Made to outlive us.

Sanmdi means Saturday in Kwéyòl and Kreyòl, the creole languages of Saint Lucia, Dominica, and Haiti.

My mother liked to remind me: I was born on a Saturday. Gloria Saturday. Black Saturday.

Saturday was also the day for visiting my grandmothers. Their houses. Their furniture. Their market stalls. The gnarled hands and toothy grins, the purpose-built lives they had carried over from a bygone era.

The name fixes the business to that memory.

My maternal grandmother, Mina-Rose, lived in an old stone structure that had stood in the same spot for over 150 years.

That hut, and the ones surrounding it, had been used for different purposes over the years: plantation slave cells, slave quarters, and then housing for the free people of Roseau in the years after slavery ended.

She decorated that place with madras and beaded curtains and stools, makeshift sofa cushions hand-sewn and stuffed with foam and old clothes.

Her dining table, if it could even be called that, was blackened from candle burns, mosquito coils, scratched and aged and cracked. But it could hold my weight when I sat on it while my cousin fed me fresh papaya in the morning.

My paternal grandmother, Marie, lived in the city of Castries and led a different life.

She lived in a hand-built wooden house on stilts, red clay in her front yard, the path to her door lined with flowers.

I would visit her at the Saturday market where she sold fresh fruit, vegetables, and provisions.

I can remember the curved stool she sat on. How smooth it was from use. The places it had been repaired. The warmth it held.

Nobody in either of those houses has ever heard the word wabi-sabi. My grandmothers barely spoke English.

But they practiced it anyway. The belongings of Afro-Caribbean people, the structures, the cloth, the hides. That is what has always survived and stayed beautiful.

I remember the imperfections in the furniture, the mending, because throwing good things away was unthinkable. The repurposing of things from an era everyone else had agreed to forget.

Studio Sanmdi is my attempt to build from those houses.

The furniture enmeshes three philosophies I trust, each in tension with the other: the beauty of listwa, the honesty and simplicity of wabi-sabi, and the restraint of midcentury modernism.

The photography does what it has always done for me: it documents, it asks questions, it freezes moments we might never live again, it tells stories. About others. About myself. About you.