My Mother's Tender Script by Asiya Al. Sharabi

My Mother's Tender Script explores memory, illiteracy, and family history through photographs, handwritten address books, folded papers, and personal documents left behind by the artist's late mother, preserving one woman's life through a visual archive.

My Mother's Tender Script is built from family photographs, handwritten address books, folded papers, and personal documents left behind by the artist's late mother, Shukriya. The book explores memory, illiteracy, family history, and the everyday ways one woman documented her life.

Following her mother's death, Al. Sharabi inherited the small handbag she had carried everywhere. Inside were address books, folded scraps of paper, family photographs, medical records, simple drawings, and handwritten notes. What first appeared to be ordinary belongings slowly became the foundation of the project. Returning to those materials also marked her return to the studio after more than two years away.

At the center of the book are the address books that accompanied Shukriya throughout her life. Rather than simply recording names and telephone numbers, they reveal the system she created to live with illiteracy. They did not replace the education she never received. Instead, they became her way of navigating a world built on words.

Married at eleven, widowed at fifteen, and the mother of two before marrying the artist's father at seventeen, Shukriya spent much of her life finding her own ways to bridge the educational distance between herself and her husband, an educated writer and journalist. Whenever she met someone she wanted to stay in touch with, she asked them to write their name and telephone number on a scrap of paper or even a napkin. At home, she carefully copied the information into her address books, memorized what she could not read, and kept every piece of paper that entered her hands.

Years before her mother's death, Al. Sharabi began recording conversations with her. One exchange appears in the book:

Me: Mama, did you have a dream when you were young?
Mama: What do you mean?
Me: A dream. What did you want to be when you grew up?
Mama: I always wanted to make the best bread.
Me: No, I mean outside the kitchen.
Mama: Maybe a writer like your father... or maybe a judge.
Me: Why a judge?
Mama: A judge makes girls go to school by force, right?
Me: Why can't I find a photograph of you when you were young?
Mama: Only girls who go to school have their photos taken.

The book also follows another chapter of Shukriya's life. During visits to Egypt, she found moments of freedom that were difficult to experience in Yemen. She enjoyed dressing fashionably, visiting beauty salons, and having studio portraits made or asking her husband to photograph her. Years later, after motherhood, illness, and the passing of time, she chose to wear the hijab wherever she went, even during those visits to Egypt. The photographs preserve both chapters of her life.

Created using the nineteenth-century photographic process Resino-Pigmentype, Al. Sharabi layers her mother's portraits with pages from the address books she left behind. The handwriting comes directly from those pages and includes names, telephone numbers, doctors' notes, and small drawings. The repeated portraits were inspired by her mother's habit of repeating names, telephone numbers, and letters until she memorized them. Some of the folded pages throughout the book also reproduce the dried pigments left behind after each print, preserving traces of the photographic process alongside the archive.

Designed by Caleb Cain Marcus of Luminosity Lab, My Mother's Tender Script extends the archive into the physical structure of the book. Folded Japanese paper pages, layered sequences, and hidden photographs echo the experience of unfolding the papers, photographs, and handwritten traces preserved inside Shukriya's handbag. Across the cover, scattered Arabic letters, numbers, and vowel marks reflect the fragments of language that accompanied her throughout her life.