Hello World!

Welcome to this first post, the opening step in a journey I have been walking toward for a very long time . My time, has finally come.

I am Njideka Onabisi Wiggins, aka "NOW"—Narrating Overlooked Wisdom—and this space is where I write toward what has been lost, what is fraying at the edges of memory, what history, too often crafted by others, has allowed to disappear.

I come here as both a recoverist and a discoverist, listening for the faint threads of stories that were left unfinished, following the traces of names that have gone unspoken, attending to lives and moments the record has silenced, erased, or rendered unknowable. On this page and the ones that follow, I will work with words the way one might work with fabric: piecing, mending, and reweaving, to see what small wisdoms can be brought back into view.

This first post is less an arrival than a beginning again—a quiet, confident pledge to keep writing toward what lingers just beyond what we think we know, and to give language, as best I can, to what has long gone without it.

Iam interested in the mysteries we inherited; the things we sensed before we had words, for them, the absences we carry without understanding their origins, and the histories that live beneath our personal stories.  I have many questions for us.  The most pressing and reoccurring is this:  What if we were not simply marginalized from our past, but inculcated with the practice of forgetting it?  What if we were taught - repeatedly and systematically --to look away form our own narratives, to accept fragments in place of histories, silence in place of names and absence in place of memory.  

I do not pretend to have the answers , but as a curious , radical creature I write to discover (myself and us) and imagine how reclamation might be achieved.  I believe the first act of reclamation is simply to name the mystery. 

To name what happened.  To name what didn't happen.  To name what is missing , to name what we were never given the language to understand. I believe the work of remembering is not solitary.  I recover/discover a story; someone else recognizes themselves in it.  I name a mystery; someone else discovers the language for theirs.    It is a call and response.  An instinctive dance our folk do. One I hope you will join me in, as I write not to solve us, but to help us remember ourselves so, that together, we can come home to who we were always meant to be. 

"We were taught to forget-- I write to remember!"

Blessings --

NOW and Later!