on evidence
Last week, my friend and I watched a collection of documentary shorts from the Blackstar Film Festival. The collection we watched was called “Vulturine: Rapacious Exploitations and Resistance”—films that narrated moments of dispossession, and the life lived in the wake of these disasters. There was a meditation on the erasure of Gaelic and Inuktitut languages, a film about the murder of Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, a film about the British government’s forced displacement of Chagossian islanders, and one about a Black family in the U.S. who lost their house because of a predatory lender. I could write a separate newsletter on each of these films and their generous, incisive sharing. But today I want to discuss evidence. The kinds of evidence we are taught is real, and who we compile evidence for.
Something that struck me as I was watching these films is the various ways they compiled evidence of harm. Through interviews and anecdotes, through academics’ testimonies, through family photographs and news clippings and maps. I felt deeply informed by each one, grateful for the care with which the pieces of these stories were set forth. And yet I couldn’t help but think about the audience implied by some of the forms of these arguments: one that needed to be convinced, one that valued “objective” proof. The ways a documentary about human rights abuses meant for a general, Western audience needs to first prove that its marginalized protagonists are human. The ways a film about the displacement of an African people needs to contend with the widespread and intentional lack of education about African geography and history, in a way that a film about Europeans would not.
In How to Read Now: Essays, Elaine Castillo writes, “What does bear some questioning is the subtle implication that the only way to write about abuse or trauma is through the courtroom logic of testimonial and confession, through the sensational drama of exposing a psychic wound…or through the finiteness and finality of judgment and denunciation.”
The films in Vulturine move deftly between registers, from the “courtroom logic of testimonial and confession” to forms of lyricism, images of everyday gathering, that are less legible in (and less focused on) the language of a white supremacist state. In this fluidity, the films’ various uses of evidence could themselves be seen as documentary, a documentation of survival strategy.
This is not to say that traditional forms of evidence-making don’t have their uses, or that they’re always morally suspect. These forms of narrative can be incredibly necessary and useful in mobilizing people to action, holding the powerful to accountable, and creating counter-archives. Particularly when it isn’t focused on appealing to the frameworks of Western NGOs and human rights law, documentary filmmaking by and about oppressed people can mobilize evidence in searing and effective ways. Films like Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody (1970), about Black women hospital workers going on strike, Emile de Antonio’s Vietnam War documentary In the Year of the Pig (1969), and Mohammed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2003) about the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in a West Bank refugee camp are just a few in a long history of leftist documentary filmmaking that use interviews and testimonials about colonial violence, statistics, news clippings, or conversations with academics and policymakers to tell stories about movement-building and resistance.
Venus is retrograding in Leo right now. It’s a time to reconsider our values and our love practices. A time when past relationships may return to us as hauntings, as dreams, as instructions. The other day a friend sent me a photo from early 2020, of the last time we ate indoors together pre-pandemic. I opened my Google photos app and went back to the day of the photo, finding other images to send them. Then I spent over an hour scrolling through my camera roll from spring and summer 2020. It wasn’t a great idea, or at least I felt very sad, but maybe I processed some grief I needed to deal with. Spring and summer 2020 was a time of fear and uprising and precarity and loneliness, new joys new geographies, cross-state drives. The images from this time in my camera roll are interspersed with screenshots chronicling the end of a relationship that was deeply harmful to me. Screenshots mostly of text conversations, some that happened months before the end: moments of anti-Blackness, disrespect both petty and major, moments of being minimized, talked down to, made to apologize for my interests or having a conflicting opinion. I talked to my partner about the ways old angers and hurts were coming up for me. At some point near the end of our conversation, they asked why I’d decided to keep these screenshots. I faltered, saying something about needing to remember, needing to prove. About evidence. I said although I would never be called upon to build a case in a way that required evidence like this, it was “the kind of thing that’s used to prove a pattern of behavior.” In a moment of confronting my own need to hold onto capital-P proof, I returned to the language of juridical evidence, courtroom logic. Even though all those screenshotted conversations are also in my message history, I somehow feel safer, more protected, if I have pictures of them too.
The real answer to my partner’s question, and the one I came to later, is that I’m afraid of not being believed. There’s something in my brain that says if I have these screenshots handy, if I can retrieve them after a convenient five-minute scroll through three years of my camera roll, then my experiences will not be doubted or trivialized. Born into a body seen as inherently suspect—irrational, angry, hysterical, an unreliable narrator—and having experienced relationally and institutionally the burden of proof placed upon me, I hang onto evidence like a lifeline. This year, I started writing only in archival ink on archival paper. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds, just cheap pens from a Japanese company that uses archival ink, and a specific brand of notebook. But I think it comes from the same impulse to make sure the stories written onto me, about me, and by me can’t be doctored or erased, won’t be washed away in some unfortunate disaster. Because without the words and the screenshots and the camera roll and the archival ink there’s just me, and the weight of my word against the world.
Later on in How to Read Now, relating how her parents kicked a sexually abusive relative out of their home when she was a child, Castillo writes, “I was not destroyed, because the people who loved me read my story, believed it, and changed the world I lived in because of it.” When I was talking to my partner about my need for evidentiary screenshots, they reminded me there’s other evidence that exists, too: the fact that I told my friends about what happened, and now they know. I want to feel like that’s enough. I want to trust that the people who love me will believe my story, and change the world we live in because of it, because they already have, and will again. Last year I got these lines from the poet Muriel Leung tattooed on my arm: “My allegiance to the bone, its refusal as instruction/will buoy me when memory is not enough.” It’s a reminder to myself that what I know in my bones is truth, that even in the absence of juridical proof or linear memory, the remembering carried in my marrow is something I can always return to. Bones have no obligation to prove the validity of their memories through quantitative evidence that may or may not be validated by the court of law/public opinion/white society. And actually, neither do I.
Evidence can’t save us. Even the most carefully assembled proof can be washed away in the disaster of white supremacy, overlooked by the arbiters of believability. How many times have we seen powerful men get away with sexual violence despite the seemingly incontrovertible evidence against them? Israel’s genocide continues despite the crucial brilliance of Jenin, Jenin. Until the systems decreeing our worth and believability are destroyed, it will always be just us, the weight of our word against the world, hoping the documents we have preserved will be taken seriously in all the ways we are not. When I tell my friends what happened and they fold my story into their understanding of the world, I catch a glimpse of what could be. When the strident and legalistic façade of a documentary film slips into an image of a quiet dinner, a tired parent speaking plainly to the camera, a narrative without a talking head, I feel myself instructed by that refusal. Evidence can’t save us, make us feel real, validate the harms we experience every day. Only we can do that for each other—by toppling the structures that attempt to determine our realities, and creating them anew.
Cover image: Evidence of Grace (2020) by Genesis Tremaine