Written piece
One Thread Through Us All
Ellanive Kasamba
Malawi
About this piece
A meditation on the untranslatable emotions that connect humanity across languages, cultures and borders, exploring love, longing , memory and the invisible thread that makes strangers feel home, we have different languages but at the end of it we are expressing one emotion.
There is a word in Portuguese saudade that English cannot hold. It describes a longing for something absent, but sweetness inside that longing, the way the missing itself becomes a form of keeping. The Welsh have hiraeth a homesickness for a home you cannot return to perhaps never had. The Japanese have mono no aware, the bittersweet knowing that everything beautiful passes. In Chichewa, we say chikondi, love so complete it requires no reason.
Across fifty-six nations, in a hundred tongues, there are words for this particular country of feeling. Words that resist translation, that cup something private and enormous impossible to pass from one person to another whole.
And yet,
When a grandmother in Nairobi cups her granddaughters face between her palms, something crosses between them that words do not carry anyway. The grandmother in Port of Spain does the same. The gesture, its own language.
This is what I fathom about a thread, it is not fabric. It is what runs through the fabric and holds it together. You do not see it first, you see color, pattern, the beautiful particularity of each cloth. But reach for any corner and feel it, a quiet tension beneath everything, something that denies to be taken apart.
we were given different words for the same sky. Different waters shaped us; different songs and stories raised us. Yet beneath every thread, border and language. We carry the same unnamed feeling the same way a mother looks at her child as she wraps her around her arms.
This is what I bring to the quilt.
Not a nation, not a language, not even history folded into a border.
A pulse already yours before I gave it a name, crossing every line we’ve drawn, whole and saying
“You are no stranger here”