écrire les silences, tisser les mémoires

How can we transmit a culture of origin when we no longer understand the people who look like us, when stories have been lost to silence?

Language structures thought.
Without words,
without language,
without history,
only empty vessels remain, ready to be filled with anything and everything.

To cut off a language
is to cut off a culture.
It is to sever parenthood,
to destroy the bridges between generations.

Being cut off from one's roots
also means being cut off from one's emotions,
from the ability to fully express what one feels.

Losing one's language
is losing one's psychic territory.
While some fight to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage,
we,
sometimes,
let these territories fade away.
And when nothing remains, who will rewrite history?

My grandmother and I share no words,
so it is in silence that we meet—fragile yet connected.
The languages in my family are multiple:
Russian,
Kinyarwanda,
Ewe,
French.
They intertwine, overlap, and sometimes fade, creating silent spaces rich with buried memories.

These silences are not empty:
they carry stories, wounds, forgotten fragments of a past that is still present.

It is within these in-between spaces that I invite you,
“into this third territory,”
where the foreigner in Belgium meets the muzungu in Rwanda.
There,
between silences and fragments,
I try to shape a hybrid language—
a speech unfinished yet alive.