“It was very important for me not to pretend to have surmounted the pain and terror of that time of my life, very important not to pretend that it left no mark on me. It marked me forever.” ― James Baldwin, 1976
This workshop series is a continued exploration of memory as an imagined, contested, and embodied playground. Over the course of six weeks, we will build a memory palace, probe its foundations, scrutinise its appearances, rummage through the cellar, and decorate the dance parlour. Approaching memory as a multisensory archive, we will ask how trauma affects remembering and how we can sustain memory palaces in exile. Most importantly, we’ll decide which memories we need to break up with and which can help fertilise our garden. Each week, I invite you to engage with a reading/video/podcast before we convene online for collective, thematic free writes. You do not need to be a writer to participate, and you can write in your language of choice.
Workshop structure
Week 1: Moving into the memory palace
Leila Aboulela: The Neighbourhood of the House of Wealth
Koleka Putuma: Collective Amnesia [Excerpt]
Week 2: Cleaning the windows
Sharon Mashihi: Appearances
Akwaeke Emezi: The Death of Vivek Oji [Excerpt]
Week 3: My memory stammers, but my soul is a witness (rummaging through the cellar)
James Baldwin: Giovanni’s Room [Excerpt]
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: How James Baldwin’s Faulty Memory Yielded Lasting Truth [Excerpt]
Week 4: The dance parlour, an embodied intervention
Caleb Femi: Wishbone + Lahai: The Time Traveller’s Memories
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Small Worlds [Excerpt]
Week 5: Dwelling in dispossession
Mahmoud Darwish: In the Presence of Absence [Excerpt]
Dima Saad: Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile
Week 6: Planting a garden
Caleb Femi: The secret life of Gs
N.K. Jemisin: The Ones Who Stay and Fight
This workshop series is offered on a sliding price scale. The suggested contribution is 60€. The minimum contribution is 30€. Pay what you can and do not be discouraged to sign up with whatever it is you can offer!
About Amuna
Amuna Wagner is a German-Sudanese writer, journalist, and educator. She studied International Relations and Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with a special interest in decolonising processes and the politics of gender. In her work, Amuna explores the many ways through which we heal ourselves and others: ancestry, identity, pleasure activism, feminist spiritualities, and creative knowledge production. She regularly facilitates creative writing workshops and is currently pursuing an MFA in Literary Writing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
Amuna co-founded and edits Kandaka, a platform that imagines feminist futures at the intersection of art and activism. She was awarded the Tejumola Olaniyan Fellowship at The Africa Institute in Sharjah (2023) and selected as Writer in Residence at the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD) in Ghana (2021). Her work has been published on Project Myopia, Africa Is a Country, The Pan African Music Magazine, Amaka Studio, Egyptian Streets, Skin Deep, Meeting of Minds, shado mag, Rosa Mag, sweetthangzine as well as part of auftakt festival (2023) and Fringe of Colour (2021). She lives between Cologne, Germany and Cairo, Egypt.
Images by Yael Wagner
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