Given the gravity of this moment, we will take a pause from our usual practice of individual speculations on issues relevant to the issue at hand and offer the following comments.
—Leila & Robin

Speculative Nonfiction will be donating all submission fees collected from issue #3 to the NAACP and The Movement for Black Lives. For the remainder of 2020, we will waive the submission fee for any writer who makes a financial contribution to one of these organizations working for racial justice.

The theme of erasure seemed a logical choice after our issue on “What history teaches.” Still, we could never have known just how fitting it would seem given the global pandemic and uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd. When we were thinking of the notion of erasure, we were not thinking, exclusively, about the erasures of history, about empires and individuals, about colonial and racist power structures that attempt(ed) to erase or succeeded in erasing the lives of individuals and peoples. We were not thinking exclusively about the erasures caused by disease, by wars and famines. We were not thinking exclusively about the massive erasures of bio-diversity, happening in real time from environmental degradation and rapid climate change. We were not thinking exclusively about the tendency to see no evil when evil persists all around us, erasures of conscience. We were not thinking exclusively of the technique of erasure, employed by some of the writers in this volume, of taking an existing text and erasing words around it to create a new text.

As with all our themes, we envision them broadly, as thoughtful invitations and provocations to investigate, experiment, invent, and of course, speculate around our theme.

In 1938, nine months before the start of World War Two, poet W.H. Auden wrote the poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” whose subject, in part, was the painting by Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, painted in 1555. In the painting, we see a mountainous landscape on what seems an ordinary sunny day. A farmer plows a field with his horse in the foreground, his head bent to the earth while another man farther away seems to be idly looking up in the sky. Farther still, a fisher is busily tending to his lines. A merchant ship heads out of the bay, its sails billowing on this apparently windy day. Between the fisherman and the ship, and easily overlooked, a pair of legs seem to scissor kick, caught a moment before the entire body is submerged. We know the story of Icarus and why he fell, but Brueghel has imagined (in a very Dutch context) the moment of his falling. Once we notice those legs, we know why that one man is scanning the skies, that something unusual in the sky has attracted his attention – one minute it was there, something falling rapidly, was it human? Where did it disappear? The man at the plow noticed nothing and the same for the fisherman, or if they did, if the fisherman heard the splash, he must have determined that it didn’t concern him. And what of the people safely aboard the merchant ship. As Auden speculates, that “expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

The fact that we do not always directly see the suffering of others does not erase their suffering or our collective responsibility to respond. For hundreds of years, Black lives have been sacrificed to make this country “great.” The fact of Black people being murdered is not new, but the recent awakening of a majority of this country to that shameful fact is something novel. As artists, we often imagine the seemingly impossible. As artists, we are open to imagining the world differently. Sailing calmly on should no longer be an option.

Robin Hemley
Leila Philip

June 25, 2020

Note: The editors wish to thank Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole for their permission to use images of their individual works and an excerpt from their beautiful collaborative project, Human Archipelago. For more on this project, see Madigan Haley’s essay “Writing Nearby Images, Seeing the Black” in Speculations on the Field.