I've Never Seen My Father Cry

After leaving Congo alone at 7, my father returns 46 years later to a country he no longer recognizes. His frozen childhood memories collide with today’s reality, exploring exile, identity, and the confrontation between memory and the present.

I’ve Never Seen My Father Cry Chapter One: Homecoming.

For as long as I can remember, my father has never spoken to me about the Congo. When he was sent to Belgium alone to study, he was only seven years old. A childhood brutally torn away. At seventeen, he returned briefly, but the echo of this passage has left deep wounds.46 years without seeing his family again. The shock is immediate. Memories arise, darker, more complex. How to face one's demons? How to reconcile the past with the present? Every step he takes is a struggle, a confrontation between the deceiving vestiges he fled and the reality of a Congo that has changed, that is no longer the same. Each moment is a key, opening a door to the past. But behind these doors, there is also the emptiness left by uprooting, the weight of a fragmented identity. Congo, this country that has always seemed distant and abstract to me, nevertheless contains part of my history. As a child, I would ask questions, but the answers were often fragmentary, sometimes silent, as if revisiting these memories hurt too much. This first chapter is an attempt to recompose my father's story, to put words and images to what has been shattered. It's the beginning of a journey in which photographs become bridges between memory and reality, between the child he was and the man he is. A quest for meaning, a need to reconnect with my origins. Through places, images and stories, I try to rediscover that lost memory, the one that forged my father, and which, in a way, forges me too. This trip to the Congo is only the first step in this quest for memory and identity. Although deeply meaningful, this experience is only a prelude to a larger goal: to return to my father's hometown, Mbuji-Mayi. It is there, at the heart of his earliest memories, that I will truly be able to capture the essence of his story and, by extension, my own. This photographic project will continue to unfold, in search of answers, meaning and reconciliation with the deep roots that shape us all.