Storytelling

“As a writer committed to telling stories, I have endeavored to represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known.” (Saidiya Hartman)
This quote, to me, is what it means to be a historian. We are storytellers, committed to, and limited by, the truth. Hartman’s words truly encapsulate this struggle. It is frustrating and inconceivable to imagine the number of “impossible stories” we will never be able to tell. As Hartman said, it is tempting to fill these gaps with plausible stories to give us some kind of closure, even if these stories are not true. However, made-up stories do not provide the respect and closure that people like Venus deserve. The limitations of historical writing can be discouraging. I have come across similar limitations in my own project. There is not a lot of documented history about the black queer community in Philadelphia before the 1990s. So far I have found some newspaper articles about the AIDS crisis, but these articles tend to focus more on the disease than on the lives that it affects. So from a historical perspective, their lives were not worth documenting beyond their connection with a deadly virus. Similarly to Venus’s connection with another girl’s murder on the Recovery. There are more documents about the black queer community than Venus, but both can be considered historical silences. I also have yet to find a primary source about black queer women, which is another silence I have come across in my research. All these limitations are frustrating. However, I agree with Hartman that these limitations should not stop us from trying. I admire her effort to create a narrative using “critical fabulation” to try to write a story in place of silence. These stories will not give voice to those who have been silenced, but hopefully, they can help us better understand what life could have been like for those history has silenced.