What the Archive Whispered Was Not What the Catalogue Promised
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What the Archive Whispered Was Not What the Catalogue Promised
Research diary, 14 March. The reading room smells of dust and patience. What the archive whispered was not what the catalogue promised, and what the catalogue promised was orderly correspondence between a colonial administrator and his siblings in Edinburgh.
It was Edinburgh that the index emphasised. It was Edinburgh that my grant proposal highlighted to justify travel costs. This emphasis I now question, having spent mornings with boxes the finding aid misdated by a decade.
What misdating obscures is chronology of violence recorded obliquely. What oblique recording demands is reading for silences, not only declarations. Rarely have I encountered letters so cheerful beside margins annotated in another hand.
Never before had I fronted research questions so bluntly in a diary entry: This violence we must name; that cheerfulness we must contextualise
