I’m interested in the theories and implications of a name – that is, a fixed word (or set of words) given to a person as means of defining and sustaining their existence and identity. In my own writing, I’ve become aware of forming shifting narratives and identities via first or “given” female characters with names often denoting something non-human: a place (Georgia), a plant (Ginger), a month (April), an object (Penny), or a star (Astrid). This type of narrative-through-naming writing practice has led me to ask: what’s in a name, and what’s not?

In the article attached, Saidiya Hartman describes the problematic figure of “Venus,” and a particular kind of writing practice in response to this figure. Hartman’s “Venus” is based on a girl who died on a slave ship – whose name was uttered only once during the trial of the captain accused of murdering another girl on the ship (and simultaneously acquitted on both charges). What’s significant is Hartman’s decision not to write about this “Venus,” for fear of inventing a false fiction: of filling in a gap, rather than attempting the more difficult work of pointing to it.

In her book Losing Your Mother, instead of writing a story of “Venus,” she sets out to perform “the limits of writing history” using what she calls fabula: “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and experienced by actors.” She describes the writing in this book as a recombinant narrative, which rearranges the basic elements of the story, points to certain sources as “fictions of history,” and confuses narrator and speaker in an effort “to topple the hierarchy of discourse… in the clash of voices.”

In light of my own “named” characters in verse, I’d like to know more about this fabula and recombinant narrative that Hartman describes, particularly how they work to push beyond the limits of the archive. Can the use and creation of false names and reimagined narratives somehow represent real people and identities that seem to be – especially within, by, and through the archive – forever lost?

I found this article on Project Muse.