They were here. Someone made sure we forgot.
Before the Erasure is a publication for the women history tried to disappear — and the daughters bringing them back. The Black women in Abrahamic scripture whose names were translated out. The Cuban and Haitian women who built cultures the world claimed without crediting. The labor that held movements together, raised families, fed communities — and was never put in the books because someone decided it was ordinary.
It wasn't ordinary. It was foundational.
Each essay is an act of recovery. Some are scholarly — original sourcing, archival work, the kind of research that takes months. Some are personal — what it means to recover yourself when the world has spent considerable energy making you invisible. All of them are written from the conviction that erasure is not accidental. It is something that happened, by hands we can name, to women we can find again.
Different streams, different methods — but the same throughline. Bringing back what was taken, naming what was unnamed.
The flagship series. Essays on Black women in Abrahamic history whose presence has been minimized, mistranslated, or disappeared entirely. Each piece is an act of recovery. Free — because these women deserve to be found.
Cuba and Haiti gave the world more than they were ever credited for. So did the women who built those cultures from the ground up. Essays on the matriarchs, the resistance, the religion, the food, the music — and the women who carried it all.
The labor that held movements together, raised families, built communities, and was never put in the history books because it was considered ordinary. It wasn't.
The organizers, the strategists, the unnamed architects of change. They made the revolution possible. History remembered someone else. These essays go deep: original sourcing, scholarship, recovery work.
Sometimes the most honest place to start is here. Personal essays written first-person, without translation. On being a Cuban-Haitian Muslimah, a daughter of two diasporas, and the woman who decided to put herself on the page anyway. For the people who want to go all the way in.
I'm a Cuban-Haitian Muslimah, daughter of two diasporas, born and raised in New York City, building from Charlotte. I write because the women I come from — the ones in scripture, in the islands, in the movements, in my own family — were not erased by accident. Erasure is engineered. By translators. By historians. By the men who wrote the books. By the cultures that decided whose labor counted and whose did not.
Recovery is its own kind of engineering.
This is the work I cannot not do. While I'm building organizational infrastructure by day, I'm building this archive by night and weekend — slowly, carefully, with the same rigor I bring to everything else. If you find your way here, you're already part of the work.
Sovereign property, kept where the writers and readers I trust have already gathered. Subscribe to follow along — free essays go out regularly; paid tiers unlock the deeper archive.
— Welcome to the recovery.