The One with a Soul

The multidisciplinary Ethiopian-American artist Tsedaye Makonnen described The One with a Soul as "a series of poetic prayers that I wrote after reading accounts of the violence against Black women migrating to Europe from Africa and thinking about the fragility of Black lives here in the U.S. Early anti-African and anti-Black colonial structures, as well as the practice in Islamic contexts of thirteen centuries of trafficking and enslaving African women, continue to have political and economic reverberations that shape modern policy...This is my attempt to gather elements of language, memory, and ritual into my practice." The text is in Amharic and English and deliberately include mistranslations as, the artist notes "In doing so, I am exploring what gets lost in translation when culture migrates to a new world."