There’s a scene from Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls that crosses my mind when I think about the power of collections of stories and materials from victims and survivors of state violence, which we have been building into an “archive of survival” at the Texas After Violence Project since 2007.
In the scene, the book’s protagonist Robert Jordan is given the pistol his father used to shoot himself and takes it to Bear Tooth plateau, “where the wind was thin and there was snow all summer on the hills he had stopped by the lake which was supposed to be eight hundred feet deep and was a deep green color.” Jordan climbs out on a rock, where he “saw his face in the still water, and saw himself holding the gun, and then dropped it, holding it by the muzzle, and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight.”
British author Olivia Laing, reflecting on the pain in this scene, notes that Jordan doesn’t drop the gun “until he sees himself holding it reflected in the green glass of the water.” In some ways, archives are like mirrors. In them, we see ourselves, how we’ve changed, what we’ve become. Archives of survival reflect cruel realities created by societies that prize revenge and punishment over healing and liberation. They reflect an image of us holding the gun. What will it take to finally let it go?
