An argument unfolds. It is the last panel of a robust and vibrant conference hosted by the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) project – what are the ethics of using linked-open data to aggregate dispersed and fragmented records of the Atlantic Slave Trade? In the minds of some, the lives and experiences of people who were entrapped within the horrifying system of slavery are honored by trying to piece together the fragments; to others, it is yet another dehumanizing act of violence rendering people into data, particularly as the original records detail the capture and commodification – including the sale, and relocation – of people who had few means to tell their own stories, to preserve their own records. When writing about slavery, Saidiya Hartman invokes the notion of ‘critical fabulation’ – or the method of blending archival records, scholarship, critical theory, and fictional narrative to map the limits of what is possible to know about the experiences of enslaved people. For Hartman, critical fabulation intervenes in the silences and gaps of the archival record and makes the ‘afterlife of slavery’ including the skewed health, economic, and social opportunities, incarceration rates, and violences against black people visible, knowable in the present.

While vastly different experiences, the challenges of retelling the experiences of enslaved people echo the tensions of grappling with the memory, imagination, and literatures of the atomic bomb. Does one attempt to aggregate and describe all the available pieces of information or do we sit with the fragments, silences, and gaps? Hartman’s framing of critical fabulation is another way of  leveraging the work of literature. This lever helps us grapple with ourselves, to wrap arms/minds around moments to large to understand in one sitting, to write into being possible pasts and futures. To reach for Toyoshima Yoshio’s urge that truth does not always equal fact, Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses and Hayashi Kyōko Two Grave Markers responses to the atomic bombs weave memory and speculation as truthful engagements with the facts and statics.

Hayashi Kyōko’s Two Grave Markers struggles to remember – within moments after the atomic bomb destroys Nagasaki and days later, months later. Memory – the narrator’s and Wakako’s – is uncertain, seeking to understand not only what happened but the emotional responses that unfold. The absences and gaps are visible, though unspoken. Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses also struggles to recall the atomic bombing of Hiroshima clearly. Ōta responds to – and through – the statistics and medical reports all the while returning to her personal memory, her observations, and the experiences of those nearby. While truth may not map directly to fact, the grappling with memory and emotions – fear, guilt, horror, relief – write into being a genuine narrative.

Hartman worries over the notion of critical fabulation – can a critical narrative imagine the emotional and mental landscapes of an individual girl trapped on a slave ship? If so, do we do her an injustice by imagining her experience or does such an imaginative journey bring us closer to understanding? Hartman asks how do we thread a careful path that neither offers up the horrors of slavery as a fetishizing spectacle nor obscures or erases the complex lives caught up within it. Within Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses and Hayashi Kyōko Two Grave Markers similar tensions exist, both resisting a spectacular recounting of accumulated trauma while centering the tangled emotional and mental response of specific and truthful experience.

Saidiya Hartman; Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 1 June 2008; 12 (2): 1–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1