Em Dial on archives and invitations of silence.

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Please note the word ‘quadroon’ appears multiple times throughout this essay. This word has a violent history that is inextricable from racism, slavery, and eugenics. It is not a word for use by non-Black people.

When I can’t sleep at night, I reach for the phone on my nightstand and type Craigslist into my browser. I am always instantly comforted by the white and soft grey background with all lower-case sans serif text, in a professionally hued deep azure blue that sings of the internet of the early 2000s. There is something reassuring about a vessel that remains the same as its content shifts, even if it is just an online classified website. My gaze drags over the options for where my midnight thought spiral could take me – I could buy a used sauna for one, I could take someone from New Mexico up on a housing swap, I could quit my job in favour of a gig at the Canadian National Exhibition. Yet, I always come back to the top of the home page. Under the first subheading, ‘community’, is what I am looking for: ‘missed connections’.

Missed Connections is a board where people can anonymously describe an encounter with someone of interest; someone who slipped by before they could grab their contact information, or, oftentimes, even catch their name. It is an echo chamber for ships passing in the night. An archive of ephemera. If I had to craft an archetypical post, based on the hundreds that I have read over the years, it would sound something like:

Dark, shoulder-length hair. Glasses. Red jacket.

You passed by me in the Shoppers Drug Mart at Yonge and Dundas and asked if I knew if ibuprofen could be safely given to dogs. I said no and you laughed. I haven’t been able to get you off my mind since.

If you see this, respond with what kind of hat I was wearing.

My fascination with Missed Connections isn’t because I’m waiting for a response on a post about someone I passed on a sidewalk, or because I’m hoping for the flattering moment that I’ll read a post and think Wait, is that coffee shop encounter describing me? I read them because it feels like I’m bearing witness to the very human urge to try and figure out how to write into silence. How to archive a void.

Many writers, especially writers from racialised backgrounds, work from fragmented histories, a product of the active and violent erasure, dispersal, and censoring by imperial and colonial forces of the necessary voices. In an attempt to address this wound, I have found that there can be an impulse to try and break apart this silence and rebuild the historical records that we deserve. But perhaps within Missed Connections is a lesson in how we can instead make language from silence. A language that is material.

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I’m in the middle of working on a collection about the archetype of the ‘quadroon’ – a word used to describe women of one-quarter African heritage who lived in the American South in the late 1700s and early 1800s. These women haunt the archive. By that, I mean only their outlines are present in the imprint of time, be it through history books or government records or popular culture. What fills those outlines is dependent on who is writing the journal entry, the census form, the novel. At times, the ‘quadroon’ is the meek, submissive concubine sold by her mother to be the second wife to a married white man. Other times, she is the bold seductress whose greed drives her to track down white men as if for sport. At times, she is undeniably Black. At times, so white that she is the lowest hurtle to a eugenicist’s utopia.

I seek to write about this archetype because the sexualisation, the dehumanisation, and the tokenisation of the quadroon echo into the present day, into my life. And yet, when I try to reach back towards this echo, into the cave of history from which it reverberates, I come up empty handed. I have tried to comb through the archives for the voices of women who were categorised as ‘quadroons’, but their voices are missing, as were the voices of all Black women at this point in history, as are the voices of all who threaten the falsities of the archives by the simple fact of their living. I have tried to use the descriptions of ‘quadroon’ women that exist in the archives to deduce how these women may have lived their lives and felt in the process, which only produced a flat replication of stereotypes. I have tried to invent, assume, deduce. But the space remains, taunting me.

But the task is as un-abandonable as it is insurmountable. I am finding with every artefact I encounter that the call of these women is only amplified by their absence. Perhaps this is what I feel compelled to capture. Not to reify their silence, but to testify to the necessity of remembering them. To witness. It is fitting that in the Christian etymology of the word, it is a translation of the Greek martys, or martyr. To witness is to place truth over self. To break apart language as a way of letting the dead in, as you lay awake, unable to sleep.

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Here is where, as of late, I have been turning to Missed Connections for guidance. I recently noticed something about the vast majority of posts on the classified board – here is a simultaneous refusal to let a fleeting connection go undocumented and an acceptance that it is not up to the writer of the post to bridge the gap between missing and found. It is up to the reader.

Into the archive of Craigslist goes an outline of sorts, the few facts that we have – a red scarf, the setting of a grocery store. What comes next is internal; how did a smile from a stranger affect the speaker, how did it move them? Finally, there is an invitation, the desired person is asked to reach out from the void. There is an unstated assumption: the odds of the person who asked you about ibuprofen seeing your post on Craigslist has to be something like the odds of throwing a pea into a shot glass a hundred yards away. They are not going to see it. And yet, the impulse to invite a connection out of silence is followed.

This is not to say that I am taking Missed Connections as a blueprint when writing into the wound of silence. I have encountered plenty of posts that have disturbed me deeply by their misogynistic and racist characterisations of the connections that have been missed. I am not moved by these posts, and in fact, find it disturbing that these posts at times so closely evoke through their racist caricatures the journal entries I have encountered in my research.

I am most moved by the posts that are sparse – the ones that make me feel through fifteen words just how touching a half second can be. These posts are not denying the existence of the Missed in Missed Connections. They are also not letting the Connection go unspoken. They are acknowledging that the person on the other side of that shared gaze is there, in the world, and can fill out, around, between the fifteen words in the post for themselves.

I have come to resist my urge to find or create or invent the voices of women categorised by a racist term and instead lean into the imprint that the silencing of them has left upon me. I am still refusing the historical silence that has been imposed upon them, but it is not my place to try and speak their words into existence. I am calling, inviting, conjuring them into my own corner of the archive.

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In an interview about her book-length poem, Zong!, M. Nourbese Philip says, ‘The silence is linked to what we can never tell, what we don’t know. That’s not something that sits well with Western approaches to knowledge capacity, where we feel that we have to find out everything we need to know.’ Leaning into the unknowing feels unnatural, especially as someone whose only language is English, who has only ever lived in the United States and Canada. The impulse to answer and complete is not easily undone. In fact, in this project of witnessing, this is a part of myself I am martyring. Laying to rest the desire to track down these missing persons, I am able to let these persons be reframed. Just because they are missing from view does not mean they lived lives as ephemera. They are full people, not outlines, and sitting with space and silence in my writing is one way to counteract the dehumanisation of the archive.

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As I write this, I do not know how you will fill in the spaces around my words. Perhaps we’ve crossed paths in a grocery store or breathed some of the same molecules flung across an ocean. Perhaps we’ve seen one another as spectral glimpses at the edges of a paragraph or as phantom shadows beneath letters on a page. If so, here’s my invitation.

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Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (Nightboat Books, 2025), and elsewhere. 

Photo credit: Mengwen Cao