Loss remakes you

Abstract

This article tells the story of my research on Dutch wax cloth, a highly prized textileand cultural artifact in Togo, my home country. I examine the fate of the cloth and ofthe Togolese women who made it into an object of great significance in the wake ofpolitical upheaval starting in the late 1980s, the same upheaval that led to my family’spermanent departure from Togo in 1991. Tracking my trajectory through the researchas a Togolese émigrée, I come to see clearly for the first time that the cloth’s story andmy own were not only shaped by the same historical forces but that they also tracedsimilar arcs. Told together, the stories weave a tale of belonging, rupture, and of whatcomes after; a story of how loss remakes us, and how we remake ourselves in the faceof loss. Autoethnography emerges as a tool for unearthing the personal agendas thatso often guide our choice of research topics as anthropologists. And research on topicsthat are close to home proves to be as likely to reawaken old wounds as it is to openpathways to some measure of resolution.