accidental and inflicted, bloodied and bruised, drowned and disembodied, and your arrival exacerbated the shattering of the shards.
Images
To survive is to revise— these words and a jar of trapped fireflies— as I write this letter this late night, alone, thinking about us. Perhaps I still write about you within the confines of this jar. Perhaps I am writing to you in anticipation of your return. Perhaps these are utterances of my wish for a different ending. Perhaps this is us surveying ourselves in the mirror. Perhaps these words will only lead us to gawk; to be enamored with crumbling houses, fraying images, abandoned buildings, or bodies of water swarming over bodies of land. Perhaps this is not about God’s wish, but rather, the ravishing. Still, you left our bodies as crime scene and aftermath.
Notes
The epigraph ‘to survive is to revise…’ was lifted from Laura Mullen’s work “Prose Poem”, from the book Dark Archive (2011).
The concept of the human body as both porous archive and archivist was borrowed from Julietta Singh’s work No Archive Will Restore You (2018).
The phrase ‘a jar of trapped fireflies’ was an allusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s introduction of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977).
Jessa C. Suganob is a translingual practitioner working with image, text, and ephemera. She writes and translates in English, French, Filipino, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Kinaray’a in her works. Her works can be found in ANMLY, Kritika Kultura, Petrichor, TLDTD and elsewhere. She is currently the Director of Literary Arts for the art gallery Carmen Art District. She is currently based in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines.