A list of articles to start your journey into the unseen…

The topic of invisibility is a vast and complex one—from hero superpower to weapon of racism. Today I’ve selected a few articles I’ve revisited and referenced to share with you some words of others I find more helpful when I’m at a loss of my own.

Fighting ‘Erasure’ by Parul Sehgal

The first article that gave me some clarity to that familiar foggy sinking feeling I couldn’t quite explain. The New York Times Book Review editor Parul Sehgal unpacks the invisibility weapon in the magazine’s long-running series where each week one writer explores a single, timely word.

“Efforts to force collective amnesia are as old as conquest. The Roman decree damnatio memoriae — ‘‘condemnation of memory’’ — punished individuals by destroying every trace of them from the city, down to chiseling faces off statues. It was considered a fate worse than execution. But there are subtler, everyday forms of banishing people from public life…” [read more]

“FIRST WORDS: Fighting ‘Erasure’” by Parul Sehgal, New York Times Magazine, a version of the article also appears in print on Feb. 7, 2016, Page 15 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Memory Lapse