On archives: when I began grad school I was so immobilized by the fact that the women I wanted to write about weren’t visible in archival documents that I almost abandoned the project. It wasn’t until I began expanding my definition of archives that the project became possible. When I started seriously examining textiles, oral traditions, photography, print media, & other sources as “archives”, the women’s lives became visible in unexpected ways. It’s fitting that I learned to tell their stories this way b/c the women themselves had limited literacy.

Some 20 yrs ago, I came to United States at the age of nine straight out of a refugee camp in Benin. I'd been a refugee since I was two-years-old and I spoke no English and had no formal education. Today, I am now officially a Yale-trained Ph.D. with a prize-winning dissertation. This moment is a testament to the fact that our stories can unfold in the most surprising ways. My first few years in the U.S. were some of my darkest. I struggled to learn to read and write and to adjust to life as a Black, poor immigrant girl growing up in the projects.

I met many ppl in grad school whose performance of working class politics inspired me to open up about my experiences growing up in poverty. Ironically, as I learned later, many of these ppl are actually wealthy & learned the language of 'radicalism' from academic parents lmao!! related: I met people who identified as "first gen" and I was oh they are like me....only yo discover that they identified as "first gen" because they were the first in their family to get a Ph.D lolol

I wish more people would recognize how devastating slavery was for the Africans who stayed on the continent. Our entire societies were restructured to deal with the consistent wars, kidnappings, & raids that supported the trade in captives. No black community was left unscathed. @Kwatrekwa was just reminding me of how in the norther regions along the coast of West Africa homes designed with watch towers so that people can look out for slave raiders. Walled homes and twisting and winding were thought to also be a response to slavery

I spent most of my childhood in and out of refugee camps and I'm thinking about how different my life would've been if all these nations had opened their borders to my family when we were fleeing political conflict in the early 90s. Instead we lingered in refugee camps for 7 yrs. This moment is clarifying because it shows how unnecessary refugee camps actually are. They are sites of confinement/containment for those deemed undesirable by nation-states. Refugee camps can and should be abolished.