A Letter to My Lost Elders

Written by Jay Graham

Photo Credit via Criterion Collection

I watched Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) in the belly of our Covid winter. Snow had been accumulating for a few days, its white mass swallowing tree trunks and lifting the lines from the landscape. Though I hadn’t been to mass since I was a kid, I noticed I was kneeling before the laptop screen, propped at the foot of the bed, while fat flakes flooded the window in my periphery. My legs folded beneath me so easily I wondered if they remembered the pose. The roof, arched above my head, must have been bending a little under all that weight.

Though she often acted in her movies, Akerman never appears in News from Home. Instead, she offers only her voice, which reads aloud a series of letters she has received from her mother after moving from Brussels to New York: “Write soon. I’m anxious to hear about your work, New York, everything.” The letters detail daily errands, minor illnesses, and updates about family friends, but they are also saturated with affection, anxiety, and appeals to write back. Akerman’s monotone performance only exaggerates the letters’ emotive content: “You know I live for your letters.” The intimacy of this voice-over collides with the film’s rigid frames. A fixed camera captures extended shots of New York—its sidewalks littered with newspapers, its humming subway stations, its streets washed in ambient traffic noise, its pedestrians, their faces grainy, its storefronts, their neon signs blinking on, off.

I am tempted to read these long shots as return letters: You asked me about my life, this place. Here is New York. Here is your absence on East 45th Street. I take the subway to record roads filled with bodies that aren’t yours. It sounds like light machinery, tires rolling over pavement, gravel falling in construction sites, train brakes screaming against steel beams, a mesh of voices, vehicles pushing through thick air, my voice reading over your words. 

Photo Credit via Criterion Collection

To many, Akerman’s name is sacrosanct. We speak of her with a reverence that often borders on obsession, and the seismic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has held a place in the canon of feminist and experimental film since its release in 1975. The daughter of a Belgian survivor of the Holocaust, Akerman frequently made art about her mother, and her body of work is deeply inflected by themes related to generational trauma, gender, quotidian rituals, and alienation. She is also among the first filmmakers to display queer sex free of spectacle. In je tu il elle (1974), her first feature film, sex escapes moralism. Akerman’s character hooks up with a truck driver and listens to him speak of the obligatory marital sex he participates in out of a sense of paternal duty, then travels alone to an ex-girlfriend’s place and devours several sandwiches slathered with chocolate spread before they fuck. 

To be sure, Akerman expressed ambivalence about the categorization of sexuality and preferred to eschew neat labels for the messiness of experience. Yet, I have invented her into my queer family. What does it mean that I’ve positioned Akerman as a queer elder when she never embraced the term herself? In assuming her as a gay icon of sorts, there is the danger of reproducing the linguistic and conceptual limitations she hoped to evade. There is danger in claiming her as kin at all. Put more simply, it’s a narcissistic move, netting her in these frames of reference and this particular phase of the evolving queer lexicon. 

Photo Credit via Criterion Collection

I should admit now that when I first watched News from Home, I was in the midst of an epistolary fever, ripping the covers off magazines all winter to make envelopes for the letters I was sending to my own mother 2,800 miles away. I folded the edges carefully the way she taught me, bled pens dry, described my daily tasks, recited my routines, made my appeals. I wanted to tether myself to various forms of family in the same way I wanted to reinscribe distinguishing features into the land around me after the snow had softened them. That is, I wanted to place myself.

Re-watching News from Home during Pride month, I imagined those first few shots as allegory. Here is the absence of so many of our queer and trans elders, whose lives were taken by AIDS, depression, mass shootings, overdoses, bashings, homicides. Once again, I watched with my feet tucked beneath me, hip bones stacked on top of ankles, blood pooling in my knees. This time, I noticed the silence. True to her spare style, Akerman splices the narration in News from Home with voicelessness. These stretches of silence occupy the film in the same way Akerman and her mother do, the same way our lost community members inhabit our consciousness if not our cities.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that my hands are left empty every time I reach for queer and trans elders—I mean that I keep repeating the gesture. I watch News from Home again, replay Arthur Russell’s songs, email that old professor, dog-ear the same pages in Giovanni’s Room, in Stone Butch Blues, write to the distant relative, return to that lesbian bar that’s been around since 1987, mimic the aesthetics. Maybe it’s no surprise that in Akerman’s study of alienation, familial absence, longing, and guilt, I feel a sense of kinship. To call yourself lost is another way to name yourself.

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Born and raised in Seattle, Jay lives in Bushwick. You can typically find them making mixes, biking around Brooklyn, or reading outside Topos.