Storying: A Monument of Resilience and Decolonial Healing

Abstract

This project explores the impact of migration on personal and familial relationships, through the process of storytelling. Focusing on my family’s migration story from Uzbekistan to the U.S., I explore themes of intergenerational trauma, resilience, survivance, and re-making relationships as central to our experience. For the diasporic community of Uzbeks, our past is informed by Russian colonial and imperial rule which is inherently rooted in the erasure of Central Asian history. This erasure is also a central theme when exploring the lived experiences of familial trauma, distance, struggle, and silencing. More importantly, the project also explores the ways resilience is foundational in our lives. The questions I am asking are: How is our family trauma-informed by our migration story, and in what ways is it linked to life before migration? What does a path for decolonial healing and restoring familial relationships look like? Through a desired-centred approach and mosaic methodologies, I am in conversation with my close friends, family, and my own stories to produce a piece of creative writing. This work explores the very lived realities–both individual and collective– of the manifestation of coloniality and the inheritance of pain and resilience it has on survivors of violence and displacement. My aim is to re-write stories and imagine possibilities of healing that go beyond survival. This project informs transformative and anticolonial healing that embodies resilience, longevity, and the de-pathologization of ourselves.