The Inherited Wound

My grandmother's name was Eileen Elizabeth Gordon-Grant Merritt Naber. I am also named after her.

In 1942, at just 20 years old, Eileen Elizabeth was interned at Stanley Camp on the southern tip of Hong Kong Island after the Japanese occupation of the British colony. She had just qualified for the Olympic trials and had the long, elegant body of a swimmer. She came out over three years later with a permanently curved spine and a disease caused by malnutrition and pigeon droppings. Empire did that to her body by literally reshaping her, absorbing the trauma which would distill down the backs of my mother and me.

I have had five spine surgeries. Three fusions, with more coming. And while I’ve recovered, I’ve learned what I carry and what the women before me carried.

This project begins in the gap between her body and mine, and in the question of what moves between bodies across generations when the thing that moves is not love or money or memory, but the physical consequence of empire.

The Origin:

I grew up in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands — an American colony, sold by Denmark to the United States in 1917 for $25 million. My father came there in 1982 because his body needed warm water. Severe arthritis, a bad knee — he was a pharmacist who couldn't stand the Kentucky winters. He bought one drugstore, then two more and we followed.

I grew up pale-skinned and red-haired on an island I loved completely, absorbing a displacement I could not yet name. Too visible to belong, too rooted to leave.

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo hit while we had just moved back to Kentucky for my mother's health. I was eight years old, watching the national news show footage of looting while my father was unreachable on the island for three days. A ham radio operator finally got a message through to my mother. My father arrived home on an army bomber.

That storm would force us back. And so we returned to my adopted island home. St. Croix is home.

It took years of graduate study — a master's in political theory, research into what Dr. Hadiyah Sewer calls “invisible colonialism” — for me to understand that my discomfort on that island had a structure. That the slow, structural process by which a place gets hollowed out in ways that don't make the news had been reshaping everything around me my entire life.

And that I was part of that structure.

Even as a person shaped by the territory, I was helping to perpetuate it. That recognition — that one can be simultaneously a colonial subject, a colonial inheritor, and a settler colonist — is the moral and intellectual engine of this work. The project does not resolve that tension but lives inside it.

The Method:

The Inherited Wound is a long-form work of documentary photography and literary nonfiction tracing the ways colonial violence travels through bodies, landscapes, and generations — not as metaphor, but as fact.

The photographs are not illustrations of the writing and the writing is not captions for the photographs. They are two separate investigations of the same questions, running in parallel, in conversation with each other.

The photographic work is concerned with what is structurally present but visually unmarked: the architecture of dispossession, the landscape of extraction, and the body as historical record. All photographs below are shot on 35mm film.

The writing moves between personal history, archival research, oral history, and on-the-ground reportage. The body — Eileen Elizabeth's spine, my spine, the colonial city's bones — is the primary text throughout.

The Sites:

St. Croix, US Virgin Islands — Spring 2026. The project's origin and its most personal site. 250 years of Danish colonial administration followed by American governance without representation. The displacement crisis, the housing crisis, the hurricane, and the federal neglect. I have written for the St. Croix Avis previously and am returning to report and photograph.

Peru — Fall 2026, Arquetopia Foundation, the Sacred Valley and beyond. The colonial scars legible in the Andean landscape and in the lives of Indigenous communities. How erasure operates differently across a connected history.

Mexico City — February 2027, with the colonial city as recurring form. Its buried pre-colonial landscape, its present-day dispossession, the architecture of extraction that appears everywhere empire went.

Edenhope, Victoria, Australia — May 2027. Wotjobaluk country. A month-long residency examining land, colonial dispossession, and what it means to learn a place's buried history. My grandmother found peace in Australia after the war. I am returning to understand what that meant and what the land itself carries.

Hong Kong — Stanley, where Eileen Elizabeth's body was reshaped. The landscape today — the villas built over the internment site, the prison that remains, the sea. The Public Records Office and its archives of civilian internment. My own body photographed in the spaces where hers was transformed. [date TBD]

Copenhagen, Denmark — The Rigsarkivet holds approximately one mile of shelving of Danish West Indies colonial records: plantation logs, police court protocols, administrative files covering 250 years of St. Croix's history under Danish rule. These records sit in an archive in a Scandinavian capital that most people from St. Croix have never entered. I plan to do further archival research. [date TBD]

The Inherited Wound is an ongoing project. For inquiries, collaboration, or research correspondence: redmeleemedia@protonmail.com