My mother was born and raised in Mozambique but moved to South Africa in 1992, three years before I was born. I grew up hearing her nostalgic stories about what life was like growing up in Mozambique. The stories were often exciting, but they had undertones of sadness and a longing for the world that my mother had chosen to give up. When my mother migrated to South Africa, she had to take on a new identity as she decided that it would be best to blend in with other South Africans. She in turn raised me as an isiZulu speaking South African because it was the closest language to her native language, Chopi. She did this so that I would fit into the South African black community because of her fear of xenophobia and the need to give me a sense of belonging.

My collages allow me to merge my photographs that were taken in South Africa with those of my Mozambican relatives and to create haunting, hybridized composites. I also combine photographic cut-outs with the details of the only physical object I have from my childhood – a cloth known as a capulana. These richly patterned fabrics are typically worn by Mozambican women as wrappers and used to carry children. They were often gifted to me by my grandmother and aunts during my occasional visits to Mozambique.

Given the difficulties that we face in terms oral and written communication, my collages become a means of telling stories about my origins and what is in some sense an alternative “home” culture, albeit one I mostly experienced indirectly. My work also creates room for an emotional reckoning, enabling me to share my mother’s sense of loss of her birthplace and markers of her Chopi identity. I also grapple with my parallel sense of displacement. Through imagining new memories for myself, the collages help me identify with what could have been – my mother’s country of origin and the childhood I might have experienced there. By such means I reintroduce myself to a childhood that was severed, broaching a sense belonging and grappling with the question, ‘who am I if I cannot prove who I was?’