The Archival Haunt

In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman likens the archives of transatlantic slavery to a violent and defining death of the Black enslaved.¹ The empirical record of the archives of slavery that she pores over renders the enslaved invisible and offers no glimpse into their everyday lives and subjectivities. Hartman seeks in vain the “small memories” that have been “banished from the ledger” of the slave ship: evidence of the rich lives lived by two girls who, Hartman learns, died aboard the slave ship.² The only detail of the girls’ lives that is available in the archival record is of the violence meted upon them. In the face of such overwhelming erasure, Hartman argues that for Black lives the archive of slavery is a “death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body.”³ To enter this archive is “to enter a mortuary” where even mourning is prohibited.⁴

Hartman’s account of entering the archives of transatlantic slavery presents an archival episteme that is unyielding, suffocating. To be in the archive is to be up against it, with dangerously little room to maneuver. Debilitation in the pursuit of archival discovery appears to itself be the primary discovery afforded by the archive. If in Hartman’s account the archive symbolizes such material and epistemological death, we might understand an act of haunting as the desire to exceed this archival death—to imagine possibilities of persistent life despite these debilitating conditions.⁵ Such an impulse of haunting undergirds Hartman’s pursuit of a “different set of descriptions” that exceeds the vocabulary of violence and offers a “space for mourning” denied by archival protocol.⁶ It is a haunting that stirs “against the archive” in every sense of the phrase: leaning up against the archival edge to trace and test its empirical limits, but also slowly increasing the force of the lean—pushing against the archive, clearing space to breathe.⁷ “Venus in Two Acts” speaks of the pain of entering the archive of slavery. Cornered by this archive of pain, it crafts an exit strategy.

“Now shall we consult the life of a stranger?” As in Hartman’s essay, this opening line of the poem “Ark” in the poetry collection Surge (2019) written by Jay Bernard too situates us in a moment of archival pursuit.⁸ But the line that follows in the poem implies a different archival orientation: “Now shall we see what can and cannot be kept?”⁹ The tone of this second line expresses not only the anticipation of archival discovery but also an autonomy of archival discernment. Contrasting “Venus in Two Acts” with Surge, Sarah Lawson Welsh argues that Bernard works with a less damningly authoritative conceptualization of the archive than Hartman, and that therefore Surge imagines archival engagement and haunting as processual and participatory.¹⁰ If Hartman describes her encounter with Black life in the archives as a “stumbl[ing] upon”, a deviation from archival design, the speaker of Bernard’s poem seems to be drawing up the design of the archives from which they speak.¹¹ With no eye at the exit, the poem “Ark” is not about entering an archive; it is about archiving an entry.

Although Saidiya Hartman and Jay Bernard are reckoning with quite different contexts of Black history—eighteenth-century transatlantic slavery in Hartman’s essay, and twentieth-century Black British diasporic life in Bernard’s poem—critical appraisals of Surge have put these two writers in conversation owing to their shared preoccupation with telling Black histories through archival encounters.¹² Archives have indeed been an abiding preoccupation in Bernard’s writings, approached through a queer Black British lens.Bernard drafted Surge at least in part during a residency at the George Padmore Institute, a major archive of Black history in London.¹³ At the heart of the wide-ranging inquiry of Surge are the records of the 1981 New Cross Massacre held at this London archive. The New Cross Massacre took place on January 18, 1981 when a fatal fire erupted in a house in the South London neighborhood of New Cross. On this night, a party had been ongoing to celebrate the birthdays of two young Black British women, Yvonne Ruddock and Angela Jackson. The devastating fire led to the eventual death of fourteen young Black lives. Bitter disagreement ensued in the British public over the circumstances of the fire: Members of the Black community argued that the fire had been a willful targeted attack by white supremacists on the birthday party, while the state and the police dismissed this argument, insisting that the evidence was insubstantial. The archives at the George Padmore Institute hold records of the public mobilization and demonstrations that ensued in the wake of this gross injustice.¹⁴

Not only are archives an abiding concern in Bernard’s oeuvre, as Lawson Welsh and Andrea Brady have argued, Bernard’s poetry engages with archives in their sheer and specific materiality.¹⁵ In the ‘Author’s Note’ to Surge, Bernard writes: “I am from here, I am specific to this place, I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back.”¹⁶ Drawing on this articulation, Lawson Welsh tracks how hauntings in the collection’s poems manifest both through the speculations that archival gaps elicit and by engaging with the material contents of a community-oriented Black archival institution. “The thanatology of the archive and the memorial aspirations of the collective are both present in Surge, but so too are the labour and knowledge that are required to build and maintain an archive,” writes Brady, crediting Surge’s investment in archive-building and attention to the archivist’s labor to Bernard’s experience as a professional archivist in London.¹⁷ For Bernard archives are a “space of sociality,” for sharing the knowledge that they hold.¹⁸

Building on Lawson Welsh and Brady’s work, I want to focus on this paradox of how Surge situates an impulse of haunting within archival materiality rather than a haunting that is conjured where material evidence ends. I will situate the potential of this paradox in the semantics of the word ‘haunting’ itself by close-reading a later poem in Surge titled “Apple” alongside “Ark”. “Apple”, which has received limited critical attention, figures a material haunt-ing in both the act of building alternative archives and in building a collective sociality around the records these archives hold.¹⁹

The speaker of “Ark”, which is written primarily in the first-person singular, attends to the ageing contents of a box before them. The speaker attends to signs of decay in these contents—rust stains, flaking text—as they glean clues to describe what the contents are and where they come from. As Lawson Welsh has argued, in emphasizing acts of preserving and describing, the speaker of “Ark” operates as a “poet-as-archivist” figure who “draws attention to the materiality of the archive’s documents . . . as well as the process of archiving itself.”²⁰ More specifically, the speaker of the poem approaches the objects before them as an archivist would carry out the work of archival processing.²¹ Archival processing refers to the steps undertaken by archivists to prepare a newly-acquired archival collection for access by researchers. James O’Toole describes archival processing thus:

These are indeed the tasks that preoccupy the speaker of “Ark”. In writing a poem that narrates the processing of an archival collection, in putting forward the figure of the “poet-as-archivist,” Bernard situates us not in the reading room of the archive, but in its backrooms, its stacks. Here in the backroom where the archivist is at work, the archive is neither distant nor definitive. We see this in the forensic tenderness with which the “poet-as-archivist” in “Ark” attends to the material in the box. Their patient hand unfastens a rusting paper clip lodged in a document; they gently work a sponge upon the wound where the rust eats away at the paper. Archival protocol approximates rituals of ministration. These rituals of material preservation convey the relationship of care between the record and the hand that handles it—reads it.

This affect of caring for and about the archived object resounds deeper still in “Apple,” a later poem in Surge that also regards archival photographs. The words “don’t you love” repeat throughout “Apple” as an anaphora of affection towards photographs of gatherings that have been archived at the George Padmore Institute. These include photographs from the birthday party of John La Rose, a trailblazing Black British activist and “founding force” of the Institute.²³ These photographs record the kinds of “small memories” that Hartman struggled to find empirical record of in the archives of transatlantic slavery that she encountered.

The titular apple of Bernard’s poem is one such tender detail in a photograph from La Rose’s birthday party that the poem makes loving note of:

However, this apple acquires an increasingly complex signification as the poem proceeds. While the motions of the knife—cleaning, peeling, cutting— embed us in the material minutiae of the photographed apple, with no warning these very motions render the literal apple figural: The knife’s edge acts upon the apple to not only cut it into smaller pieces for communal eating, but also to “cut the pieces into pages.” This figuration extends into the lines that follow:

In conflating the pieces of the apple with the pages that contain the party photographs in the archive, the apple moves from being a descriptive detail in the archived photograph to being a metonym of it. The knife’s incisions thus connote the apple’s photographic indexing.

But the pieces of the apple do not become simply a photograph. Tellingly, they become a “brown photograph”—a snapshot of time that is itself in turn marked by time’s passing.²⁴ The photograph of the fruit slices “ageing” into soft brown on the plate references the sepia that has spread across the photographic surface with the passage of time. The slices and the photograph of the slices are both exposed to the elements—decomposing, discoloring. And yet, unlike the apple slices that would have begun browning within minutes, the photograph itself would not have browned so soon. The fact of the photograph’s eventual browning signals as much its decomposition as its preservation in the archives of the George Padmore Institute. To signal that the apple slices “have become” a “brown photograph” is to allude both to the indexing of the apple into a photograph as well as to the transformation of this index into archival record. First a detail in a photograph, then a metonym of the photograph: the apple now seems a metaphor for the act of archiving itself.

It is this act of archiving that the speaker reckons with more explicitly in the lines that follow:  

These lines reveal the underlying logic of the love that is repeatedly confessed to in this poem’s anaphora of “don’t you love”. These lines suggest that the joy afforded by the apple in the photograph is not only in experiencing secondhand the moments of everyday tenderness that it is evidence of. Rather, as Andrea Brady notes in her reading of “Apple”, Bernard sees archive-building itself as an “act of love.”²⁵ The anaphoric form reaffirms this article of faith. “[T]he creation of documents and their aggregation into archives is also a part of everyday life outside the purview of the state,” writes Arjun Appadurai, imagining archives as a space of aspiration rather than damnation.²⁶ The joy of the apple is in the very fact of an archival logic that made it possible for such everyday tenderness to “become” a “brown photograph”—to become archival record. An insignificant, ordinary apple—more momentary than momentous—twinkles in the archival eye. It is an archival eye that acquires archival records not as a surveilling “mechanism of the state” but by a different metric that fondly memorializes passing “glimpses of joy and solidarity.”²⁷

Reading the apple as not only ekphrastic detail in an archival trace but as itself metonym for the archive and metaphor for its archival logics elicits a different interpretation of the gestures of cleaning, peeling, cutting, placing that the poem details by which the apple is prepared for the hands of its eaters. These actions recall the gestures of the archivist preparing archival records for the hands of the reader in “Ark”. And indeed, “Apple” makes note of these very archival processes towards the end of the poem: that the brown photograph has been

Unlike “Ark”, in which the apparatus of the archive is foregrounded from the beginning of the poem, it is in its final lines that “Apple” announces this apparatus explicitly. In these lines, nested within the continuing anaphoric refrain of “don’t you love”, is another reference to love, describing the work of the archivist who has “lovingly” processed these photographs. In imagining the acid-free archive box holding the photograph as a burial plot, “Apple” seeks to reconcile the relationship of the deceased Black body to the archive: “This dignity is more than was offered to the dead themselves,” writes Brady.²⁸ It dares to imagine an archive that may be a place of bodily dignity, of rest, of love, rather than a record of their vehement denial. The archive box is “acid-free” but not sterile: it teems with endurance.

What resonance might the idea of ‘haunting’ have for an archive that is imagined as a resting place where the dead have been laid so lovingly? We might linger on the metaphor that this poem in Surge relies on for imagining such an alternative archival formation. Apple: an object of nourishment, invoked in a scene of gathering. It brings to mind a second sense of the word ‘haunt’ as a concrete noun: “A place of frequent resort or usual abode; a resort, a habitation.”²⁹ It chimes with Derrida’s reminder that ‘archive’ traces its etymological roots to notions of the house, the residence of the archon.³⁰ Lawson Welsh draws on Derrida’s reminder to identify an “ambivalent” archon in the speaker of “Ark”;³¹ “Apple”, on the other hand, seems to be squarely inside the archon’s home, narrating a humble feast at the archon’s table. Far from an imperiously-abstracted archon, the archon here shares a plate, shares an apple. Rather than a haunting of the revenant, this is a haunt of revelry. Not a haunting that looms over the archive, this is a haunting that inhabits the archive and becomes it: an archival haunt.  

The titular apple of this poem is one of the most abiding metaphors for knowledge in the history of the West—particularly knowledge of the verboten.³² In this poem, the apple signifies multiple such forbidden knowledges: of survival, of sheer pleasure, of the everyday, of the marginal. Yet the titular apple of Bernard’s poem also importantly departs from its Biblical antecedent in its rather unassuming incarnation as a piece of fruit split between friends. I want to draw attention to the splitting of the fruit itself. Even as I suggest that the incisions of the knife connote photographic indexing, they also signal, quite literally, the portioning of the apple. Portioned before its partaking, the act of sharing the single apple, the sociality it enables seems as important as the apple itself if, as Andrea Brady remarks, the archive in Surge refuses the “imputation of deviance to Black sociality” and fosters an alternative to it.³³

It is worth noting then that before Bernard presents this apple as metaphor for an alternative archival logic, before they render it a metonym of the photograph, before they even locate this apple as empirical detail in the photograph, the apple originates in the poem as a detail in an oral recollection. In the lines just before the poem introduces “the particular apple”,³⁴ it is listing some of the details that those who are still alive may remember about these gatherings:

The stanza which introduces “the particular apple” begins as the next line in this list of details that are, tellingly, those elements—of scent, sound—that a photograph cannot capture.  

The act of recollection expressed here is a social act, not a solitary one. For this we need to read the poem’s anaphora of “don’t you love” not only as expressing Bernard’s love of archive-building but also as consistently invoking an interlocutory spirit. Don’t you love, the lines speak to a second person, the addressee of this poem. Unlike the solitary “I” of the archivist that looms large in “Ark”, the poetic space of “Apple” makes room for multiple people. Even the first line of “Apple” opens in media res, as if the narration of a story is underway, “And so the revolutionary had a birthday party.”³⁵ It is in this ongoing interlocution that the poem introduces the imagined person who may recall their memory of the casual ceremony of apple-cutting that preoccupies the rest of the poem. The recursive form of the anaphora itself evokes the frequentation that makes a haunt. The acts of cleaning, peeling, cutting, placing the apple then may just as easily be what preceded and therefore evades the photograph of the cut apples, like the sounds and smells of the day, and yet re-emerges in the oral recollection when the photograph serves as an aide-mémoire. If the photo records the events at a haunt, the viewing of the archived photograph is its own event; it conjures its own haunt. The titular apple is then also a metaphor for the sharing, the sociality that makes an archival haunt.

Towards the end of Bernard’s earlier poem “Ark” the “poet-as-archivist” wonders “where to put” the photograph they hold, haunted by its horrors. One the other hand, the ending of “Apple”, narrating another photograph claiming its rightful resting place, strikes a different note. “Apple” renders even one’s final resting place, the most solitary of spaces, parenthetically into a haunt, noting that the photograph has been laid “(as is tradition)”. Evoking tradition signals a recurrence, situating this isolated burial in a history and a logic that extends beyond the body being laid, and makes the laying a communal experience. Following Appadurai’s invitation of archival aspiration, can we think of  such a poem of the empirical everyday, far from ghostly stirrings in archival gaps, too as a haunt-ing: the work of alternative archive-building, of building with apples and acid-free boxes an archival haunt?³⁶ A place to gather, to collectivize, to leave flowers: to share apple slices, and to share the small memory of having shared them.

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1. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14.
2. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 8.
3. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2.
4. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 17, as cited in Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, 4.
5. For a discussion of archives and haunting, see the introduction to Jenny Sharpe, Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020.)
6. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 7; 8.
7. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12.
8. Bernard, “Ark”, in Surge, line 1.
9. Bernard, “Ark”, line 2.
10. Sarah Lawson Welsh, “Jay Bernard’s Surge: Archival Interventions in Black British Poetry,” Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings 6, no. 1 (2022): 1–26, https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/5813/, 15; 19.
11. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2; 6.
12. Besides Lawson Welsh cited above, see also Andrea Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive: Jay Bernard’s Surge and Holly Pester’s go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt-tip.” Études anglaises 76, no. 1 (2023): 47–65; Victoria Adukwei Bulley, “Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic Review: ‘Surge’ by Jay Bernard,” Poetry School, September 26, 2019, https://poetryschool.com/reviews/ledbury-emerging-poetry-critic-review-surge-by-jay-bernard/
13. “George Padmore Institute,” accessed October 21, 2024, https://www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/.
14. For more details on the New Cross Massacre and the subsequent Black People’s Day of Action, see Aaron Andrews, “Truth, Justice, and Expertise in 1980s Britain: The Cultural Politics of the New Cross Massacre,” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1 (April 1, 2021): 182–209.
15. On the material archive in Surge, see also Jayakumar-Hazra, Cathie Kanagavalli Lakshmi. “‘For Here, We Have Not an Enduring City, but We Are Looking for the City to Come’: Dysgraphia of Disaster and Wayward Black Futures in Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019).” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58, no. 3 (May 4, 2022): 374–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2021.2019090.
16. Bernard, Surge, xi.
17. Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive,” 52; 51.
18. Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive,” 48–49.
19. For a brief close reading of “Apple”, see Brady, 54.
20. Lawson Welsh, “Jay Bernard’s Surge,” 17.
21. Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive”, 53.
22. James M. O’Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1990), 65.
23. Chris Moffat, “Against ‘Cultures of Hiatus’: History and the Archive in the Political Thought of John La Rose,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22, no. 1 (55) (March 1, 2018): 40.
24. Emphasis added
25. Claire Armitstead, “Speaking out: Ted Hughes winner Jay Bernard on exploring the New Cross fire in a one-off performance.” The Guardian (5 April 2018): 36, as cited in Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Politics of the Archive”, 51; Brady, 54.
26. Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” in Information is Alive, eds. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: v2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, 2003), 16.
27. Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive”, 57; 54. For one such example of a colonial archive of the surveillance of racialized subjects, see Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Shadow of Shadows,” Positions: Asia Critique 11, no. 1 (2003): 11–49. Aaron Andrews has argued that the events of the New Cross Massacre marked a disaffection among Black British diasporas towards official state narratives and activated “the potential of archives and historiography as anti-racist tools” to contest such narratives. See Andrews, “Truth, Justice, and Expertise in 1980s Britain,” 15.
28. Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive”, 54.
29. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “haunt (n.),” December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8064279071. Among scholars who have attended to this dual connotation of ‘haunt’ in other contexts, see for example Karen N. Salt, “Ecological Chains of Unfreedom: Contours of Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic World.” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 2 (2015): 275.
30. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 2. Antoinette Burton has also explored the notion of dwelling in relation to archival spaces. See Antoinette M. Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
31. Lawson Welsh, “Jay Bernard’s Surge,” 11.
32. I am grateful to Emmy Waldman for suggesting this possible connotation.
33. Brady, “The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive”, 56.
34. Bernard, “Apple”, in Surge, line 12.
35. Bernard, “Apple”, in Surge, line 1.
36. For one such study of alternative archive-building, see Laura E. Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.

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  A Banerjee

  A Banerjee is a writer and a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.