"At the Foot of a Tree is a sonic, ancestral terrain and portal rooted in the cosmologies of the Bakweri people of southwest Cameroon. It pays homage to broken magnolia limbs, seeds and caskets buried deep within the earth, fractured recollections of falling things, and the unnamed. Those whose names have vanished from record, yet whose presence endures in breath, soil, and memory. This work honours those who persist in fringe imaginations, too often reduced to antecedents or the dearly departed. It inaugurates them instead as futurities in motion. It holds within it land sites, burial grounds, home and kitchen spaces, biographies, and recipes: the lives of my great-grandmother, Enanga Joke, and grandmother, Mary Mojoko; my mother, Lolita Hardeson’s voice; two lullabies about trees and the sacred act of gathering to witness or behold new life and life forms. These are the oral and tangible geographies that shape this work."