on photographs and war
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Right when you walk into my childhood home there is a framed photograph of Eritrea, my homeland. Superimposed onto the image of Eritrea are nine black and white Eritrean faces in neat circles. All young adults, an even mixture of men and women staring at the camera unsmiling. When I think about it, I don't know if I can find a picture of my own mother smiling while she was back home - taking pictures was not a casual affair.
I came home for 20 years to that same framed photo and had no idea who those people were. I never asked and my mother never brought it up. It wasn't until I was 21 & my girlfriends' family came over that the silence was broken. Her history-enthusiast dad began earnestly asking my mother about the war in Eritrea. My mother began sharing stories that I'd never heard about death, loss and displacement. I sat listening with my mouth open thinking "Why is she so open with this random white man but not me?!" Eventually, she brought up the nine photos.
"Those are all martyrs of the war for independence" she says solemnly,"My two older brothers and their friends and comrades from our community." I find myself moved but unable to cry in front of these guests in our home. Nine people memorialized in a photograph I grew up barely registering. My own uncles, whose names I didn't even know at the time. Their stories, lives, deaths locked away in my mother's memories.
I felt betrayed by my mother at the time. I couldn't understand why she never told us. Ten years later, I feel accountable; I can't understand why I never asked.
I was moved to write this piece while reading bell hooks' "In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life" and realizing the opposite experience I had growing up in a home full of photos of strangers. hooks talks about the gallery of black people in her home, of the countless hours she spent listening to the elders in her family describe intimately who each person was. The importance in knowing your kin, in not forgetting.
There were no elders to hold memory in my families, they died before I was born or lived back home in Eritrea. There was only the trauma of war, haunting us with silence.
War has severed my families relationship to photos, memory and our genealogy. hooks posited that mages can offer us a way to return and my mother is not interested in going back. Even now, I must coax the stories out of her and I am learning the container required to hold her grief is larger than I have capacity or skill for, but I'm working towards it. I am piecing together my genealogy slowly through different narratives, stories, and memories collected from my aunties and older siblings. Rarely does anything line up, but I'm not interested in The Truth. I'm interested in developing a relationship with my ancestors, even if I'm almost 50 years late.
As the queer/trans child in my family, naturally I am the archivist. Family history will try to erase the fullness of me and I will repeatedly force my way in, every inch of me. This is my background, part of what fuels my urgency to know, to collect, to organize and to share out. I imagine this to be a life long practice.
The thumbnail for this note is a photo of my grandfather, Misghina, and my two uncles, Aaron and Tesfalu ; this picture rests on my ancestral altar. The frame for the original picture of the nine martyrs broke some years ago and the photo is deep in a closet somewhere, unable to be found.
...
here are some quotes from the bell hooks piece that I found particularly resonant :
"Fictively dramatizing the extent to which a photograph can have a "living presence," [Toni] Morrison describes the way that many black folks rooted in Southern tradition once used, and still use, pictures. They were and remain a mediation between the living and the dead." [p. 63]
"When the psychohistory of a people is marked by ongoing loss, when entire histories are denied, hidden, erased, documentation can become an obsession." [p. 59]
"The word remember (re-member) evokes the coming together of severed parts, fragments becoming a whole. Photography has been, and is, central to that aspect of decolonization that calls us back to the past and offers a way to reclaim and renew life-affirming bonds." [p. 64]