There’s a scene from Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls that crosses my mind when I think about the power of collections of stories and materials from victims and survivors of state violence, which we have been building into an “archive of survival” at the Texas After Violence Project since 2007.
In the scene, the book’s protagonist, Robert Jordan, is given the pistol his father used to shoot himself and takes it to Bear Tooth plateau, “where the wind was thin and there was snow all summer on the hills he had stopped by the lake which was supposed to be eight hundred feet deep and was a deep green color.” Jordan climbs out onto a rock, where he “saw his face in the still
