An essay for the feminist publishing platform Futuress, Embargoed Memories is the result of a personal research project about my family's connection to Portuguese colonialism.
The research was guided by oral accounts and personal memories, as well as the very particular objects brought from Africa by my ancestors. Building upon these fragments, the essay tells about Portuguese colonial history, memory, and its absence.

“Out of shame, pain, or trauma, the [Portuguese] country chose to forget. Through the construction of history, the exclusion of Black voices and of those who were lured into fighting the colonial wars a planned effort was carried out collectively. [...] Each of these [my family’s heirlooms’] objects is a portal to our past, a possible connection to our history, our silenced memories. The problem is that most of those memories are incomplete, distorted, contradictory. They are blank. They're hard, if not impossible, to recover. And it's no accident. The absence of memory is so by design.”

Publisher   Futuress ↗
Type   Essay
Year   2022