Ek Khaale • တရံရောအခါက • Once Upon A Time

For people in Myanmar (Burma), the Rohingya community’s history has been, at best, questioned, and at worst —and in reality—rejected outright. So much of the Rohingya’s visual history has been lost, confiscated or destroyed during waves of violence, forced displacement and genocide over the past 60 years.  This destruction continues today. This has severely undermined ways in which the Rohingya preserve and share their collective memory, identity and history with others. 

Ek Khaale, is a collaborative, participatory storytelling and visual restoration project. In late 2021, several years after genocidal violence forced three quarters of a million Rohingya into Bangladesh, the project Ek Khaale was launched by photographer Greg Constantine. It was launched in collaboration with Rohingya in refugee camps in Bangladesh, as well as those still living inside Burma, and among the diaspora in the US, UK, Canada, Malaysia and Europe.

Working with Rohingya youth and Rohingya elders, the project seeks out historical visual materials that Rohingya have miraculously preserved, secretly held on to all these years (often at great personal risk) or have salvaged and carried with them under the most unimaginable circumstances.

Old photographs, family collections, documents, letters and illustrations contributed by Rohingya are combined with historical materials from a variety of public and private archives. These memories of family and evidence of historical existence as a community have been displaced and separated into pieces all over the world, just like the Rohingya community.  This project brings these materials and stories from the past back together again into the present.

Woven through the visual materials are the voices of Rohingya found in old letters and correspondence with the voices of Rohingya living today. Collectively, they show and share the story of a community with a long and deep connection to a place they have called home for centuries, Arakan, and a nation they helped create and contribute to before they were slowly and systematically excluded from it, Burma.

By exposing this unseen past, this project aims to share a visual portrait of the Rohingya most people have never seen before. It also challenges and reconstructs what Burmese regimes and other communities have spent decades trying to destroy.

Please contact Greg directly if you are interested in sharing this story - grconstantine@gmail.com

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