A Minnesota Exhibit Framed Around Longing for Home (Published 2022)

Not along any path, I thought, that would find me scrapping and scraping and muscling my way forward through the world. I had lost someone. I did not wish to move on from that. In a sense I didn’t wish to move at all. In the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I had been allowed to dwell in silence, circling, pacing, returning, communing, lifting my eyes u

Is the grief I have felt, sometimes, in this writing, a kind of transmitted nostalgia—a mourning for what was lost, against the narrative of progress and accomplishment that characterizes most contemporary stories of our diaspora? I think sometimes of the villages where my ancestors lived, which I have visited for only a few days in my life. And I

Most of us have been orphaned from our ancestral land, and with it, our people’s history, including the songs, teaching stories and wisdom ways of our lineage. And we may find ourselves looking in on families who are more intact than our own with a kind of unassuageable grief. This ache for something deeply familiar, yet entirely unknown, is our lo

Each time we move, we must leave something of ourselves behind; perhaps then the map of a diaspora consists, like a constellation, mainly of gaps. And these distances gape in our memories, as in our personalities; we lack the physical objects, buildings, people whose presence might remind us of what we once were, might lend us some continuity.