The Brooklyn Rail

Dear G,

This writing is overtaken by night. Belated. It is the colour of pink peony petals sent through the post, before becoming sick with white powder, left to rust in mildewed water. It was May—two months into lockdown—when you mailed me six stems of the same flower, which I have been hiding in a dog-eared paperback ever since.

Backdropped by days of dwindling light, we started writing letters to each other at the start of the long late-fall of 2020—a second lockdown in England announced. As art historians in an art school, such letters became the form of our feeling toward an academic paper on sickness and gender, feminism and care. The deadline felt impossible. But then, as new demands of care for ourselves, families, partners, friends, colleagues, and students necessitated a different approach, we turned to what we could manage: short-form epistles, scratched out in snatched moments. Sent through the delays of the post, these letters formed the pieces of the paper we went on to present in the once unexpected, then quickly predictable, online environment.

Inspired by the scrappy and recycled epistolary materials of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, the paper was a collage of excerpts from the correspondence by which we had slowly gathered and reflected on our research. It was an assemblage of accumulated cut-outs from a pandemic world; a sticky juxtaposition of our work with the intimate distractions of lives-in-confinement; a thrifty art of attachment, which helped us to understand more of our everyday adherences to our work on chronically ill, chronically marginalized female subjects, long dead, as well as to each other as feminist scholars and writers. It felt risky: a “sick” form with which to explore a “sick” mode of researching, writing, and collaborating, against notions of ability, accessibility, and productivity, working with what was at hand, with what was possible, with notions of inertia, interruption, and incompletion. It also felt like care.

Our work was indebted to Johanna Hedva’s 2016 “Sick Woman Theory”—a manifesto-essay for a subject of “many guises,” representing all of the “un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less than.” Careful not to subsume the particular experiences of a person living with chronic illness and disability into our own pandemic lives, we sought to activate Hedva’s text not for, or on behalf of, but with the subjects they speak as—those made vulnerable by being un-cared for, who have mobilized alternative means of protest and survival across art, writing, and life. Hedva’s theorization has also inspired the intimate politics of how we address our “Sick Women” historical subjects—artists and muses across the twentieth century—through love letters and in likeness.

Hedva values the letter too, understanding its potential as a relational encounter, a gesture of solidarity, a form of agency, and a practice of care. In “Letter to a Young Doctor” (2018), published online, yet written in bed, on tactile pieces of paper found on hospital floors, the artist replies over time and at length to the med-student who had asked them how “healing might happen” from within the medical-industrial complex. “I directed my voice in your direction,” Hedva writes, “you whom I’ve never met, may never meet, who felt very far away, across a distance that was dark and unfamiliar.”

The letters we wrote to each other as well as to our “Sick Women” subjects were always meant to be read aloud, coalescing shared utterances. What we didn’t anticipate was how central the practices of spoken word and sonic collage, meaning voices juxtaposed, attached, overlaid, would become. Since its first iteration at a conference—which included the work of our Brooklyn Rail correspondents (Fatema Abdoolcarim, Allison Morehead), as well as Carol Mavor, alongside—our project now comprises multiple correspondences-made-public, interweaving live talks, readings, performances, and sound pieces, with the voices of epistolary essays, and conversational exchanges at public events on letter-writing, health, and care. We have been struck by what audiences have described as the impact of our letters in the distanced context of the pandemic. In a 2022 conversation hosted by The Brooklyn Rail, one participant commented, “In thinking of these transactional writings... these letters... getting us beyond what we thought we could not get over... Is it in any way true to ask: ‘What is healing, but a shift in perspective?’” And another, “The wondrous slowness of the epistle form. What an antidote to damaging velocity.”

Listening to their Zoom-chat sentences: could such letter-collages—full of affective, visual, and sensory texture—suspend or deviate history’s chronological line? How might the letter—its “embers of a Thousand Years / Uncovered by the Hand” (Dickinson)—bring past and present voices and selves closer? Since our exchange began in 2020, we have returned to our individual work, feeling through the archives of our historical subjects once more, including their letters (although we could not help but sneakily send fragments to each other). We have sensed the archive as a textual, textural, and sonic collage, full of voice, frequency, and sound, which echoes around bodies, spaces, and centuries, in a way that rearranges capitalist time like sick time. Healing, we have come to realize, is to hear such distant traces.

Dear A,

Your letter arrived by stealth. It was not announced: no squeak of the gate or snap of the sprung flap, no footsteps, no sign. It appeared—miraculous—face down on the rough coir mat. I rush-read it in the moment between his cough and cry, eyes seeking the shortest lines, the italics, the end.