Learning from silent teachers: On researching at a teaching mortuary

In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), Saidiya
Hartman writes: “to read the archive is to enter a mortuary.” What would it be to re-interpret this statement: to try and read the mortuary in order to enter the archive differently? Taking up this proposal, this essay reflects upon my encounters within the archives of artist Rita Keegan and photographer Shirley Read, and six months spent visiting a teaching mortuary in Scotland observing full cadaveric dissections. Drawing these public and personal contexts together, the essay moves between the laboratory and the living room, suturing field note to prose, creating an affective proximity through which to explore what Rebecca Schneider has called “the on-going afterlife of contact.” These sites share objects and actions: from the glove to the cut. This entangled body-text will figure dissection as a gesture-in-conflict: a generous, intimate act, in which knowledge is transferred through an embodied experience, but also a destructive, voyeuristic practice where the cadaver is categorised under a biomedical gaze and consumed through learning. I propose these tensions provide a useful frame for re-entering the archive, in order to consider questions of visibility, ethical responsibility, and agency when writing about the past.