This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/Dirt Road between Plantations.jpg 2020-11-16T23:03:09+00:00 Mathusala Redacted 22 image_header 2021-06-01T21:23:19+00:00 By Lauren Barker Bedsole
  
  As I considered a topic for this redaction poem, I felt especially drawn to Mathu. Enslavers tried to take his life and his heritage, but Mathu proved to be a giant of a man, even according to those who enslaved him. The redaction aims to crystallize description of his personality while centering him as a character. The original draft features Mathu as the object of a bet; this redaction poem makes him an agent of his own history.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  All right
  look at him
  sitting
  grinning with confidence
  A hundred
  A hundred
  a hundred against life
  my name is Ma th u 
  bet?
  bet 
      Jack
  you know something about this world I don’t know?
  It’s possible
      Jack
  you’re my witness
  you 
  you
  picture him as a boy
  who named him Mathusala – Mathusala Jack
  Later he shortened it to Mathu
  Mathu is what he was all his life
  He was 
  older
  and
  older
  grew up
  and fought to hit back
      Jack.
• 1 2020-11-16T16:26:57+00:00 Traces 13 Creative responses to the archival collections visual_path 561 2021-05-20T16:30:30+00:00 The collections at the Gaines Center afford us an opportunity to study the development and composition of his novels. But doing that work at a distance, with limited access to the research materials, encouraged us to ask how else we might engage Gaines’s drafts other than recovering his writing process. What other forms of reading and writing might the collections elicit through digital remediation?
  
  
  This series of creative entries offers a number of answers to that question. Partly inspired by Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann’s experiments in “Deformance and Interpretation,” these textual “deformations” develop new perspectives on Gaines’s draft materials using procedural alterations that reorder, isolate, alter, or add to the document at hand. Some use redaction to draw out aspects of the original documents that require reader attention; some isolate particular words to break the linear order of prose lines into fractured, impressionistic utterances; others use draft materials as the starting point for original poetic expression.   
  
  In each case, these creative entries work toward reimagining Gaines’s unpublished writing and what it might mean for contemporary readers. As Samuels and McGann point out, among artists and poets, “interpretation regularly involves some kind of performative element” (46). Giving space to performative engagements with the archive in this project reminds us to continue reading Gaines with fresh eyes. Doing so reveals traces of the lives he preserved in his published writing at the same time it demonstrates how his legacy continues to inspire new approaches to representing South Louisiana.