Loss remakes you

Abstract

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