The loss of my maternal grandmother significantly changed the landscape of my family. With her death, our generation lost its footing in the complex territory of cultural identity and memory. Among her fifteen grandchildren, I was fortunate to be the only one who ever traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with her and who was able to meet the extended family she had been forced to leave behind. It was perhaps for this reason that I was the one to inherit the stack of letters featured in the performance piece: Lettres Pour Yaya Mujinga, as read by her grandchild. The letters were one half of a correspondence dating back approximately fifty years between Mujinga and her uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, and their children. The majority of them were written in my grandmother’s natal language of Tshiluba, which I can neither speak nor understand.

Performing Lettres Pour Yaya Mujinga, I addressed these letters as a representation of both the loss of my grandmother and the parallel loss of language, history, and belonging that our colonized relationship represented. Placing myself at a small table in an anonymous parking lot, I read the letters aloud for a period of eight hours. This was an act of mourning, reverence, and closure. Yet, the fractured strain in my voice as I stumbled through handwritten Tshiluba with uncertainty and increasing exhaustion also signaled the void left by her death, my distance, and our colonial displacement.

This piece was performed for eight hours in a public parking lot in Missoula, Montana on October, 23, 2015.
The desk and letters were also installed with an eight-hour audio recording of the reading at the Gallery of Visual Arts in 2016.