Dutch rule in Suriname lasted for three centuries, establishing a plantation colony based on slave labor mostly supplied by the Dutch West India Company. It is estimated that around 213,000 people were brought to Suriname as part of the Atlantic slave trade. In the plantations, communication among enslaved people was strongly surveilled and repressed—and they often spoke different languages from each other—however, they found common ground through song, storytelling, fabrics, braids, and a whole array of creative codes that hid their messages in plain sight. Creating these secret languages not only helped them survive, organize and resist, but also allowed them to preserve their own version of history across time.

Michelle Piergoelam is a dutch photographer from Surinamese descent. Her parents migrated to The Netherlands when they were only kids, losing contact to their Surinamese culture through assimilation. So when Michelle got curious about her ancestral roots and about a place she had never been to, she dived into those secret languages that held the history of her ancestors. Her ongoing project, The Untangled Tales (The Untangled Tales, explores the myths, songs and codes that enslaved people used to communicate, and which have survived thanks to oral history. Her project is an attempt to document history in a way that focuses on the perspective of enslaved people.

The first chapter of her project, also titled The Untangled Tales, grew out of the Anansi myths, the stories about a deceiving spider dealing with a tiger who tried to make his life miserable, and often defeating him through trickery and mischief. The Anansi stories were one of those ways in which the enslaved people managed to encode messages as they gathered to tell stories at night. In this same chapter, Michelle also explores the angisa headscarves, another secret language that developed after the years of slavery and that was mostly used by women who passed messages like «"Let them talk"», «Wait for me at the corner» o «"Trouble"» through the way they folded their angisas. The second part of this project, Songs in a Strange Land, moves to the water to find the songs sung by rowers in the night. Like in the many other work activities in which the enslaved people sang, songs offered to spirits and ancestors helped them make the rowing more bearable and find their collective rhythm—and also, the songs were hidden messages and intel traveling across plantations as they navigated down the river. 

But how do you photograph what is supposed to be hidden? How do you make visible the invisible? The brilliance of this project is that Michelle is not merely retelling history or revealing the codes, but also imagining how these messages were told: in what spaces, with what elements and gestures, under which circumstances, to whom and with whom. That is, the materiality, relationality and corporeality of language. And so palm tree, hand gesture, water, night, spider, forest, fabric: they all become tellers of the story, they all speak. This project reminds us that to «see» language you need to see the bodies, materialities, landscapes, and contexts in which they exist. The photos present us with a speaking world, and therefore, asks of us to see that world as capable of speaking. 

That the enslaved people could hide their messages in plain sight not only tells us something about their creativity and ingenuity, but also about the limitations of the slavers, whose prejudices and assumptions hindered them from recognizing that others were capable of complex communication: of conceptualizing and expressing their own experience of the world, their own cosmovisions, their own aspirations and possibilities for the future. Enslaved people, in turn, found ways to have conversations that included everything around them, visible and invisible. They developed relationships and common languages with strangers, with a new land, with the elements and the spirits. Whether it was through stories of a small creature defeating a mighty beast, through folded warnings, or songs to water spirits, their emancipatory project—the imagination of a world beyond the one imposed—was a diverse and more-than-human conversation.  

In times of ecological crisis and persisting systems of oppression, Michelle's project reminds us of the wisdom and strength demonstrated by the people forced to endure uproot, violent systems and constant uncertainty. In their difficult circumstances, they found allies all around them and learned how to listen and speak to them, placing themselves in conversation with the world. Tales were told that everyone could hear and see—only those blinded by their assumptions couldn't understand them. Centuries later, those tales and songs are still here, carrying a message about both the past and the future.