The Ember Records and archival elegy

The archival elegy is a concept that I arrived at through the initial drafts of my creative work for The Ember Records, my poetry collection written as part of this thesis. In writing numerous elegies for late friends and family members, I began to wonder about the mechanics and the purposes of the elegy itself. What I learned is that when we mourn the dead through the elegy, we are using textual traces to memorialise them, essentially preserving their memories in the face of death’s destructiveness. The elegy is built on this knife-edge of memory and oblivion, and this is how I arrived at the idea of the elegy being a form of archive. This novel concept is important because it dismantles many of our existing notions of what an archive can be. As I shall explore later through the writings of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Sadiya Hartman, Ann Cvetkovich, and many others, the archive cannot be conceived exclusively as a physical or digital space in which various historical documents and records are held, the archive must also be viewed as a spectral space, containing and preserving textual material in a world where crucial historical narratives are often excluded or destroyed. In addition, the archival elegy is significant as a concept because it allows a more expansive view of mourning, in which cities and countries can be grieved for example, and it places more power in people’s personal lives because, in my view, the archives can now be written as text and within the space of a poetry collection. The archival elegy serves as a form that can, on one level, personally grieve for someone or something that has not been given the space to be mourned and, on another level, it can also be a form that ‘writes back’ against or haunts the archival silencing of countless minority communities.