And my mother as she taught me darn the other day.

Each stitch refused forgetting.

It struck me. Sitting beside her, as she taught me to fix a hole in my own sock, that this was the emotional opposite of Kew colonial gardens.

The British empire gathered; while my mother mended.

Both acts speak of tremedemous power.

However one chose to extend its power to dominate; the other extended to heal.

Through decolonial feminist theory, I encountered a better word for my research: rematriation.

Returning, with care, through tenderness, and through relation.

And somewhere between those two spaces, the colonial garden and my mother’s hands,

I began to understand what this work is really about.

This project began as “Restitution and Reparation concerning Aotearoa and the Carribbean”

But during this project, I learnt this terminology is, in fact, too bureaucratic, engraved in patriarchal narratives... tied to property and ownership.

It’s not just as simple sending it back.

That’s what my research concluded as:

Not only a return, but a renewal

Through intervention, relation, movement, mixing, through creolisation.

Its in respecting where we are today , multifaceted and complex.


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