“Let’s call him Ahamefuna: let my name/legacy not be forgotten.”
Whom Did He Love? (2022)
Client / Publication: The Brooklyn Rail
Role: Writer, cultural analyst, archival interpreter
Focus: Metabolising the colonial gaze through intimacy and interiority
Summary:
In this essay, I meditate on a 1911 colonial photograph taken in present-day Anambra State, Nigeria. Through the imagined figure of “Ahamefuna”, I explore how the colonized subject resists capture through opacity, how the anthropological archive becomes a mirror for my own lineage, and how language and interior life remain the last refuges of freedom.
The essay traces a line from N.W. Thomas (British colonial anthropologist)’s colonial fieldwork to my personal encounter with loss, memory, and the untranslatable worlds that survive empire.
🌟 What clients value:
This piece extends my broader inquiry into the human textures beneath infrastructure and system—in this case, the infrastructure of knowledge and memory.
Clients and collaborators in storytelling, heritage, and institutional reimagining value this perspective because it bridges research, affect, and decolonial thought into a single, embodied form of knowing. It demonstrates how archival work can be reclaimed as a space of tenderness and political imagination.