“This, too, belongs”

Abstract

“This, too, belongs,” is a mantra that helps me navigate this strange time of the global pandemic and Black Lives Matter. It also helps with the project I started. Waking the Stories is based on an archive of Ibiteekerezo or wisdom stories from the oral tradition of precolonial Rwanda, where I am from. These stories were traditionally held as bodies of wisdom and passed down in families. Very few Rwandans know how to interpret these stories anymore. They were transcribed and translated by colonial administrators, missionaries, and researchers to better understand, keep traces of, and ultimately supersede the cultures they colonized. The violence of it paralyses me and I feel very small. But what if that too belonged? What if I imagined my project as small as a seed? What if I gave myself permission to start very simply from where I am situated and acknowledged that one challenge of working through historical trauma is finding ways to look at the past, recognize what was done and experienced, its consequences to this day, and remaining well? To be continued.