My mother stopped communing with nature as she did when she was girl of blue blood and dust back in the 50s in Afghanistan. She stopped terracing stones and burying her shit in the yard as she did in the unforgiving heat of dinosaurs and petroleum. She has instead, become nature itself. She’s root, soil, Bahian oxygen. She’s bandaged together with spitballs and rubber cement - the only thing left from every burned bridge and scorched earth. She’s molten - the Tropic of Capricorn. She’s at once never here nor there, yet she’s everywhere. First there was bone, fractured under the weight of pride. Then came rain. She coughs a parade of pink petals, a single locust, and that one thought that’s been gnawing away at her since her first born. Her perfectly constructed worlds imploded in on one another and all that remained were the predictable patterns of her breath and promise of falcon wings to carry her across the divide.
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Mother Tongue documents the psychic trauma of being displaced from home as told through the story of my mother. My mother is a refugee from Afghanistan who currently lives with asylum status in Brazil. In her 70’s, my mother speaks 9 languages and lives in isolation. Without a sense of place, she’s become a citizen of the world with no belonging. I tell her visual story through metaphor and nuance to paint her fragile mental complexities and the weight she carries being stateless, old, and without the anchor of family and a mother tongue.