Description

“You do not start at the beginning. You start where the question lodges: a soft ache behind your breastbone.”

This story begins with a tree. A tree that stood in the middle of a house. A tree that saw all the men and all the burying. A tree that was and the tree that became with the woman that grew alongside the tree. The tree becomes the architecture of the story as much as the woman becomes it, and in places the tree grows around the house, around the stories, around the root of all things. A work of autofiction set in the premise of memory: how memory holds fort when everything else fades and what happens when memory itself fragments, forms the rest of the tale. “All My Men Underneath the Bimblika Tree”, is a formally hybrid work of autofiction that moves between lyrical prose, dreams, and reclaimed voices. At its heart is an attempt to understand the selves we inherit, the selves we lose, and the selves we eventually learn to reclaim.