Drift: proximal distance from the center (Part II)
(read Part I of Asiya Wadud's "Drift" here)
Songe: think, consider, dream
Josué Guébo’s Think of Lampedusa is a threnody for the 366 people killed in the 2013 shipwreck of a boat attempting to reach the island of Lampedusa, long a point of entry into Europe for those migrating from the Middle East and countries throughout Africa. Various ‘drifts’ surround this elegy, starting with the title. In the translator’s note, Todd Fredson questions the possible translations of the title as it appears in its original French, Songe à Lampedusa. Fredson writes, “Songe, while it can mean ‘think,’ implies a certain kind of thinking. ‘Consider’ would have been a viable alternative.” He later continues, “‘Dream’ is not concrete enough to include the material conditions that demand an immediate decision: do something.”
The implicit “you think” of the “Think” in the title stands in opposition to drift if we understand this particular drift to include a drifting in thought. A drift in thought allows us to quickly forget Lampedusa and all that Lampedusa is a proxy for in migration: who is granted the ability to move, and who do we let drift. The “think” becomes an antidote to our drifting thoughts, the thought that might rather free itself from the attention required to think of Lampedusa. The “you” affixes each of us to the “think.”
A drift in thought can go far afield and not make its way back, can ultimately get washed up elsewhere. Maybe the center and the drift are no longer held in any accord at all—there is no signal, there is no call and response. The tension releases. But for a call to have any meaning, there must be at least two people involved, one person on either end of the line (no one can be adrift). A ‘missed call’ happens when one person places a call and the other person doesn’t receive it.
Their own accumulated centers
Lateral borders extend within Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian so that the possible landscape of the footnote is thrown into higher relief and we read in order to ask ourselves a series of questions: when does a footnote constitute the center? What can the center never show us that only the periphery can? What would a landscape made up entirely of drifts look like? How can we put these drifts into relation with one another instead of the center?
Footnotes could be thought of as moments of drift, but not drift as “mov[ing] along a line of least resistance.” There is a physicality to this drift—our eyes travel down the page to look for the relational moment between the center (body of the text) and the drift (footnote). How far are we willing to travel before we no longer remember the center? Can the footnotes start to compose their own accumulated center? Can each drift instead also become its own drift-center in a constellation of drift-centers?
The center isn’t fraying here, but maybe we are asked to think again about the firmness of the center (could also be called the border, the plinth, the inside) we have constituted and what it would take to reimagine a new geography and landscape for it.
~~~~~~~
There is still the drift that is “to move or float smoothly and effortlessly.” In this acknowledgement, maybe we can soften the firm line between any periphery or border, release the tension a bit between center and otherwise, and assume that things will travel smoothly and effortlessly between center, edge, left of center, and otherwise. The edge will become the center in one frame and in the next, it could be closer to the edge one more time. Try a third time and again it’s back at the edge. But if we stop looking, the animated moment doesn’t end, it keeps moving against or towards any expectation. Expecting drift repositions the center, acknowledges that its forcefield is magnetic for this moment, but that just outside the frame, there is another, then another field on which to affix new relational drifts.
_________________________
*Portions of this essay emerged through conversations with Sarah Jackson during Telepoetics: Crossed Lines, which was a symposium dedicated to exploring the relationship between telephony and literature. The event was originally scheduled to take place at The Dana Library and Research Centre at the Science Museum in London on 27 May 2020. Due to the impact of Covid-19, however, the event was hosted online (https://crossedlines.co.uk/telepoetics/).
Other thoughts mentioned here emerged in the days that Brandon Shimoda and I co-taught a workshop as part of Pacific Northwest College of Art's low residency MFA program.
The image mentioned in relation to Dawn Lundy Martin’s Good Stock Strange Blood is a still from a film made by Sienna Shields and the HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? artist collective. The film was shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Editor's Note:
This article's feature image "Adrift, listless, unmoored from its safe," by sagesolar, was used under the Creative Commons license via Flickr. No changes or alterations were made to the photo.