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Mariam Arwa performs academic beef through the heat of epistolary

Dear Diary,

Róisín once asked me why I am so drawn to letters and epistolary fiction. She is always so annoyingly concerned with the “why” of things. I think it came from our mother, who was always writing, but was a terrible communicator (though she was fantastic with prose). Since her departure from this world two months ago, it has been difficult to deal with the sheer amount of material that she left behind, mostly, her written work (and naturally, little-miss-perfect Róisín hasn’t been of any help). As of last Tuesday, I’ve been given no choice but to look through her materials. Her former colleagues at the university (the oldheads) have decided that the most appropriate way to mourn a “titan” of architectural history and theory (mom always hated the “omission of the third word,” which she considered to be the most important: “and critique”) would be to host a ghastly, overblown two-day symposium in her honor, with keynote speakers, panelists, dinners, and to top it all off, a pop-up exhibition.

What a pretentious excuse for a wake. It’s happening within a few months, though a date hasn’t been set yet.

There are rumours that there are some quarrels behind the scenes about budget, but knowing that that place has more money than God, I am uncertain how true that is. She would have thought it obscene, to say the least. She always considered herself a person before anything else, and though she was gregarious and loud, she was surprisingly shy and would have hated her life being put under the microscope. She also would have pointed out that it took some nerve to host that affair for a professor that they had, only months before, been trying to push out. Regardless of anything she may have said, I can’t help but make a joke about how the cancer took her out before the department did.

Anyway, I have been tasked with digging up dirt. I was surprised that it was Wanda Waggstaffe who had reached out to me about the symposium, considering that mom hated her guts (and the feeling was mutual). Dad regularly had to calm her down at family dinners after faculty meetings, but hey, him and Wanda got on well enough. I still don’t actually know why her and mom had such a legendary beef between them, and maybe I’m just naturally suspicious, but I’m uncertain what her motivations are in regards to this. She apparently wants to get the band back together for this farce.

Mom was always happy that I chose to become a social historian (she thought that my natural tendency to snoop, i.e reading Róisín’s diary as a kid, is what will make me a good one) instead of following in her footsteps. She hated how “catty and bratty” architectural historians were to each other, and she would be appalled at who is working on this. Regardless of all her complaining about “the vultures,” she did truly love the discipline and put on a number of things like this herself for her mentors. Maybe a part of her would like that this was happening. Either way, instead of working on my dissertation I now have to dig through her documents, her study, and, worst of all, her emails.

It does disgust me that I feel this, but I suppose I have a sharp little glee at doing the last one. She very rarely let me or Róisín into her study, and there was a moratorium on either Róisín or I reading her or dad’s work. She said that she wanted to “protect us from becoming architects, or worse, architectural historians.” I don’t really know if I would want to ever read Mom’s work, Though I did say earlier that I had a fascination with correspondence – and it will definitely be more interesting than whatever was in her book about the Danteum, whatever that was. I’ve started looking through her imported emails in her private email’s inbox. Hopefully there’s something fun in there, it would certainly cheer me up to at least see her wit and humour in the written word.

-Tanya, Middletown, CT, December 12th, 2037

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DRAFTS: June 15, 2037

Dear W,

The serial reproduction of our asymptotic (at times disagreeable) relationship blew up in our faces and came to an end. This was not catastrophe, merely repeated spectacle. Though we have chosen to put the knife down instead of continuing to twist it, at times I find myself missing its well-worn handle. After a long sabbatical, I have decided to return to letter writing, as a project, before I put this practice to a rest. Though I am not writing this letter to actually send to you, maybe those who identify with conditions of abandoned collaborations would relate to it. Let me tell you how this one goes: the long sentences are for you; the short for me. (Anything in-between is for anybody else.) Your response to me saying that would likely be a question (or realistically, an interrogation) on how we would establish quantifiable metrics in a case like this; my response to your response would be a raised eyebrow and joking if size really matters. You of course, by that point, are both exhausted and frustrated by my usual antics and my inability to treat anything seriously. I could say the same, but I don’t think I could write a sentence long enough. I’m serious about this though.

You once told me that I am insatiable. I told someone else that all I want to do is eat the entire world; I told yet another that I need to learn to take small bites and chew, before I inevitably choke. Still nursing the slow-healing wound left behind by the knife, I find myself rereading our old letters from that catastrophic summer during our Post-doc years, the letters and postcards from the time I was a fellow in Rome and you were in LA, the sporadic emails from our horrific tenure-track days, the little notes left to each other in word documents between edits. In the aftermath of our falling out, I have kept a few of the cabal that surrounded us, despite the reminder of your betrayal, and am now meandering down (or rather, forced onto) the unfortunate but well-advised path to going emeritus. I find myself ruminating on the present and the future. I just can’t let some things stay history. After our end it was hard to walk away from that perilous idea of an email’s perpetual lifespan on a server. When I anxiously muse about our letters, I am faced with the fact (and fear) that my archive will chase me once I am gone. I can burn letters, I can shred photos, but there is no point in combatting the trifecta of inboxes, outboxes, and some nameless server. I don’t like this.

I think back on so many of the figures whose lives I visited during my career and wonder if they ever felt the same. Do historians ever stop to ask when they’ve hit the limit of what is acceptable and respectful? Do they stop to remember the rights of a person who is now long gone? I am thinking not as a historian right now, but as a person. Do we just dig up bodies that should have remained buried? Will I, too, be reinterred one day?

Niall used to say that every archive is a conversation over time. He was always better with words than I am, so much better with people too, something that Roisin got from him. I sometimes wonder how people will handle my material when it’s not my hands doing the handling (so to speak). How would that “conversation” go once I am not in the room to speak for myself? As you may remember, Roisin has become a social worker and Tanya has expressed some interest in becoming a social historian and has started applying to History PhD programs. She’s far braver than I am, to dive directly into people’s lives like that. But again, she got that from Niall. Regardless, I worry about where she will land in regards to the ethics of such things. She has always been of many different minds, and I am not certain how fast she will hold to a set of principles. I just write about buildings and cities and clumsily weave people’s narratives into them, which I thought was relatively harmless until this past decade. Maybe I was too clumsy. I regret most of my work. I lost the spark of the Avante Garde the second I got tenure (or maybe after I got married? You and I would have differing opinions on this, perhaps). Maybe you were right in what you said that disastrous last time we got drinks one-on-one all those years ago, pretending that we were still friends. I don’t know what to do with my old correspondence with you, with those old mistakes. Maybe a “drafts” folder is so much better than an inbox and outbox. Maybe not all correspondence is meant to be sent.

I revisited your first letter to me, from 1991 and I feel painfully wistful. So, for myself, I write this dedication in reverse, caressing old text, touching objects that I hope to glean some knowledge from, and, at times, worrying a small piece of seaglass plucked off a beach in my hands. I still wonder if we can actually know anything about something just by touching it. I think it just gives way to more questions. I no longer think every letter is a monologue on longing, but I do still think every letter involves love. All manners of love are needed to take to the word, to do the work we do, to play little games with the pen.

As I wade through my letters wondering what to redact, what to burn, what to delete, wondering what the rules of the game are, I imagine myself walking through a minefield. Each sentence – each word, potentially – could either blow up my future if left in, or destroy my truth if left out. I find myself questioning the worth of being stubbornly loyal to a method. I fear this stupid thing growing in my head (and making me stupid enough to write this) will take me before I can answer that question. But who needs a clean legacy? My daughters won’t care and Niall has been gone nearly ten years (the perils of marrying a man twenty years your senior). As the evidence in our old letters shows, wanting and needing struggle to get along. Somehow, after all these decades, I still cannot bring myself to throw anything away. I wonder if I should at least tell you that I am leaving soon, and not in the way you think.

yours,

S

P.S.: If the vultures descend on my remains after I am gone and you do end up reading this, please don’t let them write a biography. It’ll be sanitized and horrible. Or, you could just burn their funhouse down. Maybe then we can call it even.

Mariam Arwa is a Brooklyn-based jack of all trades and a master of none. Her work balances editorial, architectural, and literary practice. She is currently adjunct faculty at CUNY City Tech and CUNY LaGuardia.