When one is a bit of a glitching, potentially unstable version of a person, it’s handy to have access to a sort of… backup folder (forgive me) that can restore some vital data to your, er… programme (why won’t this metaphor end?) that will help stabilise or at least improve the functionality of whatever the fuck it is you’re trying to be, do, become, embody. Excuse the cheesy software analogy, but I have been bingewatching techbro YouTube videos for no clear reason other than perhaps the possibility that YouTube has broken my brain. Anyway, here we are.
But I like the glitching metaphor, because it suits my sense of self quite well: a person who is a little bit all over the place and, for no obvious reason, sometimes quite clear and lucid and apparent (and even USEFUL), and other times a mere ghost of something that was. All within the most miniscule time frames. Seconds, sometimes.
It is, actually, quite annoying.
But what I found, some decade and a half ago, was a wondrous tool: the archive. A kind of both static and living entity, that tells you interesting things about yourself and your history, and the history of everything your glitchy little hands touch and eyes see and brain tries to comprehend.
Mine was from the now-decommissioned Centre for Popular Memory (R.I.P.) from which I was generously gifted a trove of oral history accounts of the community my father came from and talked endlessly about, and which was miserably removed and erased during apartheid’s Group Areas Act. The ghost voices I listened to were people I would never meet directly, but who I found I would later interact with through their descendants and artworks and writings, among other legacies. Here, in these vivid voices I witnessed an urgency and animation that defied the rules of time and brought me to myself in a past and a present and a future in a single moment. Ta-da, backup files, were being restored. Ah, how much smoother the system was starting to run.
A gallery of some of the photos in the Claremont Histories archive (and one of me being a total bummer at a street carnival by reminding the revelers of the history of the place as they day-drank)
But, of course, every system has to stay current. And I had to keep up with life’s changes. I had a child, moved, divorced, changed careers, lost one of the most important people in my life, got older, got a little more unwell, and basically just fucked with the nice little ecosystem I had going.
Enter: more archives!
Look, this isn’t, if you’re thinking it, living in the past. I wish. This is the past making a cordial visit to me and leaving me a lovely gift. The gift isn’t always a pleasant one to open, because you know, history. But it does nicely help provide me with tools to build a more robust self that can handle some shit life throws at me (like sneaky internalised racism and sexism).
An example: I’ve been feeling a nagging insecurity, a nameless sense of diminishing worth, as I find myself more busy with work and friendships and generally things that should make me feel better about myself. Why? The archive helpline was eager to help.
So, in a recent meeting with some memory activists attempting to preserve the heritage of their lost community (again, apartheid), I found myself welcomed into their group because of my father’s history, and because of my passion for their project. But also, beyond finding a sense of belonging that naturally offers one a sense of worth, it also helped me understand why I feel this dreaded, nameless worthlessness. My heritage has been plagued by the message of being told that one is unworthy. Through the very act of being discarded because of the colour of their skin, and their homes occupied to this day by white people when their neighbourhood was officially & legally declared a “White Group Area”, I have been fed the message (even if I and my parents openly resisted it) that I am some kind of inferior being. Again, I don’t actively or consciously believe this of anybody. But my subconscious doesn’t play by the rules.
The archives I explored, along with listening to clever people who study people and societies, helped me make sense of the feelings, name them and therefore begin to dismantle them. Without naming them, it was impossible to fight, because there was nothing to fight against. And the archives also gave me something to attach myself to, something familiar to myself while currently living in unfamiliar territory. And so now I had something solid to fight against and was solid enough to lift my fist and do the fighting.
The way I could suddenly see myself, feet on the ground, palms opaque and real, breath leaving puffs of steam in the cold Norwegian winter, after connecting with this history, indicates that I needed that grounding. Not really to define me, but more to inform me. To help me see and understand.
It is commonly expressed that we have to understand and know our past if we are to create the best world for ourselves and others in the present and future.
And so now, I am on a bit of a minor crusade (hilarious, since my heritage is both Catholic and Muslim in equal parts).
I am going to archive the shit out of everything and gather bits of the archives already out there for my own greedy purposes. And kids, there are other freaks out there that are a million times more obsessed with archiving than me, and no I don’t mean hoarders but yes I do, but no they’re like information hoarders and yes it’s super cool and no it’s not crazy and yes its crazy but in a cool way and yes they have conventions and yes there are FREE resources because they just want everyone to love archiving as much as they do.
Sjoe! Breathe, me.
I will start with the most obvious archive on the internet, and this should keep you occupied for the rest of your life. And when you reach the next life, there are so many other archives out there, and other ways of building and disseminating them. This digital one is hardly traditional and, what with the potential AI invasion and takeover looming, it may not be the only and best way to be collating all of our history and knowledge. But for now, I love it so because it is accessible, democratic, free and fiendishly optimistic. I do think I will dedicate a separate post to each archive I adore, but here is my first in the list:
Correct, this is an archive of the whole Internet, and they don’t fuck around. It’s been going since 1996 (hello chain emails, Duke Nukem and Mrs Isaacs letting us do whatever we wanted in IT class), and has since spawned a wealth of insane and cool projects. You’ve probably heard of the Wayback Machine. That’s a gift from the Internet Archive.
But, as I said, I am going to write separate posts on each archive I find and love, so this one can end here. Just a love letter to the archive, the darling that stepped in when I needed some support and reminded me that I am a person, part of a community, with a history and a story, and whose story will one day be part of somebody else’s history and story, and how lovely is that? Or terrifying, depending on how I plan on living my life (do I feel stabby today?).
Song of the day:
I’m also going to bring back the habit of sharing a theme song for each post, not necessarily something that has to do with the post content at all, but what I was listening to when writing the post. (HOLY SHIT, I had not seen the video before sharing it now and it’s BRILLIANT. Oh sweet lord. And it fits, it fits, it fits).
Here you go: