Without Terminus: untraining an archive

Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poetry, Without Terminus emerges from chaun webster wrestling with Frank B. Wilderson III's question: "How does one narrate the loss of loss?" In his first work of nonfiction, webster attempts to find traces of his family, and in particular of his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a sleeping car porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Anchored by the figures of Reginald and the train, Without Terminus ranges in subject from comportment and confinement, to speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, to the ancestral meeting place of dreams, and to moments with webster's own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, reaching toward the lives of Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry "Box" Brown, and the writer Henry Dumas, who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway. Though he is often confronted by an absence born of dispossession and erasure, webster works with the debris at hand, splicing images and documents with text, attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the geography of the page. What results is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.