Welcome to Excavations. My name is Connie Chen and I am here to center marginalized bodies and voices and excavate what I love. Our first episode is my response to a photo I stumbled upon on April 9th, 2020 and have not been able to look away from since.
The seven white dry brush strokes against the sandy soil have legs and arms. They stood along and in the dark brown strip of earth cutting diagonally across the drone image, where two rows of small wood boxes stacked on top of one another like legos, or pencil cases with sliding tops that I used in elementary school. Some pieces have splatters of dirt on them that seemed to be the work of toothpicks protruding from the white. I zoomed in. Those are shovels. Those white bodies are inmates. They are digging. Those are plywood coffins stacked three high holding unclaimed bodies in this coronavirus outbreak. The dark brown strip of earth is the depth of their graves. That is Hart Island, home to a million bodies, mostly unclaimed. This is New York. That is a burial.
“Inmates wrote the names of the deceased on the side of coffins with a wax crayon,” I read from the caption and felt ashamed for this brain that dared to conceive them as brushstrokes, legos, and pencil cases. But the drone photo, hovering over life and death, spoke the language of legos, brushes, and pencil cases and observed me with familiar eyes.
Death is in the crayon. The story of names and crayons is the story of a bygone childhood—the childhoods we doodled away to grow into the names we were given. Paraffin—the waxy substance in crayons derived from wood, coal, or petroleum—derived from lives lived, mourns in colors, celebrating the breaths we have as we move obliviously towards death. To contemplate the movement of the crayon is to grow into and out of life and time. The mute crayons calligraphing the names of the dead revive our first memories of learning who we were, and dreaming of our becoming. Time is the death of the crayon dying again on the forgotten canvas. Each stroke condenses, extends, undermines, and enlarges a life into a line--at once finite and infinite. Who were these unclaimed bodies? Who were they becoming? What has become of us—that we accept their bodies stacked three high? How did we get here—where they have become crayon strokes on plywood, lego pieces, and pencil cases?
In Gustave Courbet’s painting, “A Burial at Ornans,” he depicted controversially ordinary subjects from his own family and his own world on a huge canvas usually reserved for depicting historical, biblical, and mythological scenes and idealized forms. His elite audience in the early 1850s commented on the “ugliness” of the people at eye-level who claimed their own bodies and the dead body they had gathered around. Beholding the scene ignites the anxiety of our intrusion: the people in the painting can look back. They are looking back at our own ugliness. Meeting their eyes, I retreated into Edouard Manet’s unfinished portrayal of Baudelaire’s funeral where Manet draws me to the whites of the towers of Val de Grace in the background before I can make sense of the dark green and black silhouettes of mourners in the foreground. Yet even here, even without the intensity of facial features, Manet gives us the shapes of bodies that we depend upon to perceive people.
But in this drone burial of unclaimed bodies, the absence of immediately legible bodies unsettles our faith in the shape and belonging of any body, of all bodies. Death seems at once absent from the burial and yet never ending. The inmates standing in the graves, alive at the edge of death with faceless and distorted bodies, wound the face of the earth with shovels, and assemble its cheeks with tombs. They have seized Charon’s oars from the coffins to row through the foamless soil, sowing memories into dust. It is as though death is life in a new figure--a strange image where abandoned bodies are as seeds in porous wood casings, and the earth, eating them alive into her bosom, might give birth to them again--at any minute now--as she has when the trees came to life as coffins, when decomposed matter breathed into my childhood as wax crayons.
With one lid leaning on the grave bank, the plywood boxes seem to resist the tide of dust, fearful of sinking and dying again in their burial. I remember Gustave Dore’s depiction of Charon’s bark in his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy—where bodies overflowed from the boat, weighing it down to the brink of sinking. The plywood coffins stacked three high, unbearably heavy for their barks, are drowning in the earth on Hart Island, New York. And I selfishly wished to uncover bodies shaking, turning in the boxes, claim movement from coffins, and give form to nothingness--even if they are suffering bodies writhing and stacking under Dore’s pen--for at least they seemed alive enough to be dying. The deaths of the unclaimed bodies are unfinished, ongoing, emerging from the ambivalent reveries of births and deaths. I cannot accept that these people have become absent, that these bodies will remain unclaimed. I am yet awaiting the future of their memories. How desperate am I to deny conceiving death as death! As Carl Jung wrote: “Life has never been able to believe in Death!”
I wanted so much for any dead body here to seem alive, like the bodies under the pens of Courbert, Manet, and Dore. The insensate eye of the drone has sustained the dead in its own way--making it possible for them to be seen in our imaginations. Yet it has also written a fiction of power where we the living assume the hierarchy of resurrected eyes overlooking the unclaimed and drying bones, unable to engage or escape our gaze. Who emptied my eyes from my body to tread across these imprisoned bodies--living and dead? What awful and despicable privilege to claim this aerial view, so removed from the wounds in the tomb that we share, with so much unearned freedom to never worry about being stared back. With marginalized people disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, I can only imagine the colors of the bodies lying here. We do not see the resurrection of their death. We do not see the newness of life. But these are the body of Christ, broken, abandoned, and unclaimed because we have just begun to claim the experience that the body we inhabit may end our lives--that our bodies too, can be neglected and annihilated. They are not other bodies in wood boxes exposing the becoming of our own. They are our bodies, our deaths, our vulnerabilities to claim.
Looking at the homes of the bodies we abandon from the comfort of my bed, I recognize that my wonder, my sorrow, my terror, and my hopelessness are futile attempts to confer dignity on them, and should not be disguised as appreciation. But I ask you to not look away from the death and abandonment before us so we may learn to know them--the poor, the homeless, the disabled, the people of color--as us. The dying, our dying has already begun. And my question to you is: If we have already died, how do we live?
If you enjoyed listening to this inaugural episode, please subscribe and consider leaving a review and supporting me on patreon.com/conniechen. If you would like to suggest topics for future episodes or send in comments, please email excavationspodcast@gmail.com Keep caring, keep loving, until next time.
