Chapter 07 of 07 · Remembering
Memory, or The Missing Images
What archives can and cannot hold
Archives are acts of remembrance — and acts of omission. Through photographs, stories, objects and everyday moments we preserve histories too often overlooked, while knowing that some images were refused, some were never possible, and some were lost before anyone thought to keep them. This closing chapter holds rest, repair, nostalgia and joy alongside the absences that shape the record.
Some images exist. Some were refused. Some were never possible at all.
They buried us in files, in border walls, in prison cells. They tried to burn whispers in the desert, in the Mediterranean, in the silence they branded legal. Yet we are the soil. We are earth red, brown, Black, fertile. We carry roots undestroyed, songs older than borders, seeds that sprout in drought.
Afrika the anti-colonial graffiti on stone, scars mapped to freedom. You are the first fetal kick of a rebel queen, the salt-lung cry when we landed, the pageant of prophets who refused erasure. We carry your archives in our tongues we carry your flight in our bones. Your love warms our bellies your magical spirit fills us with healing Ode to you Mama Afrika
The beauty of nature is second to none
The body remembers what the tongue forgets. A story is a soft place to set a heavy thing down. Take a breath. Let the next voice rise.
Joy is often treated as separate from resistance. For many queer communities, joy is resistance. These moments—small, ordinary, shared—are reminders that living fully is itself a political act.