Last week, our table looked like preparation for a quiet afternoon of sewing — but it wasn’t. It was the starting point of something more radical: a space where thread, movement, and memory helped us unlearn, remember, and build together.

We gathered not to teach, but to co-construct — across languages, across silences. The tools? Scraps of fabric, raffia fiber twine, a basket of scissors, crochet hooks and stories passed through generations. Our materials were humble, but our intention was decolonial: to resist the hierarchies of knowledge that keep bodies and voices in the margins.

We dismantled the boxes we were handed — the ones named professionalism, neutrality, donor-speak. Then we built something else from the remains. Something shaped like a spiral, a shelter, a breath.

Through embodied exercises and the careful critique of inherited proverbs, we stitched a different kind of narrative — one that holds complexity, contradiction, and care. One that doesn’t flatten us into slogans.

What held us together wasn’t fluency, but rhythm. Not authority, but alignment.

Decolonial work doesn’t always look like protest. Sometimes it looks like a room full of women threading memories into cloth, listening with their whole bodies, and choosing to build slowly — stitch by stitch.