Page 127 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 121

The envelope.‘…a small lock of hair inside a tiny, tiny envelope…(I cannot bear to look
inside)…’

weight of the black and white photographs. I discover that the album finally ends
(begins?) with pictures of my baby-father at seven months: white wicker pram,
floppy cotton brimmed cap, lips tucked in, as silent as he is today.
In between the first page with the pictures of my mother as a young bride, her
lips darkened with red lipstick (when I came along her lips would be frosted
pink), and the last page with pictures of my father as a baby, there are many
more pictures and things: a small lock of hair inside a tiny, tiny envelope,

inscribed in my grandmother’s writing (small tight cursive), with the words ‘My
curl’, meaning my father’s curl (I cannot bear to look inside); military pictures of
my father in sailor caps and active-duty clothes and dress uniforms with harsh
brass buttons; photographs of the three of them (my grandmother in a white dress
with an enormous dark cotton bow under her collar that covers her chest, my
laughing father in short pants, his brother in long pants) taken in succession as
they happily stride towards the camera at the 1935 Chicago World’s Fair—my
grandfather out of the frame, as he almost always is.
By arranging his life backwards, my grandmother has reconstructed my
father’s life as if it ends like some forbidding myth, with their beginning. As James
Clifford has told us, ‘Living does not easily organize itself into a continuous
narrative.’ 6 It is only after we have lived through cycles of our lives, in
recollection, in photographs, that a narrative comes through. Afterwards, we tell