I write to you as a stranger, having never met and with no expectation of a reply. I pen this love letter not out of familiarity or developed intimacy, but into the abyss as I try to whisper history out of memory: a history of festivals that confronted violence with viewership, a memory crafted by the State that was never mine and perhaps not yours either.

You craft a photomontage from the archives of PANAF, and its colours sway me to the Pan-African potential drawn from the dawn of the postcolonial era. Where is the red of the Pan-African flag? Has all the blood drained from this history, or have you avoided contact with European drapeaus—the crimson of colonial France, Britain, Italy and the US erased from this montage of the past? In its absence, the warm hue of the wood echoes Ann Stoler’s demand that we read against the grain of colonial archives. The fading papers contrast the saturated colours digitally layered on top as if the present always crops the past. But what is the glue that pastes this scene together? Perhaps we find it in the

the still frames of bobine 6, a reel that threads history together even as its technology becomes obsolete.

The brochures hide any bodies from view. The artifacts of masks dominate, revealing just the barrel of a musket fit for a cavalcade. Assia Djebar was there, you know. She debuted her first and only play, Rouge l’aube. Did you ever meet her, or were you two strangers at a crosswalk whose paths intersected only now in the space of this letter? A collision between two unsuspecting artists like The Lovers from your 2008 print. I once held that same brochure, only mine rested in Bay Area California.

The same copy sits less than a mile from my apartment, where I first encountered PANAF as I searched for traces of Djebar’s Rouge l’aube­­­­ in the stacks of Stanford University. The Black Panthers too crossed from Oakland to Algiers and back again, though their footprints are absent for this recollection.

These pieces before you, that I have seen and sat with, were once unfamiliar: linguistic difference on my tongue, foreign landscapes not parallel of my own sense of home. Curated by you, the language guides me toward the center: the pamphlets fanning out choregraph my eyes in a gentle arch from left to right, while the Arabic reverses my gaze back to the center. I simultaneously travel from visual art to cinematography to theatre as I follow the horizon you’ve constructed. In the absence of a punctum, the image features a strange abyss where these layered artifacts come into artificial contact. I notice the lack of English surrounding this event and wonder if writing this now taints the archive. The black and white choice of the brochure, printed in an era of colour print, only further reminds me of my distances: temporal and geographic, culturally and nationally.

How does one begin to re-member when she wasn’t there in the first place? How does she conjure meaning—with its historical layers, political tensions, and personal residues—for a memory that precedes her life? To re-member not only requires imagery and knowledge, but a kinesthetic appreciation: to re-member is to assemble the pieces of the body back in place in remembrance in spite of the membrane between now and then, as Afro-Surrealist artists like Amara-Tabor Smith have taught me.