“Let’s call him Ahamefuna: let my name/legacy not be forgotten.”
Whom Did He Love? (2022)
Focus: How the colonial gaze shapes intimacy and interiority
Summary:
In this essay, I meditate on a 1911 colonial photograph taken in present-day Anambra State, Nigeria. In thinking about the imagined person of “Ahamefuna”, I explore how the anthropological archive becomes a mirror (or lack thereof) for the colonised person’s 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 present-day domestic encounters with loss, memory, and the untranslatable worlds that survive empire.
Read more:
https://brooklynrail.org/2022/11/criticspage/Whom-did-he-love/
