Bringing Body Back to Language: A Conversation with chaun webster

Re:Viewed by Sarah Haas

Summer 2026

RE:VIEW

In Without Terminus: Untraining an Archive by chaun webster, the symbol of the train track continually undermines its own promises: of linear perspective, of progress, of arrival. Instead, the tracks are an admission of nonconvergence, absence, and the apagoge of webster’s familial archive because, in the United States of America, “the black figure is without place.” “But this is not just a black figure but your grandfather,” the lines continues, going on to point toward the particulars of the grandfather that survive him: his wallet, his photograph, his uncashed pension check.

And so it’s in the second person that webster and you proceed to search for Reginald—your grandfather’s name—a railroad porter who died just eight months after he retired, and just a few months before you were born. You’re tempted to say that the archive fails to secure Reginald’s presence, but it’s better to say that their scantness succeeds because, in Without Terminus, absence is recast as both a substance and a process. In a rigorous whirlwind of thinking, and feeling, and text, everything conspires to prod at the chasm wherein language literally frays, stuttering and collapsing into lines that scribble and then reforge into successions of empty squares to remerge on more earthly—or are they more spiritual?––terms.

But webster isn’t making something out of nothing; this isn’t a book of miracles. Rather, Without Terminus is an embrace of what is: a Blackness and an archive and a family and a book that begin with a breath and that don’t end, but yield into an ellipsis … to ground between the archives and the track. It's here where webster lays your body down so that you can feel every word, both what it is and what it isn’t. 

In April, Brink emailed with webster about the limits and possibilities of language, ritual, faith, and genre. 

BRINK: Let’s begin at the beginning, with the opening mark, which is a gesture of punctuation maybe? A kind of scribbled period, if a period were being looked at under a microscope. But maybe it’s unwise to name it, after all, “the mystery of a cloud’s shape so often mimicking what we call it by.” So, whatever it is, how did that line-shape come to be? I’m curious about its conception and also about what it actually felt like to make it. 

CHAUN WEBSTER: I had been frustrated with the limits of language, something taken up at length in Without Terminus (WT), and following a similar inquiry as Renee Gladman in Prose Architectures I wanted an expression that moved closer or along a parallel track as thought. How to express entanglement? How to articulate that I do not know what is beyond Hannah in the rudimentary genealogy that is made at the opening of the book? So, like a braid, it is a line that weaves around and together and through in ways that disallow citing a point of origin. And even with Hannah, my four times great-grandmother and the first word/name in the text, it is a palindrome that gestures toward the John Coltrane epigraph where he is recorded to have said, “I start in the middle of the sentence and move both directions at once.” Even that citation feels like a game of telephone. I remember hearing it for the first time from the brilliant poet J. Otis Powell nearly 15 years ago in a craft seminar he was teaching, and I did not know what it meant or would mean to me other than that it drew heat and I could not stop thinking about it. Hannah “begins” and “ends” this book in many ways. Both directions at once.

So that entanglement, or the problem of relation (or is that the problem of individuation?) is on my mind often. It is something I am reaching for in language and do not quite have. The braided spirally line gets me closer than language in this case. 

B: I like considering the sentence on the terms of the palindrome, its every point an origin. It’s how I’ve come to understand the form of your book, too, beginning with Hannah, and beginning again with a gesture of engagement, again with Coltrane stretching, again with the number one, as followed by your mother’s breathless sentence: 

“Your grandfather worked twenty-five years as a porter for the Great Northern Railroad and when he retired all they gave him was a pen with the number twenty-five on it.”

Thinking of the pen made me wonder: Did you ever see the handwriting of your maternal grandfather, Reginald? If so, do you recognize yourself in his gestures and lines? Or, is what he could have written another absence? 

W: Yes, this is why I think I keep going back to Gladman, the way she opens up the sentence, stretches it (literally with a title like One Long Black Sentence), how in Gladman's hands, in Baldwin’s hands the sentence is closer to thought and the rhetorical tradition I grew up with.  So yes, the self-containment of the sentence is something that I want to resist, and here I am thinking about sentencing also in its relationship to the carceral. It adds time and simultaneously takes time away. So can I exhaust it? becomes a question for me.  

But to respond to your question about Reginald’s handwriting, I have seen it in employment records and have recognized my writing in it, though have not thought about it as intentionally as I am doing now. I came to think of my own handwriting as messy and illegible fairly young. I was told I hold the pencil wrong, and recall a time when I had to retake a handwritten test because the teacher couldn’t make anything out. That has always felt embarrassing to me. As an adult I still feel this at times but tend to lean into it in handwriting and drawing, and here the messy lines feel resonant with the subject matter, whether that be the limited or misdirected language of the archive, or speaking in tongues which I now relate to the textual experiments I’ve been doing all these years: scribble away child, we might still skewer something tomorrow.

B: Whether in Gladman’s line languages, or in yours, I’m struck by the line’s unmistakable and seemingly inherent qualities. There is a self-evidence in their expression that language isn’t capable of, too lustful for communication, I think. And I’m also struck by the physicality of the language you’re using now—“skewer.” I feel it in your linguistic approach often, as in WT when you write of language as “studded.” Soon after, you write of the “afterbirth that follows the comma.” And it’s not long after that that your words are doubling down, literally overlapping, or the word pulllll extenuating by its l’s. The word DIES flips. Others fold. At one point, you write: “I also know absence to be an artistic material.” Here, I’m curious about how you understand language as a medium. What are the qualities of its solidity? And how do you encounter them, in your thinking, imagination, and in the making of a page? 

W: One of the things I talk about in WT is how I grew up in the pentecostal church, and in my memory of those early days in the pews of those churches what I was most compelled by was not the doctrine, but the language. I am agnostic now, but I return to those memories often and when I think about that language, I am also immediately thinking about the body. I am thinking about the way someone curved their back as they sang, I'm thinking of the collision of palms of recursive chorus that could return and return without exhausting meaning, and in that extension there is the swaying body, the humming body, the body speaking in tongues. So there is something very material about language to me. I talk in my poetry class often about that false distinction that I believe gets made in writing—an activity of the mind—and the body, which is considered separate. Writing is embodied, and I know there are many now saying this, have always been saying this. As for composition, I literally laid down on tracks while writing some of WT, and was thinking about Pope L. and his Crawl performance through the streets of NYC.  He talked about what could be heard from the ground, what could be seen anew when we surrender our verticality. I want to bring my body back to language, I want to bring language back to my body. 

B: How profoundly beautiful! Your act of “surrendering verticality” by laying down and listening to and incorporating the ground, its material vibrations. After all, what else is language but sound? Breath’s vowels and its consonant edges? 

Train tracks are fundamental to WT, both as a symbol and an experience of the falsity of progression and arrival, the parallel’s loneliness of staying, always, at a distance. Can we linger on the tracks? Will you say more about that embodied intimacy, and confrontation? How did you come to them? What did you feel? How did their presence affect the writing?

W: I think it was a way to attempt to enact something, to grieve and to conjure. I would visit abandoned railyards and see what that touch and encounter brought to the surface, in some ways, following in the tradition of Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing where sometimes touch, sometimes writing, serve as a bridge to what is beyond the material. I don’t know that I’m invested in all of those spiritual dimensions, but I am a descendant of rail workers whose bodies were a kind of wager, were their only means of making a wager, so I needed to bring my body into what preceded the performance of the writing. Much of the revisions that happened later with WT were made possible by this and other rituals. In terms of what I felt, and feel, is that we need not go far to find the ghosts produced by the violence of nation and capital, or to be found by those ghosts. The black historical is already the hauntological.

B: I’m glad you brought up revision, because the earlier version I read of WT is quite different than what now exists. It’s the same entity, sure, but almost unrecognizable: an oak tree that grew from an acorn. What were the questions that drove its reformation? That brought your working into the realm of the ritual, as you say? 

Relatedly, I’m also curious how you understand the labor of writing and revision, not just in terms of artistic process, but also about what it takes for a Black writer to survive in this country, and in the living history of your family’s labor. 

W: It’s so different. I think initially I had to find a way to hold what I was trying to say at a theoretical level about the archive or antiblackness or labor that did not abandon the lyric. If I’m honest, I don’t know that I did that well initially. But there was also the issue of attempting to reckon with the structural violence of the railroad, alongside the domestic violence inflicted by my grandfather. I was afraid to name the latter for fear of it compromising the former, and that was just an indication for me that I had not fully reckoned with it.  

So ritual was a door. I walked through it as someone who does not believe in its spiritual dimensions, but wants to. I think the survival of black folks in this country has been and continues to be forged on many fronts, discursive and more than the discursive. This writing cannot pay a pension, this writing cannot raise the dead, and it cannot heal my broken heart. What it might be able to do is expand the emotional and conceptual field where I am engaging these matters, and that is not insignificant to me.

B: This wanting for faith is such a poignant element of your work. Throughout WT, there are moments of despair, one of which has really stuck with me. You write, “fraught, fury, fail. you do not write future; futurity is for believers and you are not one. you are not.” 

But there are also moments of hope, if complicated and tempered and intermixed with latent and overt violences. As you write, “where the grammar of the World is involved, its possibility is found in negation.”

The book’s final mark is an ellipsis, like a stone skipping over a pond hoping to make it to the other side. But it almost always eventually sinks. I admit I’ve been struggling with faith, too. I wonder if art has a duty to fend it off, and to write toward redemption. How do you reckon with despair? With hope?

W: I think for myself this desire for faith is not one that I would situate as motivated by the desire to resource myself against despair. I was going back to Dionne Brand's book Inventory this week and thinking about the inventory of violence the speaker collects in that long poem. And can I say, Brand’s documentation, as utterly full of anguish as it is, is comforting in an environment where we encounter genocidal rhetoric and then go about our day. The poem ends saying, “I have nothing soothing to tell you, / that’s not my job, / my job is to revise and revise this bristling list, / hourly” 

It ends there, with no punctuation, just the commitment to the hourly documenting of an ever-expanding list of horrors.

I don’t expect my writing to soothe, and what I am reaching for is not redemption, I don’t think the structures that have produced and maintain this present world are redeemable. And if that sounds then like things are impossible, I think they are, and I don’t think that means nothing ought to be done, or can be done. However I want to sit with that impossibility long enough to feel it, to not move so quickly as to misdiagnose the problem or the stakes. But I have to be honest: I want faith, and that desire is motivated by a longing for relation against the loneliness of this condition in the flesh, to be here, in a body.  

As a writer I’m just attempting to push language towards this unsayable, impossible space. I think it was Dr. Patrice Douglass who said, with respect to black people, something to the effect of how the impossible is all that is worthy of us. And this is also why I have been returning to glossolalia, to speaking in tongues, as an “aesthetic practice,” as Ashon Crawley calls it. I am returning to tongues because I don’t know what name to call the loss I’m wanting to describe.  

W: I wanted to make sure that I thank you, because one of the first doors I found to enter this project was the theme for the Brink Literary Journal edition that you solicited I write for. I believe the theme was “boundaries,” which made me think of CLR James memoir Beyond a Boundary, which in turn made me think about the borders of the few photos I had of my grandfather and what lay outside those borders as well as the conditions that produced what was within the borders of the photo. All this to say, it was such a useful material exercise and the essay, or movement within WT I call “Look Where It Ain’t (after Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle),” which I published in Brink, was the earliest and most fully realized part of WT.

B: I’ll never forget the feeling of first reading that submission, of encountering the square outlines of the photos that don’t exist. And so I should thank you, too, because my understanding of hybrid possibilities of form expanded then, far beyond what I thought was possible in literature. Until then, I thought art succeeded by pointing toward the sub or supralingual reality, in the moments when it allows us to glimpse the profound. But then, there you were, documenting the unsayable and creating an archive of absence. 

W: In WT I was going through the material of family history (photographs, newspaper clippings, an old wallet, census and employment records) but also the more ephemeral archive of my mother’s memory. Both the ephemeral and material (often composed of ephemera) had gaps and caused me to question what is given greater consideration or is valued as stable, it coheres as the historical. In my own experience, not unlike many black families, when attempting to go back in census records you hit roadblocks, going further than some years means moving from census to plantation records, or there is the stuttering element of birthdates in the archive due to a number of ways they were not always recorded for black folks in the Jim Crow South. But also with employment records, what happens when a merger takes place and records before a certain year are destroyed?  

I had to piece things together from an oral interview and that archival material. The story my mother told me about my grandfather’s pension gave me pause, but I wanted to know more. I was inclined to believe her due to the registers of emotion it brought up but also wanted to verify. Then I found a photocopy of a check in Reginald’s employment records from the Railroad Retirement Board that was dated for a month after his death. It is the only record I could find of him receiving a pension, and it arrived after his death. Dealing with the photocopies of records, ones I requested originals for and was denied, still enrages me. I was told the National Archives in Atlanta stewards those records for the Railroad Retirement Board, the entity that owns them. This shifted my perspective on archives. Before that experience I believed black folks were absented from state, railroad, etc., archives and we could address that by recovering material and expanding those archive’s scope. In this instance though, the material of the check is removed due to it being archived. The archive itself is doing one form of the dispossession. In that way Julietta Singh’s book title suggests, No Archive Will Restore You, and also, it may dispossess you. The untraining is not comporting the archive to behavior that would reform it; it’s a call to critically undo a project built around this dispossession.

As far as the photographs though, we had albums that were potentially lost in a robbery, or the many moves that were a part of my childhood. I don’t know. But there are photos I know about but don’t have, as in the shadow books Kevin Young writes about. So making those photo outlines with no image but a description, or taking the one photo I have of Reginald sleeping and slowly making it more opaque, or thinking about the swing my great-grandmother sat on and attempting to bring motion to that image were all ways to engage absence, and the ways it presences.

B: Before the interview began, we spoke a bit, and you wrote that you’d been thinking about the line between fiction and autobiography. I wondered, then, about WT’s considerations of lying. You write that “the only lies told here will be honest ones,” and “i am outside these margins setting the conditions for what comes in and out of view. this i will appear here only, an appeal to your trust, even as you are here being told the speaker means to lie to you.” 

Given the thefts, omissions, erasures of your family’s history, and of Black history, I’m curious about your understanding of this word, lie. How do you discern between lies and truth? Truth and reality?  

W: I'm constantly thinking about the connections between the autobiographical and the fictional. Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Autobiography of My Mother. a novel, and yet. An autobiography, and yet. Kincaid is not the subject, or maybe there is just not a clean or singular distinction to be made in terms of subject. There is James Wheldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, or John Edgar Wideman's whole oeuvre but especially his latest, Slaveroad, where in the foreword he considers whether to call it autobiographical, and in practice I think it exceeds both autobiography and fiction. In Toni Morrison’s brilliant essay, “Site of Memory,” she writes that “no matter how fictional the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory.” WT begins with my mother’s memory, my mother who would tell me stories in repetition, stories that would evolve, with changing characters and scenes, but there was always something clear in the message of them even as they were bound up with imagination. So lying, not to say untrue, I say lying to say that I am dealing in material that I cannot always provide stable ground for. I cannot claim to know my grandfather’s emotional interior, or the tone with which my great-grandmother called my mother’s name, I am not providing a narrative of chronological sequence. I think anytime someone engages in life writing they use language to sketch something of complex persons, which involves imagination, which feels like the terrain of fiction. So, I’m not blurring the lines. I’m saying it’s already blurred/entangled. The ledger and census data cannot tell me when my great-grandfather was born, its material stutters. My mother told me that a squirrel bit off my grandfather’s thumb. Sometimes she would say it was my great uncle, and sometimes a rabbit bit the thumb off. The material of her story stutters but instead of listening beneath what she is saying for truth (see Morrison), it is reduced to something else. Ledgers are not brought under the same scrutiny. There are narratives of uplift that would misrepresent and that overdetermine how folks understand the story of porters, the labor that exhausted their bodies, and how porters like my grandfather did not make it into the middle class. That uplift narrative becomes a lens applied to how complex persons with a ton of variables are understood. I am attempting to change the lens, gathering memory, newspaper clippings, interviews, speculation, and additional stories like that of John Henry and Harriet Jacobs that I run alongside my grandfather’s to see if something else might be able to be understood.

B: In ruminating on “the act of imagination bound up with memory” and the already blurred lines between fact and fiction, I’m also thinking of the dream sequences included in your book. Moments when “someone is asleep and making a world.” Beyond the veracious requirements of nonfiction, dreams are beyond both logic and serial time, all without losing their sense of reality. Rather than going back into the world of WT, I’m wondering if we can end on how you, chaun webster, are dreaming now that the book is finished. What’s emerging in the night? Has your dreaming changed in the aftermath? 

W: I don’t know, the funny thing is I very rarely remember my dreams. The dreams that are most clear to me are the ones I had when I was younger of being in my grandmother’s Volkswagen picking at her moles, my mother would tell me later that those were memories. I think dreams in WT were another door I was attempting to open, a geography where what the archive had taken or mishandled could be known differently.  

As for what is emerging in the night, not a great deal of sleep, and lots of reading on waste. This moment feels like one of gathering and listening. I can’t quite say how or if dreaming has changed for me post-WT but I was changed in writing it. It scared me, and still does. Maybe there is the faith, that I no longer feel arrested by that fear.

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chaun webster is the author of Without Terminus (Graywolf, 2026), Wail Song: Wading in the Water at the End of the World (Black Ocean, 2023), and GeNtry!fication: Or the Scene of the Crime (Noemi Press, 2018). 

Sarah Haas is an editor-at-large for Brink. Her debut book, Jealousy: A Memoir (Catapult) will publish in November 2026.

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