My Grandmother spent her early childhood with her parents on a small farm in Kenya. My Great Grandfather died when she was 4 and, she was taken to England and adopted only to see her mother once again.

In 1997, my Grandmother returned to Kenya to search for her mother’s grave and the farm they lived on, and her journey was made into an episode on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Going Back’. My Grandmother died last year, and the tape of the programme was uncovered whilst clearing her flat.

 

What was clear from the recording was that my Grandmother seemed to be searching for a place to remember her parents by, because apart from a few photographs, she had no physical space or objects to associate with them.

 

It took multiple listens to understand the tape, as the sound from the cassette player was quite distorted. To help in making sense of it, my mum sent over photographs and documents from my Grandmother’s trip to Kenya, along with a box of my grandparents projector slides.  As I explored a part of my Grandmother I’d not encountered before, I longed for her physical presence and grasped at the puzzle of her memory. Here, I saw some similarity with my Grandmother’s own search for her mother recorded on the tapes.

 

In the film I left her voice distorted and crackly, so the viewer is forced to shares this feeling of confusion and need for clarity. The unordered web of visual information from my family archive presents a journey of trying to navigate the past and the projector slides, images, and close-ups of cassette ribbon emphasise this sense of material memory. 

Cassette ribbon muffles the view at points, communicating that while the tape provides access, it’s are also barrier of distortion between me and my grandmother’s voice. All I can access is this muffled form of her. I included a visit to her grave (a woodland burial site) in order to ground the film in my emotional and physical presence, and I included footage of my mother to emphasise the family connection between four generations of women. 

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On the tape my Grandmother reads that her mother couldn’t afford to give her father a headstone but planted some carnations, which my granny looked for. Flowers are something which remind me of my grandmother, she knew all the names and loved gardening. Their projector slides are filled with photographs of flowers. It felt rounding to visit her grave with carnations after doing this research, yet also unsatisfying.  I will never fully know my grandmother now she’s gone. While I have these tapes, I don’t have her in reality and this unsatisfying feeling is what I wanted the film’s ending to communicate.