Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jim Hicks “RIEN N’ARRIVE ni comme on l’espère, ni comme on le craint”: thus does the Holocaust survivor Jean Améry begin his celebrated anatomy of torture, citing Proust. “Nothing actually happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will.” For most folks, I imagine, this was not their first association when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, though it was mine. Améry clarifies his claim: it’s not that torture exceeds our imagination (“it’s not a quantitative question”); actual torture isn’t imagination at all, it’s reality. “You can spend your whole life measuring the imagined against the real,” he notes, “and never get anywhere.” When Améry details his experiences in the Nazi prison at Breendonk, he is describing an extreme event, one which cannot directly be compared with any other. Yet, in speaking of this unspeakable experience, he begins by emphasizing “the first blow,” an act that, as he notes, itself has “very little criminological significance” and is a “tacitly practiced, accepted, and normal measure taken against stubborn prisoners,” “applied in more or less strong doses by almost all police officials, including those in Western democracies.” And the “first [blow] makes the prisoner realize that they are helpless, and thus it contains the seed of all that is to come.” With this first blow, Améry tells us, “trust in the world collapses. The other who is physically opposite me, and with whom I can exist only as long as he does not come into contact with the surface of my skin, forces his entire physicality upon me [. . .] He touches me and thereby destroys me. It’s like rape, a sexual act without one’s consent.”1 [End Page 409] So that’s it. Our bodies, ourselves. Our bodies, that are not public space. Experiences of this sort, which I can only attempt to imagine, have long been a reality for many, and it takes writing at Améry’s level to bring it home for others. In these dark times, those extreme events, those first blows, are also the foci around which our fall issue revolves. A stunning selection of poems from Tommye Blount revisits the costume drama that accompanies the violence of White supremacy, and this history animates as well a tour de force diptych from Courtney Faye Taylor. Elsewhere Alison C. Rollins rings in the changes that time takes from each and every body, and Kassy Lee, in two poems that bookend our issue, takes time and history elsewhere, both received and rejected. Places, we know, are saturated with their own particulate histories, and events that bring home unimaginable realities have GPS coordinates of their own, best tracked by writers. In this issue we bring you Samwai Lee’s dark fable “Graceless,” impossible to read without channeling the present-day lives of her fellow Hong Kongers. Also Hilary Plum’s “Philly,” a city where the adjunctification of academia registers as any-thing but brotherly love. And a devastating excerpt from Raharima-nana’s Malagasy epic “Nour, 1947,” lyrically translated by Allison Cha-rette. In some instances, of course, the unimaginable is deeply personal, yet the trauma no less real, or relevant, as we are reminded by J Brooke, in their essay “Tanker.” We should not, for all that, assume that every life-changing event is rooted in trauma. Bodies and their changes can also be comic, as a culinary fest story from Sylva Fischerová (given a sumptuous English menu by Deborah Garfinkle) reminds us, as does a lovely little post-culinary tale from Ambreen Hai. The conversation between MR art editor Mario Ontiveros and the video and installation artist Parastoo Anoushahpour offers insights of many kinds; here, however, I’ll note only the artist’s interest in “visual landscape,” in “sound, image, mood, and space” where alternative narratives emerge. For this to happen, she notes, “different bodies are needed; each comes with their own imagination and desires, even though we are working on the same project. Collaboration does things that you could never accomplish, I think, with one brain.” Given where we are today, collaboration is our only road...