In Our Diaspora Is a Severed Tree, I escavate my family’s archive like an archeologist unearths artifacts in sediment. I dig beneath layers to uncover buried histories. I try to find a complete picture of my family history, but I am met with the absences in the archive, the gaps in the histories, and the lapses in our memories. I gather documents and photographs only to find the same events documented—years in between never to be recovered. The silences in the archive become part of our history.