Indole is a highly fragrant molecule that is found in the process of putrefaction and the blossoming of white flowers, such as iris and magnolia. The aromatic compound is formed of a pentagonal and hexagonal ring, which are bound together and distributed in environments containing coal tar, human feces, and perfumes with notes of orange blossom and tuberose. Indole is linked to virulence in bacteria, and its spectrum of odor ranges from ambrosial to putrid depending on its concentration.
The aromatic presence of indole could then be associated with both creation and demise: the heady fragrance of blooming jasmine and the animalic odor of decaying flesh. It is a heavy, decadent, overripe scent that arises at points of transformation.
For our forthcoming issue, The Forgetory will use the concept of the indolic to access insights into a culture that is in the throes of transformation. Remnants of the imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal, and racist structures in our society are decaying as the vital and inchoate elements of communalism and allyship emerge. As we catch glimpses of these shifts—in the form of visual culture, uprisings, and disruptions to the norm—the editors will be posting observations to the living issue Indole. We seek to document insights as they arise rather than form a conclusive statement on a culture in flux.
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In this process, as during the inception of The Forgetory, the tenets we hold dear are reflection and slowness as a radical alternative to a culture whose expression has exponentially been deployed in the form of misinformation and bigotry in order to justify the exploitation of marginalized people.
We unequivocally support Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the pursuit of reclaiming stolen power from the mechanisms of structural racism. We stand in solidarity with the protests, born of urgent necessity for change and justice. Our words may seem small next to the hypnotic drone of polarizing rhetoric, yet we echo the mighty poetess Audre Lorde in affirming that we must “not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own”1Lorde, Audre. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action but speak out and do our part in the collective dismantling of the divisive, racist ideology that ensnares us.
“I am” is a powerful assertion connected to early theological statements which name the supreme being as the “I am that I am.” This is one translation of the name of the Hebrew God. “I am” is the defining utterance of consciousness, and at the time of the Enlightenment, it was being employed to map the capacity of consciousness in its human form, as in Descartes’ infamous formulation “cogito ergo sum”: “I think therefore I am.”
The iconic signage of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, as captured in the photography of Ernest Withers, stated profoundly and simply, “I AM A MAN.” The statement and stark aesthetic of the protest sign are the subject of eponymous paintings by American artist Hank Willis Thomas recently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas through July 13th, 2020 as a part of a retrospective of the artist’s work.
The ‘68 sanitation strike is what brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis in the spring of that year, where he delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech to the Public Works employees one day before he was shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Abysmal wages and grotesque neglect, which led to two sanitation workers being crushed to death in a garbage truck while sheltering from the rain, catalyzed the strike. The action resulted in higher wages and recognition of the sanitation workers’ union, but the assertion that spun out of that setting is still being reckoned with by American history and consciousness.
Hank Willis Thomas addresses this history in the 20-panel series, “I am a Man.” (2009). The paintings are liquitex on framed canvas, and scaled at nearly the same dimensions of the original poster. Viewing paintings online is kind of like experiencing the smile of someone you love covered by a face mask. However, Thomas’ “I am a Man” paintings are wholly satisfying and appear to be fully legible in their online presentation. The work is a poem that is also a painting, whose form calls to mind Minimalism’s aesthetic economy, the textual and conceptual art of On Kawara and Adrian Piper, and the formal qualities of woodblock printed signage.
Each panel of the painting by Thomas forms one line in the following poem:
I AM ⅗ MAN
AM I A MAN
I AM A MAN
I BE A MAN
A MAN I AM
BE A MAN
I AM YOUR MAN
A MAN M.I.A.
AIN’T I A WOMAN
I AM A WOMAN
I AM THE MAN
WHO’S THE MAN
YOU THE MAN
WHAT A MAN
I AM MAN
I AM HUMAN
I AM MANY
I AM AM I
I AM I AM
I AM. AMEN.
In the poem-painting, the viewer can let herself go whirling through the shifting ground of American history: here we recall the three-fifths compromise, wherein 3 out of 5 enslaved people were tallied in the count for Southern legislative seats. Black soldiers missing in action in service to a country that continues to enact war crimes against them as civilians. “Ain’t I a Woman,” the phrase associated with Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech advocating for women’s rights. “I am many,” calls us back to Walt Whitman’s assertion of multitudinous identity and his bearing witness to the American experiment with democracy. The “Am I” questions of the poem reflect the uneasiness with fixed subjectivity on an existential level, but also on an historical level where indiginous and marginalized people have searched for resilient ways to define themselves under the constant blow of “you are not.”
The final word of the poem is “Amen,” meaning “truly” and “so be it,” sealing the incantation of “I am” with indisputable power.
It has been argued that a more faithful translation of God’s Hebrew name than “I am that I am” is “I will become whatsoever I may become.” The American experiment with democracy will be a failing one until it is recognized and held dear that each person’s “becomingness” is an inalienable right. My “I am-ness” is my ability to heal from the wounds of a restrictive identity placed upon me by my culture (in my case, facing the limits of the identity-marker “woman”) and the collective space to transform into whatever I decide. Your “I am-ness” is the same. We have to honor that in one another, and that honoring is called love.
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007) I Am A Man (from the portfolio I Am A Man)., 1968, Gelatin-silver print.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard (Ailleurs), 1978, Image Courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
At the beginning of March 2020, Covid-19 was to many Americans, and certainly to President Trump, “someone else’s problem”— one that might be contained by closing our borders. During this time, the phrase “dream of an audience” kept bubbling up in my mind. Dream of an audience, I dream of an audience. As a writer living through this moment, I was questioning, who is my audience? And is my perspective, my experience, specifically as an Asian-American woman writer, worthy of being read?
The work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha had planted the “Dream” phrase in my consciousness. This phrase comes from Cha’s own words regarding her 1978 performance at the San Francisco Museum of Art entitled Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard (Ailleurs) in which the artist sat solemnly in front of a wall where images of beaches and rocks were projected. “Abandon,” “redemption,” and “forbidden,” were stenciled on the rocks. Cha then dragged ropes tied to the rocks seen in the images, while a soundtrack of obscured voices filled the space. Regarding this work, she said, “In this piece, I want to be the dream of the audience.” Cha hoped her audience would experience the performance as if in a dream state, and further, that she would become their dream.
The artist’s parents grew up as exiles in Manchuria during the Japanese Occupation of Korea, which spanned the years 1910-1945. They returned to their homeland during World War II, and Cha was born in Busan, Korea. Due to continual political instability, she and her family immigrated to the U.S. in 1963. Rather than solely causing alienation, her life of displacement offered her a basis for experimentation and freedom to move through personal and collective memories, throughout disparate times and spaces. This fluidity allowed Cha to powerfully connect with her audience. Her desire to become the audience’s dream, part of their experience and memory, was therefore a central concern in her practice.
As displacement made space for discovery, Cha’s ability to subvert binaries, such as outsider and insider or foreigner and native, in the context of brokenness, and personal, generational, and historical trauma, is noteworthy.
In her seminal work Dictée (1982), this subversion can be seen in passages such as:
“To bite the tongue. / Swallow. Deep. Deeper. / Swallow. Again even more. / Just until there would be no more of organ. Organ no more. / Cries.” (Cha 69)
Koreans were forbidden from speaking their language during the Japanese occupation. Cha’s reference to the tongue does not merely refer to the idea of one’s language being one’s mother tongue, but denotes a specificity of the Korean language, whose written form was created to reflect the shape of the tongue and mouth.
Young-Key Kim-Renaud, “The Letterforms of Hangul Consonants” from King Sejong the Great, 1997Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (New York: Tanam Press, 1982), 74 – 75.
When one “bites their tongue,” it is an act of suppression— to stop oneself from speaking, typically while in the presence of an authority. But Cha does not end there. The tongue is bitten then swallowed. If the organ itself ceases to exist, then the pain of having to bite one’s tongue may even have a chance at redemption. Speech and language become totally liberated from the tongue.
“Dream of the Audience” conveys a completely different meaning from the phrase “Dream of an Audience.” “Dream of the Audience,” places Cha and her work as the subject, as the audience’s “dream.” More importantly, there is no question of there being an audience. But “Dream of an Audience” presumes the lack of an audience and the artist’s longing to have one. Even while closely studying Cha’s work, I somehow managed to misremember this phrase because I had read the work within my framework, which was and is unwittingly still, dictated by a victim mentality.
It makes sense that this invented phrase was bubbling up in my mind during a time of collective pain and trauma. I was turning to Cha as a source of comfort, believing she was my patron saintess. I thought she validated my sense of invisibility and utter lack of confidence that my words deserved to be read, even written.
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That first week of March, I was running errands with my 13-month-old in a carrier close to my body. He let out a cough, as he had been experimenting with making all sorts of sounds with his throat at that time. He was most definitely not sick. And yet, people were staring at us in the grocery store nervously, and our Asianness felt conspicuous, as if our skin was vibrating with energy.
While my Manhattan neighborhood, the Upper West Side, is known to be liberal and progressive in its politics, the majority population is still White and affluent, and my family has not always felt welcome here. Even in moments of being welcomed, the experience was tinged with the inflection of otherness: small talk initiated by various neighbors asking us with intense interest—“where we are from” or “if we speak Korean,” followed by the awareness that our presence was valuable as tokens of another culture—adding to the cultural life of their cosmopolitan city—and not as fellow Americans.
After my baby’s cough, I went home immediately and took the less populated West End rather than Broadway. It seemed to me then that the lockdown was unofficially happening to us, even before Governor Cuomo’s orders.
Black and brown people make up the majority of those hospitalized in New York City’s hospitals. A quick peruse of the CDC website shows that one does not even need the statistics divided by region to confirm that the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are greater among Black, Indigenous, and the Latinx population. Rates for Asian Americans are greater than Caucasians, but less than the three aforementioned groups among the BIPOC population.
Though New Yorkers have been participating in the 7 PM clapping for essential workers since the lockdown, the fact that most nurses and doctors are Asian American in New York City has not been articulated. Asians also make up a large portion of the food service workforce. They are getting sick too. But lumped into the ambiguous category of “essential workers,” Asian Americans have become unspecified, unnamed model-minority-martyrs in the “war” against Covid-19. While hate crimes are being committed against Asians around the globe due to their perceived relationship to the spread of this virus, somehow in the U.S., it still feels like Asian Americans are unseen. Are we merely the invisible cyborg carriers of this virus, and not its victim? We are both the perceived disease and essential to the cure, perhaps.
Some Asian Americans say our invisibility is no one’s fault but our own. We have been complicit with Whiteness, coveting its privileges, under the delusion that it was within arm’s reach. This may not be false, but it is an oversimplification. Did we willfully erase our own histories, or were we perhaps too traumatized and too colonized to ever have had a choice? I think people forget that White supremacy did not begin with immigration; it existed in our (own) countries.
Cha writes:
“Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion” (Cha 33).
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (New York: Tanam Press, 1982), 39.
To know my history, to “resurrect” it, even if it is a story of pain stemming from violence or displacement, is a significant act of defiance. It is a necessary step in allowing myself to heal, move forward, and not repeat “history in oblivion.” Instead of absorbing the burden alone, I am able to view myself as part of a long line of generational trauma, which may predispose me to silence when confronted with a threat, real or perceived. Silence and passivity, no matter how much Western-centric systems may characterize it as an “innate” Asian temperament, is not a genetic predisposition. It is a trauma-response to colonization.
When I believe that change is impossible, I cling more firmly onto victimhood, as it gives me a semblance of agency. To speak, write, or take up space with assertion is terrifying as it may require confronting the oppressive structures of White supremacy and patriarchy. And what if upon trying, I fail and am made into a fool? My fears are not groundless, as being gaslighted informs much of my minority experience. In choosing not to try, I can protect my grief, instead of laying it bare for potential derision. In choosing not to try, I still have a choice.
However, Cha teaches me that moving towards change does not negate my nor my ancestors’ suffering, nor invalidate the need to mourn what is lost. Rather, in order to do so, I must acknowledge and affirm my history, all the hurt, but also all the joy, and all the in-betweens. Only then would I no longer “dream of an audience” and recognize that you may have been here all along.
Ten years ago, a close neighbor in my Philadelphia suburb died of an undiagnosed heart condition. I wasn’t home, but was told her children came knocking on our door to ask for help. The son said he thought his mom was dehydrated, as he found her blue-lipped and couldn’t wake her from her nap. Later, in our living room, the kids were told by their largely-absent father that their mother had died. You would think that something like this might have created more of a bond between our two families, and yet, the atomization of this street feels too strong for that to happen. Now when running, I often see the father, squinting through the tinted windows of a Panamera, straining to recognize me.
Once this land belonged to a department store magnate’s vast estate. Years ago, after studying a vintage atlas, I determined my parents’ home is located in what were once extensive polo fields, although the topography is somewhat vague. Work was begun on this development in the very early 1980’s, and to a degree, this is visible in the various home designs the company offered. Each lot extends into the street with generous, and legally binding, setbacks to help disguise the precise borders of the 3/4 of an acre.
Every model had its selling points, materials, and finishes: sharply angled stained cedar on the Contemporary, crisscrossing false mullions on the Tudor, endless expanses of brick on the Colonial. Tastes change of course. Now the almond switch plates and lacquered brass hardware have given way to neutral grays and Edison bulb fixtures. Kitchens have been renovated, with imposing Sub-Zeros installed, and bathrooms have had their giant unused Jacuzzis torn out for expansive digital showers, the body sprays and thermostatic valves controllable via iPhone. Although obviously unplanned, how fortuitous this prosperous contingency has proven to be, every surface warmed with wealth and now all the better to shelter in place.
All photographs by author
It struck me early on that the pandemic brings out the best and the worst in many. I’m not very sentimental, so to my eyes it seemed often the worst. Watching hand sanitizer fly off the shelves and the panic buying in every local grocery store, it appeared that not only were the polite fictions that bind the suburbs together beginning to unravel, but also their supporting structures, in blooms of cascading failure.
Some time ago, I discovered that a high school classmate bought a house up the street from my parents’ Bryn Mawr home. Though it may be petty to compare myself to my peers, this felt like a concrete example of how life proceeds in unexpected ways.
Pre-lockdown, my former classmate and his family busied themselves with painting and siding work, landscaping the front beds, and paving the driveway. Tesla solar panels were hoisted up to the roof and Powerwall lithium batteries were wheeled into the basement. It seems he achieved a dream that I am now forced to consider I may not reach. Under quarantine, running every morning by that increasingly perfected house, I could not help but wonder where I went wrong.
At home with other largely unknown neighbors in the suburbs, I became hyper-attuned to subtle changes in the rhythms of the cul-de-sac: the inhabitants of each house, where they go, how they spend their time, and their lifestyle, with the endless linear feet of flattened smiling Amazon boxes deposited curbside for our largely ornamental single-stream recycling. A prodigious number of wine bottles crest the blue bins as well, but I am not one to judge.
In the mornings, I watch the vans circle, delivery runs determined by algorithms, their PPE-clad drivers scurrying over freshly irrigated lawns to meet their quotas. Food arrives as well of course, groceries and meals deposited in metallic insulated bags like specimens returned from another planet for continued study. After each drop off, the packages are photographed and confirmations sent, inciting a reason to open the door. I wave to these neighbors on the rare occasions I see them, and they usually wave back.
In late March, a dog runs out of the owner’s yard to greet me, ignoring the invisible fence. Leading it back to its home, I catch a glimpse of my neighbors through the shadow of their open door. Their daughters were a few years behind me in school, but for the life of me I cannot recall their names. From a distance, I compliment their recent stucco remediation. What else is there to say?
I could say, “I feel part of a broader problem for which there may be no future remedy, finding myself ordering things just barely needed.”
“Could there be anything more frivolous than a fountain pen convertor?”
“I wonder if I am trading one form of productivity, a way of life perhaps, for another that is far more difficult to define.”
From the parapets of e-commerce, never-ending product recommendations are trumpeted, spoon-feeding me variations of my wants and my secret fears. The virtual twin built from my preferences exists to assuage my guilt, showing not only what I do want, but what I should want. Surely the corporate appetite for data is voracious and vast; I assume that this somehow benefits shareholders–our browsing commodified into a hyperlinked lexicon of digitized desire. Infatuated once more, I click, and click again.
Once, many years ago, a teacher of mine read the class a poem in an effort to promote kindness. I remember that the title played on the now dimly remembered show The Six Million Dollar Man. In the form of a staggered list, it spoke to our potential in sheer numbers: the net value of the chemical compounds that constitute our bodies. I found the idea fascinating; this list was meant to swell self-worth, a goal certainly very much in vogue at the time I was in grade school, leaving my peers with an expectation for a kind of coddling that the world can never really provide.
I think to many, the concept of such a gross calculation would seem cold, or at least patronizing, as a simplification of humanity into its less noble parts. I found the idea appealing at the time, both for the inner logic it pointed towards, as well as the bizarre precision with which the argument was made. Although my world had not yet enlarged itself to include such notions of quantification, it was then, just as it is now, thoroughly governed by them.
A pandemic is quantifiable, which is frightening to many–the data is at our disposal, and yet a meaningful response seems ungraspable, lost in a barrage of caseload dashboards and intensive care capacity limitations. This is an unscheduled disaster, uncaring and unseemly in a world that governs itself by the resonance of cesium-driven clocks. And yet, the arteries of commerce never ceased to flow; the wings of FedEx planes were never clipped; the trucks made more stops than ever before, while bandwidth stretched past any preconceived need for limitless Netflix originals. Online, denial does not exist, just boundless want, limited only by the capacity of the cloud and our own attention spans.
In early April, I text old friends, describing the area I live in akin to the Red Masque of Death, except that Edgar Allen Poe’s abbey is here a Whole Foods and the entire town has sequestered themselves inside for the duration of plague, although I admit to not remembering the details of the story clearly. I stare at my phone, receiving no response.
An immediate neighbor has taken to obsessively restoring a long neglected tennis court. Every other day, he traverses the turf with a newly purchased cylinder mower, carefully winding up the net to cut the grass. Many years ago, my mom took this neighbor’s wife aside to tell her that he was not only neglectful but terrifically selfish and that she should leave him, to which she simply responded, “thank you for being honest.” His tennis-playing days are in the past, and now after the kids have moved on and the vitriolic divorce, I wonder if anyone is left to play upon that increasingly perfected field.
On one sweltering May morning in the pool, I pause and notice the next door neighbor playing with their children around a lawn sprinkler. The metronymic regularity of swimming has come to mean a great deal to me, and in the past year I went every weekday to a local university pool to do laps. Time becomes elastic in the kinetics of a kick turn; you can become lost in the shroud of bubbles created with each stroke, cocooned in your own momentum. Although I’m not sure the kids see me, I keep my head down close to the surface, watching the seraphic light dance across the bottom of the pool, feeling guilty. I try to quietly start again. There is another kilometer to go.
Although they do not face any bodies of water, the blue lawns of the Main Line hint at the promise of a different sort of green light than the one that haunted Jay Gatsby. Affluence is often depicted as the pleasant aftermath of ambition, fortune favoring the brave, but its secretive inverted counterpart usually controls the narrative. Up these long gated driveways, wealth and power can shout or whisper, spreading influence silently like an incubating contagion. Some inherit much, but the scope of one’s family extends beyond place and genetic predispositions, it reaches outward toward the social mobility of future generations, shifting, altering their dreams, and shrinking our sense of possibility.
Every summer, I re-read The Great Gatsby, and while this is surely not Fitzgerald’s landscape, I keep thinking of it anyway. My analog to those train rides home, eagerly comparing holiday party invitations; the sinuous pulsing of the turn signal of a neighbor’s azure Audi, the syncopated self-testing cycles of whole house generators starting up, and the linear ballet of weekly mowing. In many ways, this is a place far from the dark fields of the republic but a variant of the same hopeful aspiration has long resided in this zip code. Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s lost love, had a voice that was “full of money.” I wonder what if I am similarly branded by my own time and place and what that inflection must sound like to others. It occurs to me that I’m now older than Nick Carraway was when he watched Gatsby’s dreams slip out of reach, and wonder if like him, I also am five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.
Collin Sundt is a writer and photographer, born and raised in the greater Philadelphia-area. After studying photography at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington DC, he completed an MFA at the Art Criticism and Writing program at the School of Visual Arts. Most recently, he has been writing about analog film as a cultural object, and the aesthetics of the future.
