I’ve never seen my father cry
Chapter 1: Back home
For as long as I can remember, my father has never spoken to me about the Congo.
When he was sent to Belgium alone to study, he was only seven years old.
A childhood brutally snatched from him.
When he was seventeen, he returned briefly, but the echo of that experience left deep wounds.
46 years without seeing his family again.
The shock was immediate.
Memories come flooding back, darker, more complex.
How do you face your demons? How do you reconcile the past with the present? Every step he takes is a struggle, a confrontation between the remnants of what he fled and the reality of a Congo that has changed, that is no longer the same.
Each moment is a key, opening a door to his past. But behind these doors, there is also the emptiness left by uprooting, the weight of a fragmented identity.
The Congo, a country that has always seemed distant and abstract to me, nevertheless contains a part of my history.
As a child, I would ask questions, but the answers were often fragmentary, sometimes silent, as if revisiting those memories hurt too much.
So this return was essential, as much for him as for me
This first chapter is an attempt to piece together my father’s story, to put words and images to what has been shattered.
It’s the start of a journey in which photographs become bridges between memories and reality, between the child he was and the man he is.
A quest for meaning, a need to reconnect with my origins. Through places, images and stories, I’m trying to rediscover that lost memory, the memory that forged my father, and which, somewhere, is forging me too.
This trip to the Congo is just the first stage in this quest for memory and identity. Although deeply meaningful, this experience is only a prelude to a wider objective: to return to my father’s home town, Mbuji-Mayi. It is there, at the heart of his earliest memories, that I will be able to truly capture the essence of his story and, by extension, my own. And so this photographic project will continue to unfold, in search of answers, meaning and reconciliation with the deep roots that shape us all.
