Erasure in Three Acts: An Essay

Tell me about disappearance, and I will tell you about palimpsests. Everything we try to erase still manages to leave something behind.

In Haunted by Empire, Ann Laura Stoler calls this the “scarred traces” of history, the remainders of colonial violence that persist in intimate forms. A violence so deep and lingering that it drapes itself over the land, and no withering of time can deny its indelible imprint. In other words, let me tell you about what stays. The ghosts. The unvanquishable.

What I know about ghosts: “It’s over,” a former love once said to me. As in done. As in “I erase you now.” The elbow sleeve to the page, smudging the love out of it. If only he knew: the vanishing as a voluntary move. I wiped my surfaces clean.

Erasure refers to a poetic tactic in which a found text is erased—blacked out, whited out—and what remains is the new poem, emerged from the old. To be found is something akin to being discovered, which is the convenient trapping of saying something is new when it has already long existed. To make something new from these old bones will always be a political act, either to liberate the text from it original meaning or to reinscribe the violence in another form.

Isn’t it tragic? I often say. The choices we are left with in the wake.

Sometimes what emerges from the erasure is a refrain. After something unfortunate happens, I find myself narrating the events over and over, the same inexhaustible order of words, until gradually, they decay into a less comprehensible shape, and finally, “It happened. That’s all.”

Solmaz Sharif, in her essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetic: Erasure,” describes erasure as a parallel state and poetic tactic in the U.S., citing the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as just a few examples of state militarization abroad. If there’s any nation that excels at erasure, it is the U.S., after all. Sharif adds, “Still, when it comes to erasure, this very form of palimpsest, the ghost is not only death or the degradations of time—the ghost is the state itself.” In this turn, we are left with questions of power, of who gets to haunt, and the quality of that haunting.

In a workshop on erasure poetry, I described erasure as a subversion of the belief that it is poetry’s job to reveal. If the writing of trauma, for instance, requires some excavation of the recesses of the mind, then how do we account for the blank spots? For the perpetrators we cannot name? The histories we can no longer access because they were stolen from us? Calling upon Édouard Glissant’s concept of the right to opacity, can we consider poetry for the ways it does not tell? How it retains its dignity through selective silence? In this case, erasure is a strategy that at first mimics the psychological embodiment of what we have lost. Then the loss blankets the page. Then the poem becomes synonymous with loss itself.

***

Tell me about disappearance, and I will tell you about palimpsests. Everything we try to erase still manages to leave something behind.

In Haunted by Empire, Ann Laura Stoler calls this the “scarred traces” of history, the remainders of colonial violence that persist in intimate forms. A violence so deep and lingering that it drapes itself over the land, and no withering of time can deny its indelible imprint. In other words, let me tell you about what stays. The ghosts. The unvanquishable.

What I know about ghosts: “It’s over,” a former love once said to me. As in done. As in “I erase you now.” The elbow sleeve to the page, smudging the love out of it. If only he knew: the vanishing as a voluntary move. I wiped my surfaces clean.

Erasure refers to a poetic tactic in which a found text is erased—blacked out, whited out—and what remains is the new poem, emerged from the old. To be found is something akin to being discovered, which is the convenient trapping of saying something is new when it has already long existed. To make something new from these old bones will always be a political act, either to liberate the text from it original meaning or to reinscribe the violence in another form.

Isn’t it tragic? I often say. The choices we are left with in the wake.

Sometimes what emerges from the erasure is a refrain. After something unfortunate happens, I find myself narrating the events over and over, the same inexhaustible order of words, until gradually, they decay into a less comprehensive shape, and finally, “It happened. That’s all.”

Solmaz Sharif in her essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetic: Erasure” describes erasure as a parallel state and poetic tactic in the U.S., citing the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as just a few examples of state militarization abroad. If there’s any nation that excels at erasure, it is the U.S., after all. Sharif adds, “Still, when it comes to erasure, this very form of palimpsest, the ghost is not only death or the degradations of time—the ghost is the state itself.” In this turn, we are left with questions of power, of who gets to haunt, and the quality of that haunting.

In a workshop on erasure poetry, I described erasure as a reversal of the belief that it is poetry’s job to reveal. If the writing of trauma, for instance, requires some excavation of the recesses of the mind, then how do we account for the blank spots? For the perpetrators we cannot name? The histories we can no longer access, that were stolen from us? Calling upon Édouard Glissant’s concept of the right to opacity, can we consider poetry for the ways it does not tell? How it retains its dignity through selective silence? In this case, erasure is a strategy that at first mimics the psychological embodiment of what we have lost. Then the loss blankets the page. Then the poem becomes synonymous with loss itself.

***

Tell me about disappearance, and I will tell you about palimpsests. Everything we try to erase still manages to leave something behind.

In Haunted by Empire, Ann Laura Stoler calls this the “scarred traces” of history, the remainders of colonial violence that persist in intimate forms. A violence so deep and lingering that it drapes itself over the land, and no withering of time can deny its indelible imprint. In other words, let me tell you about what stays. The ghosts. The unvanquishable.

What I know about ghosts: “It’s over,” a former love once said to me. As in done. As in “I erase you now.” The elbow sleeve to the page, smudging the love out of it. If only he knew: the vanishing as a voluntary move. I wiped my surfaces clean.

Erasure refers to a poetic tactic in which a found text is erased—blacked out, whited out—and what remains is the new poem, emerged from the old. To be found is something akin to being discovered, which is the convenient trapping of saying something is new when it has already long existed. To make something new from these old bones will always be a political act, either to liberate the text from it original meaning or to reinscribe the violence in another form.

Isn’t it tragic? I often say. The choices we are left with in the wake.

Sometimes what emerges from the erasure is a refrain. After something unfortunate happens, I find myself narrating the events over and over, the same inexhaustible order of words, until gradually, they decay into a less comprehensive shape, and finally, “It happened. That’s all.”

Solmaz Sharif in her essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetic: Erasure” describes erasure as a parallel state and poetic tactic in the U.S., citing the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as just a few examples of state militarization abroad. If there’s any nation that excels at erasure, it is the U.S., after all. Sharif adds, “Still, when it comes to erasure, this very form of palimpsest, the ghost is not only death or the degradations of time—the ghost is the state itself.” In this turn, we are left with questions of power, of who gets to haunt, and the quality of that haunting.

In a workshop on erasure poetry, I described erasure as a reversal of the belief that it is poetry’s job to reveal. If the writing of trauma, for instance, requires some excavation of the recesses of the mind, then how do we account for the blank spots? For the perpetrators we cannot name? The histories we can no longer access, that were stolen from us? Calling upon Édouard Glissant’s concept of the right to opacity, can we consider poetry for the ways it does not tell? How it retains its dignity through selective silence? In this case, erasure is a strategy that at first mimics the psychological embodiment of what we have lost. Then the loss blankets the page. Then the poem becomes synonymous with loss itself.