Growing up, I often heard my mother say ìwá kú ìwá ná nwa nkan tó sọnù which translates loosely from Yoruba as ‘when you are searching for something that is lost, you search high, lo and in between’.

I can’t recall when I first became concerned with excavating women’s histories. It may have been in 2016, when my mother surprised me by becoming very outspoken and intentional about having a more healthy relationship with me. In the process of finding a way to each other, I recall asking questions about her mother, her grandmother, what she was doing in the days before I was born and who inspired her as a young woman. Some of her answers confronted me with the fact that I didn’t actually know my mother as a woman outside of her wife and mother roles and the assumptions I’d made based on our run-ins and the life we lived as a family.