{ critical fabulation }
I’ve carried an idea for a while: to create an imagined meeting of a few of my female ancestors on the Áhkánålggie mountain. Details of the Sami ontology from pre-colonial times are, regretfully to a large extent forgotten, but some stories tell that holy mountains were considered sites where ancestors resided, and there was a general belief that deceased formothers and -fathers could provide aid to their descendants and play a role in their lives. What I have in mind is a conversation that can describe the events of the last 300 years and the link between removed heritage and the loss of connections with the past, community, land rights.
I think of a dialogue of sorts, three voices from different centuries in a casual meeting where they reflect on their respective lives and experiences. I would develop the script in dialogue with people I’ve got to know in the local area during my visits. Inspirational for this endeavour is the knowledge I’ve come close to through my Sami friends, and proposals from Indigenous scholars regarding the importance of relationships and reciprocity in research. Beyond that I have also found further inspiration from Saydiya Hartman who argues that “critical fabulation” as a form of truthful historical practice. She writes the following in the essay “Venus in Two Acts”:
“My effort to reconstruct the lives of two girls who came to no good end is an attempt to describe the resistance of the object, if only by first imagining it. The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”[1]
She explicitly distinguishes this from invention or falsification:
“The history of the captive, dispossessed, and enslaved is inseparable from the display of the violated body… For this reason, narrative restraint constitutes a principle of this writing practice. The refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law.”[4]
Critical fabulation is not “making things up,” but rather a method of truth-telling that works at the limits of the archive, imagining responsibly while remaining accountable to historical evidence and the violence of archival omission. I believe it can serve as inspiration and foundation as we develop the work.
[1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.
[2] ibid.
