Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about intimacy—how it shows up in our stories, our families, our creative work. Whether I’m speaking with artists or making new work about Malcolm X, or exploring the sacred and everyday roles of Black mothers and daughters, intimacy is the thread that keeps everything connected. It’s a quiet force, but one that carries generations.
I see intimacy in the way artists return again and again to the archive—not just to find what’s been lost, but to reclaim and reframe what’s already there. The archives we inherit often feel incomplete, fractured, or distorted—especially as Black people, Muslims, Caribbean descendants, and those living in the wake of colonial violence. But we also hold our own archives. Through art, memory, ritual, and personal narrative, we become the living links between what was, what is, and what might still be.
Malcolm X, Embodiment, and the Personalization of Legacy
Intimacy is at the core of my X Speaks project, which explores the relationships Black Muslims have with the legacy of Malcolm X. What interests me isn’t just what Malcolm did—it’s how people today internalize and embody his message. X Speaks invites people to speak Malcolm’s words—not to imitate him, but to further his voice. In doing so, they reflect on the significance of his words in their own lives.
We often think of Malcolm X as a towering historical figure—and he was—but he also belongs to people in a very intimate way. We don’t just read about Malcolm; we quote him, we are inspired by him, we argue with his ideas, we pass down his teachings to our children. His image is on our walls. His story lives in our homes. The act of reciting Malcolm’s words isn’t just performance—it’s a kind of prayer, a kind of alignment. It’s living history.
This embodied connection is important because so often, the official archives strip figures like Malcolm of their spiritual, emotional, and communal dimensions. They present a flattened version of him—one that feels distant, polished, and removed from the people who actually knew him or loved him. But what if we prioritized the voices of those who do feel connected to him—not through institutions, but through memory, imagination, and shared practice?
That’s part of what I mean when I say we need to tell stories from the inside—not the outside. And that’s why it matters who gets to tell the story.
Intimacy as a Political Act: Black Female Artists on Motherhood
This same principle applies when I make work about my own family and community – This isn’t theoretical for me—it’s personal, lived, and ongoing. Some of my most meaningful work has emerged from reflecting on the relationship between myself and my mother, or between me and my children – most recently my Metem film which highlights the relationship between my mother, myself and our mother-land Guyana and my Fitra painting series.
And yet, even the most personal stories have political weight. They speak to what it means to care, to raise children, to hold grief and joy in the same breath. They speak to the choices we make to survive in a world that constantly asks us to forget ourselves.
When I think about artists like LaToya Ruby Frazier, I see this power clearly. Her portraits of her mother and grandmother are not only documents of their lives; she creates a counter-archive. One that’s rooted in the real conditions of their environment—pollution, economic decline, healthcare inequity—but also in tenderness, loyalty, and resilience.
Her mother’s illness isn’t just a personal tragedy—it’s linked to the steel mills, to environmental racism, to a system that poisons both land and people. But LaToya’s response is not just protest—it’s care. It’s saying: You matter enough to be seen. That’s a form of resistance, too.
The same can be said about the late Camille Billops’ work. She explores Black maternal autonomy and adoption, Black fatherlessness, and the narratives surrounding single-parent households. These issues are often treated as statistics, but Billops brings them to life through her own experiences. As the mother who abandoned her daughter and was highly scrutinized for it, she is the villain. But, as the artist telling her own story, she is the protagonist of Finding Christa. That’s a different kind of authority. One rooted in the authorship and authority every artist ascribes to themselves and lived knowledge visa vis her own experience.
The Archive Isn’t Neutral—So Why Pretend It Is?
This brings me to a broader reflection on how we work with archives. As a visiting artist at universities, one thing I often share with art students is this: when you’re doing archival work, you should always ask yourself why. Why this archive? Why this story? Why now?
Is there something missing in the way this story has been told? Something distorted? What do you bring to it—not just intellectually, but spiritually, emotionally, viscerally?
A good archive can’t just be about facts—it has to speak to the senses. To memory. To the body. That’s the only way to make it alive again.
And archives aren’t neutral. Neutrality a myth. Archives are shaped by power—by what gets preserved and what gets erased. Take Malcolm X again. There’s so much official material about him, and yet, when I speak with elders in the community, I often hear stories that aren’t written anywhere. Stories that are more revealing, more human, more honest.
There’s value in institutional archives, of course—but there’s also value in the archive of the kitchen table. Or, the backseat car conversation. The after-jumuaa conversation in the sister’s section of the mosque. Of the funeral procession. Those moments matter. These moments have been catalysts for my own work.
Guyana, Erased Histories, and the Presence of African Muslims
I was reminded of this on a recent trip to Guyana. I had a conversation with a man whose grandfather was descended from some of the earliest African Muslims in the country. I had never heard this story before—it wasn’t in any book I’d read. One detail that struck me was about the mosques there. There’s an old mosque that dates back to the 1700s, established by enslaved Fulani people from West Africa. But when you look at the official record, it’s the 1860s mosque—built by Indian indentured laborers—that’s labeled as the “first.”
Why is that? Because the colonizers decided that the Indian Muslims were the “authentic” Muslims, while the African Muslims were erased, or seen as illegitimate. This is historical fiction—manipulation passed off as fact.
That kind of erasure is why I ask questions. Why I dig deeper. Why I talk to elders and community members—not just curators and academics. Because some stories don’t live in books. They live in people. And sometimes, you have to be there to hear them. You have to sit with someone, drink tea, and listen. Those stories are part of the archive, too.
In Guyana—and in many parts of the Caribbean—people still know where in Africa their families came from. There’s a consciousness there, an ancestral memory that’s more intact than what many Black Americans have access to. That awareness doesn’t always come from documents; it often comes from oral tradition. From songs. From recipes. From names.
And it challenges this idea that Blackness is always fragmented, always broken. Sometimes, the memory is more whole than we realize. Sometimes, we just haven’t asked the right person.
Our Stories Belong to Us, We Need to Tell It
So what am I trying to say with all this?
I’m saying that stories matter. That intimacy is a method. That archives are not fixed—they are living, breathing, shape-shifting forms. That the personal is not only political—it is sacred.
I’m saying that when we tell our own stories, we don’t just correct the record—we create something new. We bring the past into the present and ask it to speak again, through our own voices.
Whether it’s Malcolm X’s legacy, a mother’s love, or the unrecorded prayers of African Muslims in Guyana—these are not just subjects. They are relationships. And when we honor them with care, with rigor, and with imagination, we don’t just remember—we transform.
That, to me, is the work.
