Bad Archive
by Flora Feltham

At work in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Flora Feltham was tasked to archive the diary of a nineteenth-century teenage girl. Feltham found a pressed flower between its pages – a precious surprise, making the historical girl tangibly real, but also a headache for an archivist: any organic matter threatens the sterility of the archival space. It was decided that the flower was to be kept – though sealed inside ‘a tiny clear envelope from acid-free plastic.’

This is the opening of Feltham’s expressively titled Bad Archive, a collection of thirteen essays thematically assembled around questions of memory, remembering, and personal history. To be a good archivist and ‘keep the scraps of the past from the bin of today,’ Feltham explains in her opening chapter, ‘On Archiving,’ requires precision, order, and pragmatism:

[A]ccording to traditional archival theory, we archivists are ciphers for this truth and orderliness—we simply turn documents and objects over in our hands. We catalogue items according to common and sensible standards, applying the necessary categories. We write lists. We aren’t meant to imagine the deck of a ship or admit we bear witness to others’ secrets and that we tread silently in the footsteps of strangers.

Feltham describes herself as a ‘bad archivist’. She won the 2021 Letteri Family Prize for Creative Nonfiction at Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University), and as a writer admits to imagining, to ‘add[ing] muscle and tendon, facial expressions and emotion’ to the ‘bones of the story’ told by the straight facts of records and receipts. Her creative curiosity leads her to the ‘gaps’ and ‘absences’ in these records, to interpreting ‘what feels like an emotional, if not literal, truth—a way to open [her] arms and enfold all the library’s ghosts.’ Bad Archive is not interested in sterile record keeping, locking the past inside an airless vault, or sealing flowers in acid free bags: it wants to imagine who plucked the flower, and why, and what it might have meant to those who smelled it.

In these essays, Feltham offers lyrical personal archives of the people and places that have made up her life thus far: the library where she hid in toilet stalls to cry over her husband’s infidelity; the Newtown New World of her childhood where she sat on her mother’s hip while her mother ‘lived life one-handed’; her house ‘within smelling distance of Wellington’s Southern Landfill’ where ‘on certain still, pink evenings a thick, sticky aroma clings to [her] street’.

Her portraits of the people around her are delicate and specific: her mother, who used to rescue her from spiders’ by ‘scoop[ing] them up with her bare hands’ with ‘bitten nails and freckled forearms’; her father, ‘a man of ordinary height’ with ‘reassuringly broad shoulders’ and the ‘thick midriff or someone who calls vegetables “rabbit food”’. Her partner, Pat, and their relationship, comprised entirely of the tenderly smudged images of personal memory:

And while I’m writing, if I ever think my work is silly or sentimental, I will offer myself these images from my own relationship: Pat helping me pick out onion from a restaurant meal. Pat filling a hot water bottle. Pat stroking my hair while I lie down with my head in his lap. A smile spreading across Pat’s face, long-gone cigarette hanging from his lower lip, as he’s illuminated by a slowly rotating party light in green, blue and red.

Her snapshots are not the stuff of conventional archives, pinned to receipts, tickets, and birth certificates. They are entirely made up of moments and emotions that throughout history have been significant only to those experiencing them, destined to become gaps and absences in future records.

The act of remembering and the act of creating and re-creating memories is a guiding thread throughout the collection and the source of some of its most effective imagery. In ‘Proust Yourself’, Feltham tries to recall the summer she turned sixteen, when her mother was in a psychiatric facility in Dunedin and Feltham was left in the care of her older brothers. She plainly acknowledges the absence of any concrete memories: She can’t remember who drove their mother to the airport, what the family ate for dinner, or even where the money came from during that time.

I thought about trying to write some cute images to represent this absence, but I couldn’t think of any that rang true. I can’t say that this part of my memory is like an empty ice-cream container or the wrapper after you’ve finished your Subway. It’s not a quiet lake at dawn or a dried-up river bed. Where my brothers should be sits a pristine void.

On her quest to recover some of these memories, Feltham retraces her steps in the Newtown New World, intimately familiar since her early childhood – except that the supermarket is being refurbished, and everything looks ever so slightly different than the way she remembers it. ‘Now, the new supermarket adds friction to my memories,’ she writes. ‘In an unfamiliar space I have to work harder to remember.’

Feltham’s writing is both poetic and precise, evoking the quality of grainy family photographs where every background and face feels friendly and familiar, even if the album is not your own. Only a few of the essays are not quite as sharp or engaging as the rest: ‘Dekmantel Selectors’ tells of a few drug-fuelled weeks in summery Europe, and, in particular, a long and hazy weekend at a Croatian music festival. While its significance reveals itself in hindsight (in a later essay, Feltham and her husband face his drug use and its consequences), the essay is less compressed than others. Instead of a family album, we are presented with the exhaustively curated slideshow and meticulous step-by-step narration of any friend who’s ever returned with tales from hedonistic Europe. And yet, the essay adds to the character of the personal archive: not every memory can be made meaningful to everyone it is shared with.

‘The Raw Material’ and ‘Tapestry Lessons’, detailing Feltham’s journey to become a weaver, offer another pertinent metaphor to describe her writing. The parallels between weaving and storytelling become apparent not just in the delight in one’s own creation – ‘And then, just like that: finished cloth’ – but also through the very act of crafting itself:

But it struck me then that the whole point of tapestry, despite the need for excruciating intention, is to disguise that idea; to hide the structure of the work; to make an argument for porousness; to let the weft wander; and to let colours flow and dissolve into one another. It feels philosophically optimistic that I can build something so infinite from something so limited.

Bad Archive, its occasional looser threads notwithstanding, is a beautifully intricate tapestry of personal memory. It dissolves its colours subtly, weaves threads into an archival artwork that only fully reveals its impact once the book is finished and the reader takes a step back to take in its whole – creases, fingerprints, pressed flowers and all.