Skip to content
LAKEER

00. PAPERWORK

The prologue: twelve lines about looking for yourself in other people's records

Before any history arrives, the narrator tells you his problem. He has been looking for his family in the paperwork: baptism registers, ship manifests, citizenship orders, census tables. They are there, but never as the reason the page was written. PAPERWORK is twelve spoken lines over a tanpura drone that slowly gathers instruments. Each line quietly points at a song still to come, from a name a stranger wrote in a book to an accent that nobody meant to leave behind. There is a thirteenth line. The album keeps it until the very end.

A closed leather-bound register with a brass clasp and a ribbon marker lies on a wooden table, a dip pen resting beside it.
A name in a book The narrator's oldest possession is a surname entered in a register by a stranger: the name Fernandes was given at a baptism by a godfather the family never met. AI illustration, in the manner of archival paper still life, in watercolour and gouache

The ledger

  1. The oldest thing I own is . → 01 UNREAD
  2. I've been looking for us in the paperwork. We're in there. We're just never the reason it got written. → 04 MAWSIM
  3. One side prayed in a church, the other in a mosque, and both of them did it in . → 06 MAA BOLI
  4. When things go bad, they stop writing it down. That's how you find the worst years. . → 08 FERNANDES
  5. Nobody writes down what a person was like. They write down what they're owed. → 10 DIWAN
  6. On we're a weight, a wage and a place of origin, in that order. → 13 GIRMIT
  7. Nobody counted. The lowest guess and the highest guess are . → 16 RADCLIFFE
  8. Every language in this story got here before me, and I can't speak any of them properly. → 18 EKUSHE
  9. My mum came one way and my dad's family came the other, and nobody asked either of them. → 21 IN ABSENTIA
  10. . A hundred and twenty dollars. A Portuguese name on the side of a suitcase. → 22 NINETY DAYS
  11. I used to want the facts. Now I just want to know what the room smelled like. → 23 RIVERS
  12. Not one of them left me a letter. Between them they left me an accent. → 24 DAYTIMER
  13. An empty ruled line.
A long aisle of archive shelves full of blank-spined volumes, one shelf with an empty gap, and a distant reader at a lamp-lit table.
Look for the gap The worst years leave the fewest records: burned files, counts nobody kept, and estimates that disagree with one another. AI illustration, in the manner of archival paper still life, in watercolour and gouache
A brass balance and a row of weights beside a stack of blank ruled sheets tied with red tape, a ruler and pen laid across them.
Weight, wage, origin Ships' lists and indenture registers recorded workers by weight, wage and place of origin; GIRMIT, track 13, follows the people on them. AI illustration, in the manner of archival paper still life, in watercolour and gouache
A scuffed suitcase with a blank luggage tag stands on floorboards in a bare room, a coat on a chair by a net-curtained window.
Ninety days In August 1972 Uganda's President Idi Amin gave the country's Asians ninety days to leave; NINETY DAYS, track 22, tells that story. AI illustration, in the manner of archival paper still life, in watercolour and gouache
A small desk holding one blank sheet of paper, an open empty envelope, a dry glass inkwell and an unused pen, in fading light.
The thirteenth line PAPERWORK is a poem of thirteen lines, but only twelve are spoken here; the last is held back until the album's final track, LINE 13. AI illustration, in the manner of archival paper still life, in watercolour and gouache

See the real thing

Further reading

  • Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Duke University Press, 2005).
Part I: Water and Word → Back to the surface