I was thinking of one of the questions proposed in class for the blog carnival as telling a story of recent repairs, and I could not get my mind off repair as “rejection”. This repair includes interactions with physical and digital things and non-things, with me as the hub at the center. I have had to continuously repair my mental health by rejecting (to borrow from one of the elements in Walton et al.’s 4R model) unfavorable stereotypes that emerge from false and incomplete single stories around Blackness and Africanness. (90) [TO-15]
[Odell, 2019; Han, 2022; Walton et al. 2019; Jackson, 2013; Adichie, 2009]
You have me thinking now about reparative verbs, but also reparative intervals. “Repair” associated with many other possible actions, some favoring a path of recovery, or brining back, and others favoring a path of release, or letting go. Perhaps repair stories, like repair itself, tend to follow iterative or repeating loops; after all, what is once and for all repaired after just one mend?