The
author's maternal grandfather, Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady, in the backyard
of his home and research laboratory 'Rameses Villa', London, September
1917.
Photo courtesy the author.
When family members die they take their
memories, facts and figures with them. Their stories, as well as their
lies and omissions, become harder to track after they've gone. They
leave behind mountains of material, with few entry points. If you dare to enter, you will find yourself alone in the archive.
Someone close to you dies. A generation apart, you are busy with your own life.
You may choose to ignore all the stuff they leave behind. If you hired
someone to cart it away, no one would blame you. But perhaps you value
these leavings for personal reasons, or even 'historical'
ones. So instead, you make the choice to plunge in. At first this is
cathartic. You start blindly, picking away at the monolith, peeling back
a transparent corner until you see something. You think you know the
general shape and size of it, you think you can get away with a few
weeks' work and be done with it. You figure you've seen all the pretty
hairpins, grease crayons, love notes on creased napkins, all the dusty
books. But then again, if you are like me, the whole situation will gnaw
at you.
This happened: tired and covered in dirt and sweat after a day of digging through my mother's
storage, I found a strange box, which contained many envelopes and
another, smaller box. I felt a jagged sensation in my gut that I mistook
for a symptom of mourning. Wiping the sweat from my face, I knelt
before the box to read the label: an adhesive tag with my mother's hand
in red Sharpie: 'Papers to Sort'. The archive, it seems, had finally
gotten away from her. Inside, a smaller box was labelled 'More Egypt'.
Inside this box was the first crop of what was to become a legion of
things that had been secreted away. My first find, large-format negatives
that had been resting for seventy-five years, were perfectly preserved
in little glassine envelopes. Yet more images, I thought; more than I
was prepared for. But also amulets, perfume bottles, pins, ID cards, feathers, kites, love letters,
poems, diaries, birth certificates, death notices. Items that document
events I never knew about, showing the people I thought I knew all
about, in attitudes and places that demonstrate the absolute inadequacy
of my imaginative faculties. There was more to the story than the neat
one that was drawn for me. My family, with its famous poet patriarch, had kept secrets.
This scenario was to be repeated at
least three dozen times over the next two years, in apartments and
storage units, at institutions in faraway towns and cities, and,
eventually, in other countries. Following the trail, I would buy plane
and train tickets I couldn't afford, and stay with friends or at
B&B's in close proximity to certain libraries.
By then I would have learned which special collections housed the
things that I had to see and hold. I laughed when, at one
state-of-the-art vault, a surly staffer handed me a pair of white cotton
gloves and took away my laptop so I could safely examine my aunt's letters
regarding her donation of my grandfather's papers. They were, of
course, the same grumbly letters written in the same minute hand as the
ones she sent me regularly since I was a child. But here, in the context
of my grandfather's personal papers and so many other things that had
almost escaped me, her grumbling meant something different. Docile, I
donned the white gloves.
Once humbled by the archive, my
commitment to it became steely. My early tentative pokes into its hidden
folds were marked by a combination of trepidation and overexcitement. I
felt at once stupid and grateful, like a gangly puppy who gets to gnaw
on an oversized bone. There were reasons for my sense of inadequacy,
such as my half-baked Arabic. Plus, I still had no idea of the extent of
the archive. I thought I was dealing with something finite, the
contained leftovers of a generation, rudely abridged by decades of
packing and unpacking, voyages
by ship and train, seizures by customs at home and abroad – all the
brutal inconveniences of repatriation, dispersal, accident and loss. I
had yet to learn of the existence of so many remaining books, objects, photographs,
keepsakes and letters. And I had yet to consider the archive's
ingeniousness, its unlikely survival through conventions of redundancy
(duplicate prints!), the many rhizomatic outposts in rare book cages,
filing cabinets, safe deposit boxes and basements scattered across the
globe. And now it has me with my camera, my scanner and the Internet. Daily, I dig through the archive, holding the things I never knew in my hands, seeing them for myself.
Abushady’s student ID card, from Medical School in Cairo.
Photo courtesy the author.
Joy Garnett
is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is writing a
book about her influential Egyptian grandfather, poet, publisher and bee
scientist, Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955). She hopes to further
realize the Abushady archive as an open-access portable museum as part
of her post-doctoral research at Winchester School of Art, University of
Southampton. Garnett currently serves as Arts Editor for the journal
Cultural Politics,
published by Duke University Press. Her writings have appeared in
numerous journals and anthologies. Her work has been included in
exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Houston Center for
Contemporary Craft, the Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland (Oregon),
MoMA P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Wellcome
Trust, London, and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. She is represented in New
York by Winkleman Gallery.
