Written piece
Where Threads Refuse Silence
Friday Lupunga
Zambia
About this piece
A poetic reflection on identity, resilience, and heritage—this piece traces a personal thread woven through memory, struggle, and faith, transforming brokenness into strength and giving voice to stories that refuse to be silenced.
Before I had a name,
I was a thread,
not in cloth,
but in the hands of time
that knew me before I arrived.
I was carried in songs
my grandmother never wrote down,
hidden in the cracks of calabash stories,
passed through firelight and memory.
I have been pulled,
oh, I have been pulled,
by hunger,
by loss,
by questions that never returned with answers.
There were days
I felt myself thinning,
stretching across distances
no map could hold.
But listen,
even the weakest thread
remembers the hands that spun it.
Mine remembers red earth.
It remembers footsteps that refused chains,
voices that rose without permission,
faith that stood
when nothing else remained standing.
I am not a single strand.
I am a gathering,
of prayers whispered into dry seasons,
of laughter that survived empty plates,
of dreams that refused small rooms.
And though the world tried
to measure me in fragments,
to name me by what was missing,
I kept weaving.
Not perfectly.
Not quietly.
But truthfully.
So, if you hold this thread,
do not look for symmetry.
Look for survival.
Look for the places
where breaking became becoming.
Because this,
this is not just a thread.
It is a voice
that refused silence.