| On Friday, April 3, 1981, Peter Wright drowned. Marjorie, the eldest, was commissioned by Daddy to deliver the news to Maureen, who had immigrated to the United States in 1966, settling in the Bronx. At the request of their father, Marjorie wrote a letter, rather than call. It is dated April 13, 1981, ten days after the drowning. The letter itself would take another ten days to arrive. Sixteen years later, Maureen would be dead. And fourteen years after that, in 2011, I would find the letter. | 
Maureen
|
Thirty years after it was written. | I had gone to New York to help my mother move. She was finally leaving the apartment she had shared with Maureen since moving back in 1996 to help take care of her. Many of Maureen’s things remained. Going through them, I found a small lockbox. In it were an expired passport, a naturalization certificate, an old Trinidad identification card, and other documents. |
ith my cousin Jude’s permission, I was able to digitize the archive, publishing it privately on my website. But it is this three page letter from Marjorie to Maureen that has turned out to be something of a codex, with and within which I have sought to make sense of what I mean by vernacular rhetoric. It is also the frame—the rhetorical situation—with which to model my encounters and negotiations with a vernacular archive and the lives they help construct. This is how I enter, by looking for the graves, by stirring up the ashes, reminding myself not to mistake movements of the spirit for serendipity.
The study of this and other texts in the archive is precursory in nature, intended to serve as a discursive and material model—a methodological testing ground—for the study of vernacular knowledge, preservation, and distribution. Its urgency is linked to the various functions of the text in its original form. But it also addresses the attachment of other functions in performative and digital contexts. This reflection marks my attempt to situate their relevance in the current moment—and in the other moments that have led to and follow from this one. In my view, therefore, establishing and understanding a connection—even a preliminary one—is key to understanding vernacular discourse in the Caribbean specifically. And, in a more general way, it allows us to examine the role of convention in the author's and audience's participation in public life and their respective contextualization of geopolitical discourse, all of which is multimodally constituted even before being digitized and re-released.
The study of this and other texts in the archive is precursory in nature, intended to serve as a discursive and material model—a methodological testing ground—for the study of vernacular knowledge, preservation, and distribution. Its urgency is linked to the various functions of the text in its original form. But it also addresses the attachment of other functions in performative and digital contexts. This reflection marks my attempt to situate their relevance in the current moment—and in the other moments that have led to and follow from this one. In my view, therefore, establishing and understanding a connection—even a preliminary one—is key to understanding vernacular discourse in the Caribbean specifically. And, in a more general way, it allows us to examine the role of convention in the author's and audience's participation in public life and their respective contextualization of geopolitical discourse, all of which is multimodally constituted even before being digitized and re-released.
| The Letter April 13, 1981 | |
| | As noted above, this letter is part of a larger collection of other documents. In addition to this one, some of the most interesting were letters to Maureen from her father, Newallo John Wright. You can view them here. |
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