Is night is a metaphor for forgetting? Perhaps if you sleep through it... I am going to play devil’s advocate here and argue that night can be used to play with historical and cultural memory. Darkness becomes an omnipresent instrument with which we can recuperate, manipulate and re-arrange fragments of our history. It’s an incubator for retrofitting memory in new, alternative ways that lifting us above and beyond our present moment. If playful re-imagination of history equals forgetting history, then I am guilty as charged…
If you had asked me this question about a week ago, I would likely have given you a different answer. Night, darkness, shadows...those perfect corners of our reality in which we can burying disturbing feelings and tuck away those deviant desires, gestures and fantasies we would rather not confront. Not now, at least. Perhaps never? But night has been kind to me of late. And by kind, I mean it has served as a creative point of departure, one from which memory explodes, revealing a cacophony of historical imaginaries. Want to try it? I dare you...It’s a fun rabbit hole to travel though. My rabbit hole in question lead me to Corpus Christi, a bayside town in South Texas. I was looking to make sense of a murder that occurred there 20 years early. On March 31st, 1995, a 23-year-old Tejano singer, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, was shot and killed by Yolanda Saldívar, the president of her fan club and manager of her line of clothing boutiques. The question of Selena’s posthumous image as a site of diva worship, or martyrdom, has haunted me for years. How was I to make sense of a senseless murder, especially when so many others before me had thrown their investigatives hats into the ring? I had to try… Over the course of two days, I walked, ran, and drove throughout the streets of Corpus Christi searching for answers. It was an embodied act of remapping, a series of movements through the historical landscape of Selena’s life and afterlife. There were many commemorative places I visited, but for now I’d like to focus on my trip to the the Knights Inn, formerly The Days Inn, for it brings us back to the question of night and memory. This highway-side motel, as indistinguishable as any other cheap lodging option, is the spot where Selena was murdered 20 years ago. As such, it constitutes an unofficial, alternative site of remembrance for many fans who have made the cultural, spiritual and musical pilgrimage to Corpus Christi. I planned to visit the motel at night. Murder is a dark, dark thing afterall. Why not maintain some consistency? What I did not plan on however, was the tremendous storm that seemingly swallowed the town whole. “Tornado warning un 9:45 pm! Flash flooding likely! Stay off the roads!” The weather alerts crackling through the radio played on an endless loop, yet I knew this was code for, GO NOW! The motel was waiting, a blue and white flickering neon light, calling me through the humid blackness. What happened to me that night at the motel? I am not ready to say. That part of the story will come later. For now, all you need to know, is this: I visited the motel to recuperate a lost memory. Like an undercover archeologist, the night allowed me to excavate a narrative, many narratives, that have been neatly tucked away. How? By whom? By what? By our stubborn insistence on a singular historical narrative. By our discomfort and fear that multiple versions of history can, and are, unfolding simultaneously. So often, the night makes us feel vulnerable, uncertain, out of place, othered (perhaps!). Better to sleep through it, no? These feelings of exposure and vulnerability will push our rational selves aside, allowing our imagination to take over. Sometimes we can control, rein in, or dictate the trajectory of our imagination. But more often, we cannot. This is precisely why I chose to go to the motel at night. When we intentionally place ourselves within the precarious, vulnerable sphere that is the nighttime, we are liberated to imagine and (re)imagine whatever singular version of history we have been fed. We are pushed, willingly, or unwillingly, to challenge our accepted memories, while we flirt with illogical possibilities, and play with alternative versions of history. What scares me most is not the dark, but the inherent instability and fragility of our memories. Night does not obscure this truth, but rather exposes it. You can’t get more Noir than that. |
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