my grandma’s garden:
beyond resilience
Anastasia Achieng Onyango
my grandma’s garden:
beyond resilience
Anastasia Achieng Onyango
In collaboration with her grandmother, Christinah Munyiva Muthiani
“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.
We need some kind of tomorrow.”
~ Toni Morrison
Listen and scroll.
“By 2075, we will each have our own kind of tomorrow. By then, we will be beyond resilience. Because embedded in resilience is having to weather unfailingly the circumstances that have made us have to adapt. By then, we will no longer be in a state of survival mode but have achieved a dynamic with our surroundings that centers mutual care.
My grandma’s garden represents this lesson to me.
I have witnessed how my grandma tends to the cilantro saplings in her greenhouse before they get planted. How she can hear the sound of sweet potatoes under the earth before harvesting them. How she threshes the bean stalks after they have been sun dried. We are nourished by her garden’s maize, pumpkin leaves and green peas. And also the sisal plants, whose threads become baskets that we use daily. It’s this traditional Kamba practice of weaving that my grandma gifted me three years ago and it is through this medium that I most appreciate the generational love and knowledge espoused by her and the emotional connection she has to her land.
And given that I am still learning our language, she taught me all of this without English, without words.
This installation encapsulates that feeling of safety and sanctity. The feeling of being at home on this Earth...an all encompassing appreciation…because you can feel how an ecology is sacred…because you can feel an abundance of nourishment.”
-Anastasia Achieng Onyango
“Some of my yesterday was discovering computer applications– pinball, Microsoft Paint and then Google Earth. grabbing my mom to show her Google Earth, locating our town Beckley, West Virginia. Her instructing my pre-teen hand controlling the mouse scroll and zoom, scroll and zoom, across 8,000 miles finding the blue roof. She had built this home for her parents (what grandpa described to me as a mansion). The only structure with a blue roof in Nthunguni and an image of home to hold onto despite close to a decade of separation, for us both, for her especially.” Anastasia Onyango, GoogleEarth Image, 18 May 2012, "Blue Roof"
“My some kind of today is trailing behind my grandma as she walks around her greenhouse.” Anastasia Onyango, Photography, 15 February 2024, "Following Her Footsteps"
“My some kind of tomorrow looks like being at my grandma’s house, walking the 10 meters to my grandpa’s resting site, being overwhelmed by a comforting flood of tears and saying over and over thank you so much.” Anastasia Onyango, Photography, 13 July 2025, "Nau's Resting Site"
Anastasia Achieng Onyango
25, Boston, Massachusetts USA
“There’s a photo that exists somewhere that I can’t seem to find, and it’s of me at 16 years old, climbing a mango tree, in our village in Kenya, with my grandparents at the base of the trunk. I wish I could find that photo.
I wish for a lot of things that that photo seems to encapsulate – childlike whimsy, adventure that is actively surpassed by imagination, time for leisure, closeness to those who have come before me.
Wishing is so key to the feeling of nostalgia for me, and this is particularly true when I think of my lost and found origins. I am grateful that this project was an opportunity to switch from wishing to basking – basking in the bond that my grandma and I have cultivated the past few years.
This project mirrors many of my others that centers an intimate exploration of my relationship to my communities. Through theater, film and curation, the art making process has been a site for healing and connection. (Really, it was the original for colored girls who demonstrated the power of collective storytelling).
Nowadays, I find my creativity to be a more solitary process that addresses my acute needs to be soothed rather than my chronic ponderings on belonging. Creating my color combinations based only on the (sometimes wholly limiting) options given to me by my grandma, surprising her with new patterns I’ve created, and carrying my work-in-progress baskets to hangouts has only tipped me further into the zone of basking. Weaving makes me feel grounded in the hands and technique of those watching from afar. With this installation, I am bringing what makes me feel safe and good to others and in that way, encouraging gratitude and reflection on what makes you feel safe and good.”
Anastasia Onyango is a sister and medical student currently based in Boston, MA, who enjoys co-creating art-based public health interventions.