“Permitted to land on condition that the holder registers at once with the Police, does not take or change employment except with the consent of the Ministry of Labour and National Service and leaves the United Kingdom not later than such date as may be specified by the Secretary of State.”
Form 223 X. My Babcia’s.
A dressmaker’s exercise book, lessons in refuge, Nyebyeya. My Babcia’s.
A piece of hand beaten heritage Bugandan barkcloth, fibrose and rhyzomatic in structure .
A four steel sewing needles, four steel pins, placed. Two families of four, counted in lines sewed together in life and then death, embodied in a land far from a motherland.
The related layers of my provocation and study are what generate opaqueness. Separately, they can be identified, clarified, positioned, and framed. They can present as old papers, rough cloth, shiny metal. As artefact’s, examples, primary source material and stories for telling. But in the context of studying hidden and micro histories, the hidden micro is simply opaque to the majority and not just the absence of awareness but absence also of the many layers are attached to it. Transparency only comes from knowing it exists, all exists. By peeling and collaborating with each layer, perspective, positionality and inherent knowledge still leave its own opacity. I gain transparency in the knowing that it will never be fully understood. The experiences of one are never directly the same as that for another.