Written piece
What the Kente Knows
McLord Selasi Azalekor
Ghana
About this piece
A seven-patch poem built like kente: separate strips woven into one cloth. Rooted in Ewe tradition from Ghana, it asks the Commonwealth what we carry forward and offer. The thread I bring is this: that nothing is a scrap that loved hands have held.
I. The Loom
Before the cloth, there was the question:
which colour carries grief
and which one carries its survival?
My grandmother's hands moved like translators
between worlds I will never fully enter.
A thing must be known in its singleness
before it can become part of the whole.
II. Geometry
Thread does not travel straight.
It dives beneath itself to resurface —
this is not weakness;
it is how tension becomes pattern,
how the under and over
make something neither could make alone.
III. Language
There is a word in Ewe — avɔ —
cloth, garment, skin, second body.
When we say a person has died
we say they have been unwoven.
IV. What Was Taken / What Was Not
Yes, the colonist also used thread.
He stitched red lines across the land,
called them borders, called them ours.
But the weavers didn't stop weaving.
The grandmothers didn't stop knowing
which colour carries grief
and which one carries its survival.
The thread outlasted the map.
V. Diaspora
There is a thread from here to everywhere.
I carry it without knowing how —
it surfaces in the way I feed the people I love
with food they don't always recognise as love.
I follow the thread back
the way a song you can't quite name
leads you, eventually, home.
VI. The Quilt
A quilt is what you make
when the good cloth has run out
but the hands have not.
It is saying: nothing is a scrap
that loved hands have held.
Each piece: a country.
Each stitch: a crossing.
Each pattern: a different way of saying
I survived. I am here. Come closer.
VII. What I Thread
I bring you my grandmother's hands
and my own hands
and the empty spool
still waiting for someone
to wind something new around it.
Piece by piece by peace —
let the cloth hold us.