Time Lost: Harryette Mullen

In this sixth episode of Time Lost, Ollie Paterson speaks to Language poet Harryette Mullen, about a work titled “Consanguinity”, constructed from a long period of research into her family history. Through a process of “dream, history, legend, fiction, fabulation, invention”, the conversation opens up the concepts of the written reliquary, the text as container for historical events, slave narratives and ways of accessing truth as both material for the writer and nourishment for the self. In opening a dialogue with the past, Mullen allows the listener into the roots of her family tree, up through the sublime formations of bark, harsh, violent knots and “wayward branches”, reclaiming a history that could have otherwise been lost to the annals of time. All whilst shedding a pertinent insight into the phrase “America’s first family”.

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