Tribute is an act of remembering in order to reawaken.

Eighteen years ago, we ascended a mountain.

There are times when you hold a book in your hands, and with each turn of the page, it feels like you have slipped into a secret portal that might not be possible if the book did not exist.

It quickly becomes clear that what Williams has done with her recounting is in many ways place-based but above all it is collectivist and wildly artful as, of course, was Toni Morrison.

The canon is a construct. It is also a war.

And yes, we follow—as if exiled ourselves—beckoned into the labyrinth of a yellow house.

This was us. This is us. Even in that foreign land, they were my home.

baba, could you stay a while longer?

building a room
for all your sorrow

The Bakongo imagined a house as one without walls, a space where the most important conversations concerning the community were to happen.