My story "Without Trace" has a long, convoluted pedigree. Much of it comes from the novel set in Crete which I researched there as well as in many Continuing Studies classes about Minoan culture and archaeology. Kanti Deschene, half Navajo in this story, was in the novel Abel, full Navajo. Zak—my Afro-Greek cultural anthropologist—is new, though his Romantic outlook has been stolen from the main character of the novel, Mar.
I revised this part of the novel to submit as a "border crossing narrative" in late 2021. Its main preoccupation, as I see it, is extinctions—that huge temporal border. The main character, Kanti, is an archaeologist whose specialization in ancient pollens has taken her to Crete over the years to study the abrupt end of the Bronze Age, of Minoan civilization. Her final trip to Crete occurs during another looming extinction—our own, due to the worsening climate crisis and growing devastation by Covid-19 (in the Navajo homelands especially). Another important border, this one theoretical, lies between knowing and not knowing, knowledge gained and lost. Kanti is preoccupied with finding out what happened to end the Minoan world; that's been almost more important to her than intimate human relationships.
But those, in this liminal state we're in, our "inbetweeness," are in flux. All our identities, social relations, and established customs, routines, and spaces have suddenly changed, become foreign, uncertain.
For those fortunate enough not to be refugees, I believe, foreign countries had stopped seeming particularly drastic borders anymore—but all that changed in early 2020. Even other people, even those closest to us, in the same house or room or public space, were suddenly forbidden to us, on the other side of crucial lines.
Crete and its prehistory is something that has always fascinated me, as a lifelong student of archaeology and philosophical reflection, and having been born in New Mexico I feel kindred to the Navajos and other Native peoples, and write frequently about their customs and beliefs.
Here's a brief excerpt:
"So they set out together in the blue Fiat for one of the last fastnesses of the small remnant of the once-great civilization which had survived beyond the general fall—soon to be gone as well.
She felt the urgency especially there, in that liminal place so near the end. The end of the Minoans, the end of the Bronze Age. She felt in her own bones the aching traces of the dying culture she'd followed with curious concern. At Vronda (and still higher up, at Karphi, the highest of all the peak sanctuaries) the very last hold-outs had defied the forces of natural destruction, the unidentified invaders, fate writ large. They’d been cut off from everything, hung on precariously in the haunts of gods who'd chosen not to save them. They died unmarked on mountains they had held sacred. In the end the shrines that they had tended had become their graves."
"Without Trace" was published online on March 1 in the Frontiers issue of Halfway Down the Stairs—frontiers and borders being more or less the same.
image: The site of Vronda, InstapStudyCenter.net
