Motherland

Abstract

Colonialism, in all its forms, is insidious in that it attempts to tear a people from the land. Forests are part of Ghana’s cultural identity, a living ancestral memory that tells the story of my homeland. In “Motherland”, I was thinking about the way extraction wounds both landscape and community, and how the violence done to one is often reflected in the other. The recitation of “kindling for a flame” speaks to the accumulation of harm through complicity and loss, eventually reaching a tipping point.