Next week, 26 June 2023 at 8pm EST we will meet for our 4th Art Monsters reading group. Will you join us in person? online? I hope you can even if you didn’t finish the book. Florencia is able to share her studio in Mile End with us.
Zoom link is always the same, and will be sent out in a private email.
We will discuss The Leavers alongside Argentine artist Lucila Quieto’s series Arqueologías de la Ausencia (Archaeology of Absence) (1999–2001) and Filiacion (2013). Thank you to Florencia for suggesting it.
Archaeology of Absence extends Lucila Quieto’s activist work in Argentina with children of the disappeared as a way to rebuild family histories. In this series,
Quieto enticed members to take part in her series with the promise of ‘the photo you have always dreamed of and could never have’. After inviting participants to select a photograph from their family albums, Quieto scanned it and projected it onto a wall. Quieto then prompted her subjects to place themselves between the projector and the wall, and interact with the image as she took a new photograph.1
The experiment resulted in 35 black-and-white photographs each showing a playful and fictional scene that imagines alternative futures for those families. The images of Arqueología de la ausencia are thus answers to a disturbing question: what might have happened had the disappeared survived? Quieto’s montages speak of a time that is neither in the [idealized distant] past nor in the present but in what she calls “a third time,” an invented, dream-like temporality, a dimension where everything, even the impossible, seems plausible. —KB Curatorial
Before telling me she’s stayed up till midnight reading and loving the book. Evita texts me, “I’m finding The Leavers so depressing,”
“I loved it, but it’s not a summertime read, I guess.” I text her back. But as soon as I hit send, I frown. What is it to be a summertime read?
I’m not a person of colour and don’t experience white supremacy enacted on my body, nor would I ever compare myself, but migration does connect with me. Without making this too much about my story, I came to Canada with my mom and her boyfriend in the 1990s for what I thought was a vacation. I don’t know the true or complete reason we stayed, or if ‘vacation’ was code for something else, like the violence I experienced back home. No one has ever told me and it’s never made sense to ask.
I was also hesitant when the group chose this book from the other, what I wrongly assumed more exciting offerings, but I am so glad we did. I needed this book. I hope you did too. The way Ko provided a story of a mother and son, from her childhood to his adulthood, allows the reader to consider each perspective on a situation. In this way, we sympathize with Deming about his mother’s abandonment. Later, this creates a tension as we are provided more back story on her departure and inability to reunite.
Yet, Polly's story is told in the first person while Deming's is in the third person. What does that do?
I included a synopsis as well as some analysis in the initial post about the meeting here.
Like the other three books we read, The Leavers takes place in the USA (in part). Unlike the other three books we read, The Leavers has a world of named (!) characters and timelines, and a focus on the internal and the external world. A world, the US, that is built on the backs of im/migrants and refugees—like Polly, and her relatives—but doesn’t want them to live. Yet, what about Kay and Peter Wilkinson?
Sara Ahmed writes about ‘bodies out of place’ in relation to white supremacist discourse in England in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. She tracks “how emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they 'stick' as well as move.” She situates her “account of the 'cultural politics' of emotion within a very partial account of the history of thinking on emotions” (p.6).
Polly managing of emotions is necessary and cultural. To survive, she must know when to self-censor and when to reveal her emotions: to white customers in the nail salon, to her students and co-workers, to her family, to her husband when she is forced back to Fuzhou, China, and especially Deming/Daniel.
After they finally reunite, Deming confronts her:
“And that was it?” you said. “You forgot me?”
“I didn’t forget. I just survived.”
Later Polly explains how she tried to look for Deming, and why she stopped: “If I thought about you too much I wouldn’t be able to live.”
Each side of the story bears the psychic pain older children with complicated relationships with their parents go through. What should Deming do with Polly’s honesty and vulnerability? What should she?
Ahmed doesn’t dwell on personal emotions in her book, but the larger structures that circulate emotions and bind us to beliefs about ourselves and ‘others’. In this case, the way the contemporary rhetoric of pop culture, our communities, and government officials proffer an understanding of migrants/undocumented workers/etc., “the others.” An othering that is pervasively internalized by immigrants themselves.
After I finished The Leavers, a copy of We, The Others (2022) finally arrived at the library for me. A hold I placed back in April. In it, Toula Drimonis, traces her own allophone heritage as a 2nd generation Greek in Canada, and what belonging means to immigrants in a country that has a long history of “emotions” (xenophobic sentiments and policies) against immigrants.
How do we belong? Did our parents scaffold belonging for us? Or, were they unable or didn’t know how to?
There are so many ways into and out of this book, and I cannot wait to hear about your path.
Apologies for the brevity.
xo
Magda
Miles M. (2020). Photography truth and reconciliation. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003103820