Explication de texte was inspired by my inability to empathize with mothers who’ve lost their young, black sons to police violence; I cannot imagine losing my son, nor can I conjure the language to explain these deaths to him.  News accounts, testimonies of their grief is incomprehensible.  The printed words resist interpretation.  They fail to convey the unfathomable.  Reaching the limit of what is sayable, the words become pure form.  

Following the il/logical or alternative reading methods explored in other recent works, this piece examines the idea of close reading in a manner that is both to-the-letter and tongue-in-cheek.  Explication de texte or “close reading,” is a method for fleshing out the meaning embedded in written works, through group discussion.  In effort to make sense of the killings of unarmed, young, Black men, we discuss news media accounts of these events—we attempt something like a close reading.  Yet discursive analysis finds its limits here, as it fails to reconcile the space between sympathy and empathy.  The grief of a mother, recounting the loss of her son is impossible to imagine; it tests our emotional potentials.

I imagined an analysis of the graphemes, the forms of the newspaper text, might yield some explanations otherwise unattainable.  I photographed the phrase “[…] shot my son,” as it appeared in the New York Times under a confocal microscope at 20x magnification.  The final image is composed of hundreds of microscope scans, pieced together again, and printed in its native newspaper format.