“The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time: it is this hidden cause that forbids the mention of its name. Always omitting a word, resorting to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of indicating it. It is the tortuous way that he preferred, in each meander of his indefatigable novel the Oblique Ts’ui Pen”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 1941
Tarrah Kranjak, an indigenous Peruvian woman orphaned as a child, was adopted by a working-class family and raised as the twin of her African-American foster brother. The early experience of racial difference laid the groundwork for her abiding preoccupation with belonging, orphanhood, ancestral exile, origins and how these constructs are inscribed on the body and in the archive.
In El Jardin de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan, the author does not seek to recover a stable and authentic identity prior to the circumstances of her birth and adoption, but to construct a psychic history, to imagine lineages, fabricate mothers and resurrect ancestors.
Through a combination of mistranslation strategies, projection and archival material Tarrah Kranjak attempts to find – or perhaps it would be better to say create – her place within the broader social, political and historical narratives of her birthplace: Lima, Peru. This is how she reclaims, rewrites, speculates and imagines a history that until now seemed lost.
Edition of 200 hand-bound copies
