My Mother’s Voice Is an Archive

My mother doesn’t trust diaries.

She says paper fades, pages burn, and locks break open. But pictures, ah, those she keeps. Neatly labeled, laminated if she has time. Still, it’s her hands that do most of the remembering: calloused knuckles that once queued for Federal University rice rations, fingers that learned to braid hair for classmates, making ends meet through styles and scalp care.  She doesn’t talk much about those days. Silence is part of the record.

I realized what kind of memory she carries when I opened an old suitcase buried in the back of our closet. Inside was a wrapper, a long, tie-dyed cloth we wrap around our chests like towels, for errands, for church, for newborns. She picked it up like a relic and smiled.

“That was your grandmother’s,” she said. “She had extras from the women’s group at church. Gifts for Christmas, remember?”

I didn’t. I hadn’t been born yet.

But she offered it to me like I should’ve known.

In our family, recollection is communal property: if one remembers, we all inherit.

That habit feels radical in Canada, a country that files people like us under diversity while misplacing our dead. Official archives call the gaps missing. We call them home. Our rogue archiving lives in rice water glossing Sunday jollof, in the back-of-the-throat heat of pepper, in the shea-butter scent of cousins’ hugs, in the engine-oil tang of my dad’s car, rushing us to Sunday school as the sun rose..

Those sensory footnotes shape my own body of evidence. When I dance at family weddings, my ankles echo my grandmother’s laughter.
When I debate politics, my brother’s fire rises in my tone.
Even my quietest moments catalogue stories that never made it into textbooks because women were too busy surviving to write them down.

I was not born to be catalogued; I was born to remember: loudly, tenderly, imperfectly. And so I press meaning into every sentence I speak, every meal I cook, every boundary I set. 

Each act is another entry in the living archive my mother began, her mother sustained, and I now protect: proof that we were here, that survival can be beautiful, and that nothing truly precious is ever lost. 

This is the archive I keep.