The Brooklyn Rail

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Restless Dead: Necrowriting & Disappropriation (2020), she describes contemporary writing practices that “have radically shifted away from the singularity of the author and onto the dynamic meaning-producing roles of readers and communities, [and] calls into question the appropriation of someone else’s materials.” For Rivera Garza, disappropriation “forms communalities of writing” that create experiences “of mutual belonging, in language and in collective work with others.” Such a writing practice describes Bindi Vora’s monumental Mountain of Salt (2023), which is a collage of words and images that operate by juxtaposition. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book consists of found images printed in black-and-white and what she calls “appropriated” language, the photobook oscillates between image spreads and word spreads, with the words presented in all caps at the center of each page. The image spreads use colorful digital shapes to emphasize moments in each of the images that highlight everything from words in a sign in the background of the image to people’s hand gestures (often pointing).

In creating what Rivera Garza would call a “text-in-common,” Vora emphasizes the co-authorship that a poetics of disappropriation makes visible. In fact, strangely enough, in a book full of images, it’s the words that offer a snapshot of our political life during the COVID-19 pandemic and the shared language that emerged from it. Mixed throughout the collection are the directives and language we’ve come to associate with the pandemic “HUMAN CONTACT TRACERS,” “MINIMISE THE SPREADS,” and “SUPERSPREADER.” In the images that precede “HUMAN CONTACT TRACERS”, there’s a photograph of a woman feeding another woman a piece of food while the facing page is of a group of Black children holding instruments, as if to illuminate both the impossibility of tracing human contact and the changing nature of that contact following the pandemic. Interspersed throughout, too, are references to the Black Lives Matter movement, which Vora tracks through references to museums and statues such as: “IF POLICE ENFORCE STRUCTURES OF POWER, MUSEUMS ENFORCE MYTH,” “DISGRACED MONUMENT,” and “STATUES ARE NOT NEUTRAL.” While the killing of George Floyd is not explicitly mentioned, for those of us in the United States, Floyd’s death is inextricably linked with the pandemic and a turning point for an understanding of race relations here (though as Vora also reminds us, “PLEASE ACTUALLY READ THOSE BOOKS YOU ALL ARE BUYING”).

Reading Mountain of Salt from a US perspective was an unsettling experience. While I cannot speak to how the found images read within a British context, I imagine that in both countries there’s a sense of white nostalgia. In fact, reading Mountain of Salt within the US context made me wonder if the time period most often depicted in the book–what I’ll say is the 1950s/1960s–is the time Donald Trump refers to when he wants to “Make America Great Again.” Raggedy Anne and Andy dolls sit together on a mantlepiece next to two even more explicitly black-face doll heads; white children sit with bowed heads at wooden desks, presumably praying; an elderly couple sits on a couch, the man reading and the woman embroidering. As Rivera Garza would remind us, disappropriation involves a “simultaneously backward and forward movement [that] uncovers the past and blazes trails into the future at the same time.” This sense of see-sawing through time accompanies the practice of examining these images alongside the text. The images speak to an entrenched present, weighted by the whiteness of the past to the exclusion of people of color in the present. Or, as Vora, tells us, “THE INGRAINED THOUGHT THAT IF YOU’RE LIGHTER, YOU’RE SOMEHOW SUPERIOR” and “SKIN COLOUR IS NOT REASONABLE SUSPICION.”

In some ways, Mountain of Salt reads like a family album (if family albums took families to task). While Vora has noted that one can open the book at any page and start reading, the experience of reading from cover to cover offers a sense of accumulation—a build-up of images and words that speak to the shared trauma of the pandemic and the attempt to piece together a life after it. Reading Rivera Garza and Vora at the same time was a happy coincidence—when Vora reminds us that “LANGUAGE IS A PLACE OF STRUGGLE” and “BUT ONE FIGURE ALONE CANNOT TELL THE FULL STORY,” I felt the communality of her work and the shared sense of belonging that Rivera Garza describes. Moreover, as I read Mountain of Salt, I was overcome with a sense of energy, of urgency. While I think of the pandemic as being at a standstill, as months hiding inside my apartment, what emerges in Vora’s photobook is the cacophonic sound of a protest. In using social media and news media as the basis for her appropriated language, Vora taps into the zeitgeist of the moment and reminds us that we’ve been fighting all along.