notes — genta nishku

Genta Nishku 1/6/23 Genta Nishku 1/6/23

“I am trying to remember where in time I am”

[…]

“I know you like I know my times”

— Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day

Genta Nishku 11/10/22 Genta Nishku 11/10/22

Genta Nishku 10/21/22 Genta Nishku 10/21/22

“Would law be the disaster?”—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Genta Nishku 10/21/22 Genta Nishku 10/21/22

“How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins? Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead?

Or is narration its own gift and its own end, that is, all that is realizable when overcoming the past and redeeming the dead are not? And what do stories afford anyway? A way of living in the world in the aftermath of catastrophe and devastation? A home in the world for the mutilated and violated self? For whom—for us or for them?” — Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

Genta Nishku 7/21/22 Genta Nishku 7/21/22

“Memory and space are in a permanent clinch; when space collapses, it drags memory into its underground, into its nonexistence, and without memory, the present becomes sick, mutilated, a torso with extracted organs.” — Daša Drndić, E.E.G.

Genta Nishku 7/20/22 Genta Nishku 7/20/22

“What is wanted is a form with continuity. What kind of continuity? What continuity? Everything around us, including ourselves, it’s all in patches, in spasms, in ebbing and flowing, our whole envelope, this whole earthly covering, is crisscrossed with loose stitches, which keep coming undone, and which we keep persistently trying to tighten. Under these unstitched tatters chasms open up into which we don’t dare look, into which we don’t wish even to glance. We try in vain to sew up and smooth out these seams, the pinpricks remain visible. Scars don’t fade. With time, that patchwork of ours, that we, becomes so thin that we forget about it, as though a magic carpet had flown away, and then come back as a huge, heavy cape, covering us. A life of continuity, how tedious. How monotonous, monochrome. A tepid, limp flow in one direction. Like literary continuity.” — Daša Drndić, E.E.G.