Obsolescence

"Here we see that what is terrifying and inconceivable is not the infinite void, but existence." (Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium)

It's difficult to avoid the dead in Prague.

Every place remembers: Slaves were sold at the Týn Courtyard.

There are people who cannot recall their origins.

The Nazis closed the Prague Jewish Museum (established in 1906 to preserve holy objects from Synagogues demolished during Josefov' slum clearances of the turn of the century) on March 15, 1939. Their plan: Create a Central Jewish Museum for the documentation of an extinct race. Their method: Collect objects from Jewish communities from Bohemia and Moravia, catalogue and store them. Exterminate the people. What they accomplished: The world's largest collection of sacred Jewish objects, simultaneously serving as a memorial to seven centuries of oppression.

Every place remembers: Yad Vashem is a memorial for the anti-Jewish Holocaust in Jerusalem.

There are people who cannot recognize their relations.

Yad Vashem memorial has a library (with an online searchable database) that catalogues the names of the more than six million victims from the Shoah period. The library keeps the names of these people, and information about where they lived, where they were born, anything that could be known or remembered about them. The point is to state definitively that they existed, they had lives and they mattered. Those who died were not without names or bodies. They were not a mass to be buried; they were human beings.

Every place remembers: Hwééldih: (Bosque Redondo Reservation) Place created at Fort Sumner, New Mexico to incarcerate the Navajo and Mescalero Apache from 1864-1868.

They say those bought and sold on the Long Walk to Hwééldih leave no trace. Their survival transformed them into shapes left outside of documents and collections. When baptized they were truly born again, outside k'éí. They ceased to be relevant as they lost their name, their origin, and their means of locating themselves among their relations. They exist only in the space between enslavement and extermination, a vestigial organ, a biological degenerate, something or someone that once was but has disappeared, passed away, without a mark or sign. A creature that functioned, once, at an earlier stage in the development of this, our species.

Novels

Almost everyone agrees: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

"You told me that that man we visited today, the one with the hollow eyes, put an end to slavery, huh? But I'm afraid that our people are still being bought and sold, even though they are dead—and have been for hundreds of years! Even worse, some of the people are not whole. They remain in bits and pieces, and yet these people are also being traded, bought and sold, like so many sheep! When does it stop?"
Anna Lee Walters, Ghost Singer

While the nation has been celebrating Juneteenth—"the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States"— few know that the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, was not applied to Indian slaves. Our slavery was not regarded involuntary. When Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19th,1865, with news that the civil war had ended and slaves were freed Indian slaves, Navajos among them, were still being held in bondage. Joint Resolution No. 65 was passed five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, on July 27, 1868. The resolution gave "General William T. Sherman power/authority to use the most efficient means at his disposal to reclaim from bondage the women and children of Navajo and other tribes then held in bondage and return them to their respective reservations."

New Mexicans resisted and fought. They were successful and maintained their hold, culturally and legally, upon their slaves. Revealing that "[l]aw . . .is merely that complex of rules which has the coercive power of the state behind it." (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study)

"For the most part, Indians carried to Rio Grande settlements and sold into slavery were lost forever to both tribe and kinsmen—as no treaty clause could induce New Mexicans to release property they had paid as high as $200 per head for." (Lynn Baily, Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest)

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter began as a novel.
I'm not suggesting you read it.
Briefly, (from the film adaptation):
"History remembers the battle but forgets the blood."
"However history remembers me before I was president, it shall only remember a fraction of the truth."
"I shall always think of myself first and foremost, as a hunter."
"I shall kill them all."

I've written about Lincoln and his historical record before: http://reidgomez.blogspot.com/2009/02/ke-heathens-and-homosexuals.html

Vampires want a nation of their own.

"Eye Killer awakened beneath a shroud of soil. Sand and dead wood pressed upon his body. He worked the muscles of his arms and flexed each cord in his hands, relishing the pull of reknitted tendons. Taut as bowstrings, he thought. And at the tip of each finger, arrowheads of iron." A. A. Carr, Eye Killers

Vile necromancers—we have warriors too: Johnnie Navajo (Ghost Singer), Anna and Wilbur Snake (Ghost Singer), Nasbah Navajo (Ghost Singer), Michael Roanhorse (Eye Killers), and Diana Logan (Eye Killers)

"Truth is facing ourselves, and seeing what we is, and swallowing the taste of it. We have to know this to live and to keep on living."
Anna Lee Walters, Ghost Singer

For the truth about slavery read: Ghost Singer
For the truth about vampires read: Eye Killers

Obsolescence

"Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You just can't rape that many people. It's mathematically impossible. It's too hard on the body. You get tired. . .the semen of those Spaniards, who thought they were titans, just got lost in the amorphous mass of thousands of Indians."
Roberto Bolaño, 2666

My life is characterized by violence: physical and ideological. Violence is my heritage.

Heritage: a) something handed down from one's ancestors or the past, a culture, a tradition, etc., b) the rights, burdens, or status resulting from being born in a certain time or place; birthright.

"The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man."
Franz Kafka, Diaries

I'm often asked: are you still here? In waiting rooms, in conversations, in response to my steadfast refusal to accept the number I've been assigned. I'm a believer. I believe. What I write (my content) and how I write (my form) reflects my refusal to fade away, my refusal to accept the terms of the day (English and exploitation—of women, earth and children). As a thinker I'm not in favor. I understand that. I'm stubborn, not daft. I ask a great deal from the world. My grandparents asked a great deal from me. We have high expectation. They provoke anger. Often that anger is directed at me. I face it. It hurts. It empties my soul and my bank account. I am free to change. I know that. I am free to turn my back on everything I know. I am free to forget myself and my relations. Always at home I knew the truth: there was no freedom without responsibility. Even during our most violent moments we grappled with ways to be more beautiful than broken.

"It wasn't enough to claim our lands, we had to claim our ways of thinking, acting and living."
William L. Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow

Everything I do has its origin in the power I was given at four, five and six years of age. Faith. Audacity. Anger. Resilience. We lived a very inspired life in San Francisco violating every code (health, penal, cultural) in the county. I was not a witness to their artistry I was a pivotal participant. Lying to animal control. Helping with the piece work. There was work to spare, so I took my place in the project of asserting our right to exist—then, there, on our own terms, in the face of urban poverty and cruelty. I have no home to go home to. But I have this heritage. I use it to speak to our legacy of slavery, alcoholism and colonization.