Unbinding the tongue and bearing witness.
Inspired by the literary community practices of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Jesmyn Ward and informed by the scholarly work of Dr. K. Zauditu-Selassie, Jeong-Eun Rhee, and S.R. Toliver, this project is grounded in the understanding that historical context is essential to collective futurity. Their work affirms that memory is not passive recollection, but active inquiry — a method of return and reclamation.
Through narrative fiction shaped by archival research and oral history, I engage storytelling as both witness and intervention. These stories do not merely recount the past; they create space for the women who inspired them to reclaim voice, presence, and authorship. Drawing from traditional Black storytelling practices, Afro-futurism, and the sustaining architecture of sisterhood, this project reconsiders how we gather, interpret, and represent data — shifting from extraction toward relational accountability.
For generations, Black women have archived the world in intimate spaces — at kitchen tables, on front stoops, inside church tents, between hymn and hush, during the quiet unfolding of known and unnamed movements. Within these exchanges lives cultural wisdom, remedy, strategy, grief, joy, and endurance. Story becomes method. Memory becomes infrastructure. Community becomes archive.
To sustain this lineage, we must return to oral history as living practice. Repetition — a foundational element of Black storytelling — does not confine narrative; it unbinds it. Through retelling, stories expand, deepen, and invite interpretation. Knowledge becomes relational rather than fixed.
Archival research into the lived experiences of Black women reveals a longstanding womanist and cultural influence that has shaped generations. This work does not invent that legacy — it traces it. It bears witness at a moment when elders are transitioning, communal gathering is thinning, and gentrification disrupts the physical sites where memory once rested with ease.
As Jeong-Eun Rhee writes:
“What has guided me to imagine, conceptualize, and carry out this work on my mother’s re-memory as inquiry is y/our m/others who have also left the haunting traces of multiple connections; and who have mysteriously showed up offering their helping hands – or their re-memories – at various points of my writing.”
This is how we remember our/selves — collectively.
No longer separated by the hush, but gathered in a collective breath — each voice a note, together composing an ocean of remembrance.
“They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine.”
- Lucille Clifton
“For all the juke joint women
With peek-a-boo knees and black seems
Grasping at hems in homemade winds
Red lip Sallys
With razor sharp teeth cutting paths for us
For all the women as emissaries
With velvet hands
Caught babies
Kneaded bread
And
Toiled unyielding soil
These divining rods prepared a sacred space for us
For all the Holy women
Leaving prayers in the back of photos in gilded frames
Taming fevered bodies with ancestral psalms from haint blue doorways
Performing miracles so that we would survive
Thank you”
SjCF
“I was raised by women who spoke in poems and songs, did ring dances and sometimes prayed for rain. They told fanciful tales, burned tobacco and sipped fire water.”
-SjCF
“Did I, did I tell you ‘bout the time I got free?
Got so free in the body that my mind traveled light years
And, I met God under a disco ball in a room full of swaying bodies
She was beautiful and Black like me
We danced until the music stopped
She left me with a song
Bone deep
Sung me into a new existence I had been longing for
Yes, Sugar, I got free”
-SjCF
Archive Tool Box
The tool box includes a copy of the LO/URE journal, field notes book, acid-free frame, gloves, hand crafted honey and tea and seeds. the tool kit can also be customized for family and community events.
