Reanimating Ancestors Guest Editor Note

I’m interested most in those who—through research, archival documents, or personal hauntings— write into fractured stories as a way to disallow for absence to go unnoticed. If a writer can begin to answer the impossible past, so that when looking at an image of a figure (or its lack) we believe we see motion, even better. I requested work in which history, ancestors, and an opposition to losing narratives maneuver syntax, following spring 2020, when shelter-in-place and the avoidance of crowds demanded revision after George Floyd’s murder by police in Minnesota. I trailed protests, walks, and bike rides in Oakland led by Black youth, as many did nationally and internationally. I witnessed the necessity for Black communities and allies to not only hold police accountable for their murders, but to hold space to mourn. As a non-Black person, I waded in the impossibility of equating or even understanding this grief. I waded in the infinity of ancestor experiences I would never know. I felt the only appropriate theme for the folio would be one that could hold space for loss without enforcing a type of grief, genre, identity, or way of remembering. Saidiya Hartman questions wrenchingly and lucidly after finding her great-great-grandmother’s slave testimony, which is more refusal than testimony, in Lose Your Mother: “If ruin was my sole inheritance and the only certainty the impossibility of recovering the stories of the enslaved, did this make my history tantamount to mourning? Or worse, was it a melancholia I would never be able to overcome?” The emergence of protests, public art, and window signs recording the names of the dead seemed less “protest” and more procession for a colossal grief.

In my small radius of the world, where large catastrophes occurred and recurred from centuries prior, I read submissions in the evenings after work on an Asian-heritage vegetable farm in Sonoma County. I planted and harvested food my family and ancestors ate that I had never seen alive before while the worst wildfire season in California’s history threatened the existence of the farm. I shook ash off chrysanthemum greens and planted bok choy knowing it could all burn away. I switched my COVID-19 cloth mask for an N-95 on land made fertile most largely by Latinx farmers, and before Chinese immigrants, and before Coast Miwok and Pomo people, in a mostly monoculture of white inhabitants, mostly growing a monoculture of grapes for wine. Some days, the sun never appeared, and often smoke obscured my view of Angel Island—an immigration prison-turned-state-park where my Alaska Native and Chinese American grandfather was incarcerated during the Chinese Exclusion Act— on my commute over the Richmond Bridge. With ash floating in through my car vents, I thought of the women’s prison on Angel Island and how a fire erased the poems they carved into the walls as they waited for entry to or deportation from the United States. After the bridge, I would see or not see San Quentin, California’s oldest prison, founded at the crest of the Gold Rush, in scenic and starkly white Marin. A virus outbreak killed more than 20 incarcerated people who were not protected because of the state’s dependence on their unpaid labor. ICE detention centers also had major outbreaks, while the U.S. food system, dependent on California’s crops, is farmed by a population that is about 75% “undocumented.”

While we read headlines on infection counts, the term “essential” surfaced for labor. What did our ancestors do to allow for us to be here? The texts in this folio feel essential in that the writers, who are evidence of their ancestors’ futures, form a parallel present in a time when the present is excessively fraught, and the future is imaginable only through delusion. In this way, the texts are marvels that become marvelous in proximity to one another. I see my systemless selection process as flawed and unethical as the months I read them in, though the process itself coaxed me into a space more encompassing and generous than...