KINDRED
For KINDRED, each contributor selects a photograph from their family or personal album, pairs it with another photograph from the Tender Photo archive, and writes a short reflection on why they have selected both photographs. The idea is to find an analogy between two photographs that might be similar or dissimilar, but connected to an experience, emotion, or idea.
And Co.
In my personal photograph, I see a little girl who loves to sing lifting her chin and preparing to lift her voice. She is finally old enough to join the children’s choir, and is swelling with the pride and joy of being one of the ten; chosen from scores of girls and boys to wear a white-on-gray choir uniform.
Patterns
When I look now at my beloved photograph of my parents, I see that my father’s smile remained the same in his later years. That the tiny eyelet patterns on his agbada and the red polka dots on my mother’s dress somehow match. And then I wish, desperately, that my mother had saved her dress for me.
Great is Thy Faithfulness
There were five years between her and her sister. So they didn’t really play together as children. Theirs was mainly chatting, she says, about little things, nothing in particular. Her sister passed away two years ago and with her their play. Her sister was the chatty one. Over more than eighty years, I think about the two of them gossiping and laughing and bickering, and of course in praise. Her good, good friend.
The Unveiling
The altar is draped in red and white. On it lies a boy, supine, the black soles of his baby shoes visible. He has been kept amid two candle stands, a small metal crucifix inches away from his left foot, and above him hovers the hand of a priest, in whose fist the chains of a thurible are gripped. The priest, caught in profile, is dressed in vestments matching the altar cloths, and matching, as well, the vestments of the altar boy, whose interlaced fingers are held in front of him, as if in waiting.
Boats
What shocks me about this image, scanned from a slide, a deepcut from the family album, is how difficult and painful their sisterhood was and how they share and seek each other out, even today. And my father, an outsider in so many ways, seeing something golden here, something he was starving to be part of, and to keep his distance from, and did.
Ojemba
In Igbo, the word “Ojemba” carries with it a sense of wonder and it loosely translates to “traveler” in English. In the context of my selected family photograph, Ojemba embodies the notion of renaissance and the transcendence of time into eternity. This is a photograph of my maternal grandparents, Captain Jeremiah a.k.a Ojemba and Mataefi Comfort Chude taken years before the tumultuous Biafran war—a time when their love was unburdened by the storm of conflict.
An Entire Childhood
Shearing sheep is an essential skill for young boys, without it, one is not boy enough. It’s violent, manly, difficult. The young boy must run after the sheep in the garden, violently pull it around the garden by its wall, into the shed where it would be sheared, and then pin it down to the floor with their knee, whilst the seizer cuts the thick fair of the sheep. Though there are no young boys in this photograph, their presence is heavy, and permeates. One cannot look at them and not see it. One cannot look at the sheep, pinned to the floor, with its eyes wide open, frightened, immobile, and not see a young boy trying to be a man.
A Port and A Portal
If that Sunday was like any growing up, what I wanted from the Word was to let me in and to also take me on excursions into hitherto unknown parts of the world. The photo album, as the picture of myself and my uncle reminds me, is far from the saintly perfection of the Scriptures—cut and pasted from a clutter of events, they are not even whole, not to talk of holy—but they are perfect for what they are: a repository of photographs that are both time machine and theatre, both port and portal.
Cousins and Kisses
“Manasseh is dead!” — the words come to me with a finality, the full measure of which I do not comprehend. When we spoke on the phone just last week, he sounded like himself. Today, he is no more. I would accept it if I knew the weight of his demise. At the moment, I am afraid, I do not know. I know I will never see my cousin again. I could not look at the videos and photos sent by Simbi, his younger sister, until now.
Alma Mater
omewhere under the almond trees in that car park, a dear friend gave me feedback on a story I wanted to submit for a competition. Months later, I received a letter informing me that my story had been highly commended by the judges. Years after, I married that friend.
On Holding Images
If we treat the idea of “family” loosely, “Ghana” could be the collective body, and the men in front of and behind the camera could be both its members and narrator/actors. Their political struggles with structure and representation might not be so different from the personal struggle of the widow who mourns her husband. Where lies the fine line between picture-as-potential and picture-as-prison? How do we (learn to) hold onto images, and how do we (learn to) let them go?
The Distance
By the time I took the photo, I no longer lived in New York, and scarcely found reason to commute by rail. Being on an Amtrak was thus an exception, and I thought it wise to record the American life I was seeing, as if anew.