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Process Essay for "Narrative Etcetera"

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          The driving impetus for this erasure poem comes largely from the source of its epigraph: the prefatory letter of authentication written by Rev. William Aldridge, a white English minister who relayed and edited Marrant’s narrative into the form readers can access today (Marrant 110-1). His claim that “I have always preserved Mr. Marrant’s ideas, tho’ I could not his language; No more alterations, however, have been made, than were thought necessary” is quite interesting, as it demands further questions of method (Marrant 111). What metrics did Aldridge employ to ensure that his editing efforts maintained fidelity to the facts of Marrant’s life as told to him while also preserving his humanity on the page? In The Factory of Facts, Luc Sante investigates how vastly different narratives can be constructed from the same factual foundation, writing that, “The past is a notional construct, a hypothesis, a poem” (Sante 300). Though memoir rather than biography, Sante’s work demonstrates that a myriad of narratives can arise from a common set of facts but different editorial decisions get at different kinds of truth. This poem seeks to tap into some truth, not about who Marrant definitely was but about who he could have been. The choice of an erasure poem mirrors some of the work that inevitably must happen when authors seek to capture a subject of lived experience as broad as “the Lord’s wonderful dealings” into the limitations of genre, space, privacy, and other audience expectations. Importantly, it also captures the added erasure to which Rev. Aldridge’s work may have subjected Marrant’s original narrative. However, as the mirrored poems reveal, erasure is not only a taking away or the engagement with a text as a palimpsest completely effaced to give rise to a completely new conception; erasure is also a means of revelation, of placing in greater relief those details around which everything else comes to be seen in new light. 
          As he appears to us, Marrant is a precocious, devout, and curious young figure, the sense of which I hope is preserved here. Part of the work of this erasure poem was to find pieces of information that, within the parameters of the historical record, are not contradicted but wholly possible within the fuller frame of a nineteenth century Black minister's life. What were his mundane joys, desires, hopes, challenges? So much of the narrative redacts these elements of daily existence. What could open up if we dare to understand Marrant as someone who indeed “prayed himself beyond this world” and its secular limitations though at times forgot to bow his head and call upon God? How does the insistence on the word “man” require a different kind of reading that the title’s relegation of his humanity to the phrase “a black” invites? Critical readings of John Marrant may cast him as a “convert” to colonial ideologies—prejudice towards the “Indians” he encounters and his own African American community not least among them—and thus an agent of empire. Another kind of reading may understand this snapshot we receive of the young man’s life as just that, a partial portrayal perhaps more revelatory of the particular agendas and aims with which it was crafted than of the man himself. When Marrant answers the Cherokee king’s inquiry about his age that he is “not fifteen,” one remembers that for the bulk of this narrative, Marrant is still a child (Marrant 119). As the poem reiterates, only “in another narrative, John Marrant was a man.” I tasked myself with presenting an editorial alternative to the kind of narrative Aldrige and Marrant’s collaboration produced, one that possibly restores the freedom of childhood innocence to a young man immersed in the work of “trying to find his way,” both literally and figuratively, throughout his narrative.
          In both the opening and conclusion of his prefatory remarks, Aldridge demonstrates a consciousness to preempt the potential incredulity with which readers would regard Marrant’s narrative as he presents it. “The following Narrative is plain and artless, as it is surprising and extraordinary,” he writes, and later, “the novelty or magnitude of the facts contained in the following pages, may dispose some readers to question the truth of them” (Marrant 110-1). The title that marks where Marrant's story begins reads as "Narrative, &c.," and while it is clear that this is meant to indicate that other elements will accompany the narrative, my creative piece takes seriously the attempt to find the "&c" beyond the frame, seeking out what is seen as superfluous or "less interesting," despite the impossibility of recovering what the archive has neglected or erased (Marrant 111, 121). Through this poem, I offer that it is not that the fact of miracles in a man’s life is unbelievable or unacceptable; it is that this connection becomes more complicated when we are unable to see his life as a man—a human being experiencing a mixture of moments just as mundane as they are miraculous.
 

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