Fragment No. 9

“I Should’ve Taken More Photos”: On Fragments, Fieldwork, and the Things We Pick Up and Leave Behind

At a shelter in Tijuana, a young man from Ghana told me he wished he had taken more photos.

He mentioned it when I asked if he had wisdom for others on the road. As we talked about the months it had taken him to reach the U.S./Mexico border — the buses, the boats, the walking and hitchhiking, the people he had met and then lost along the way, some to different routes, some to detention, some, he suspected, to death — he said he wished he had recorded the experience, to remember it, good, bad, and in-between.

He wanted to remember the faces. He wanted proof that others had existed alongside, that the journey had been shared rather than solitary. What he had instead of photos was memory — porous, softening at the edges — and the nagging sense that he should have documented more, captured more, held on to more, before the journey took it from him.

Since returning from the field, I’ve thought about that wisdom often. I was in Tijuana as part of research on Muslim migrants across the Caribbean and Latin America, in places like Bridgetown, Barbados, where small but resilient Muslim communities have grown out of decades of trade, marriage, and movement, and in the shifting, improvised landscapes of transit through Mexico, where Muslims from West Africa, Southwest Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere increasingly find themselves alongside Haitians, Venezuelans, and others on similar routes north.

These are not necessarily the geographies people expect when they picture Muslim life in movement. That story is usually told through Europe, through the Mediterranean, through more familiar maps of displacement in other places.

But the lives I have followed unsettle those maps. They show devotion practiced in borrowed rooms and courtyards, prayer times kept while waiting on buses, halal meals improvised from what is available, small communities of faith stitched together from people who share almost nothing except the road and the God they are praying to along it.

The stories people share with me during our interviews are rarely complete. They are fragments. A photo of a mosque in a city they passed through in Brazil, a voice note from a cousin left behind in West Africa, a name half-remembered because the person who introduced them is no longer reachable in detention in Arizona. People build and make sense of their lives in pieces, and they lose some of those pieces as they build them, and both things happen at once, for as long as the journey lasts – and beyond.

During this same period of fieldwork, I was carrying a fragment of the Museum for Islamic Art's dragon carpet — a small woven piece, cut from a handwoven doppelgänger of the museum's seventeenth-century Caucasian carpet, sent out into the world as one of a hundred such fragments meant to travel, gather stories, and eventually return to Berlin to be reassembled into a single whole again. 

I photographed it constantly as I went: laid out on a guesthouse floor in Bridgetown, propped against the border wall, held up against the light in half a dozen cities across the region and along the way. Those photos were meant to be part of the record, my own small contribution to the fragment's journey, evidence of where it had been and who had seen it.

And then my phone was stolen, and a corrupted backup file meant that most of my photos were gone. What I was left with, in the end, was the carpet fragment itself and the things it had picked up along the way — discoloration from the sun, stains from its dip into the Caribbean Sea, and a lot of sand from beaches that also ended up deposited in my suitcase.

Not everything was lost, however. A handful of images survived only because I had, at various points, sent them elsewhere before the phone disappeared — uploaded for the project's record or texted to a friend. 

So, instead of an archive, I have scraps, and the scraps themselves now read like a second, accidental map of my fieldwork. There is the fragment laid flat against the border wall in Tijuana, its dyed wool against murals painted on the rust-colored bollard fencing, a small woven thing photographed beside one of the largest and bluntest instruments of division I know, as if it might say something the wall could not: that people, patterns, and cloth had crossed borders long before this one existed and would keep doing so after it was gone. 

There is the image of the fragment half submerged in the Caribbean Sea, sand and saltwater working into its fibers, the wool darkening and lightening again as the water pulled it back and forth amidst the sargassum. 

Then it is lain out by another waterway, another border, this time between Mexico and Guatemala where migrants and daily commuters make their way on rafts lashed together from tire tubes and wood slats. A carpet meant for a floor in Berlin being reintroduced, briefly, to different worlds, places, and elements. 

And there is the carpet sitting in my suitcase, where I transported it between cities, so that every time I unpacked, a little grit came out with it — sand from Barbados scattering across an apartment in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, a small stowaway recording where the fragment had already been.

There is something fitting, if painful, about photos of this fragment taken, lost, and lingering. The dragon carpet itself was partially destroyed by an incendiary bomb during the Second World War, and when it was restored for the museum's centenary, the decision was made not to disguise the damage but to fill the missing sections with neutral color, so the carpet carries its own absence visibly as part of its design.

The fragments now traveling the world are cut from a rewoven double of that carpet, deliberately made to hold the marks of use and change, so that when they are eventually reunited, they will carry not the original pattern alone but the record of everywhere they have been. 

The carpet's story, in other words, is already a story about incomplete survival, about what is destroyed, what is rewoven, and what is kept as a trace of what came before.

Jacques Derrida wrote about what he called “archive fever” (mal d’archive), this burning desire, compulsion, and illness to preserve and hold on to memories, encounters, and other things, all with the anxious knowledge that preservation always fails, that the drive to record is haunted by the simultaneity of loss and forgetfulness.

This is not a comfortable concept for researchers, whose work depends on documentation. But it is, I believe, the way to describe what happens on the road, whether you are crossing a border by boat and by land or carrying a fragment of carpet from Barbados to Tijuana to interview those who do.

We take photos, we try to hold on to memories, conversations, and moments, we archive.

But the record slips away. The Ghanaian in Tijuana did not take photos and struggles now to maintain memories. The researcher loses their photos and struggles with how to write about what they encountered and carried.

Neither gap negates what happened. The experiences and encounters remain.

What is left, however, is not an archive — the photos, the write-ups, the record — but the stories we carry. They remain in our bodies and in our minds, retold and retooled, imperfect and incomplete, but ours.

The wall, the sea, the doorway, the sand in the suitcase. They were not meant to be the archive, but they are what remains. They are an imperfect record, fragmented and flawed — like all memory. And they will be passed on to other places. Other people. Other pieces.

The people I met survive the same way, in the stories they choose to share; in the things they “pick up and leave behind in the leftovers of the late-modern; and in how [they] decide to be and become this people or that people…something beyond or in between.”

The story of the dragon carpet, its history as an object, its journeys as a project in pieces, and its particular sojourn with me in the Americas remind us that we cannot keep everything. We can only account for the life we actually live, and pass our stories, fragment by fragment, into someone else's hands.

There is, of course, immense creative potential and humility found in those tensions, in other words, the “what if?” inherent in such liminality.

And that repertoire seems all the more relevant to me in the wake of this experience, in a time when how we see ourselves, how we believe we belong to one another, and how we see ourselves obligated (or not) to those connections, will in large part dictate whether we flourish, falter, or fail as societies, as people, in the future.