Arianna Adabachi

Miss Nora

The 1963 execution of my great aunt spurred my grandmother’s, her sister’s, migration from Belize to the United States. I only learned this story last summer, but having been the only woman ever executed by the Belizean government, Miss Nora has become somewhat of a legacy. By using the Victorian tradition of memorial hair art (a contemporary of Britain's colonization heyday) as a way to materially shape this legacy, I respond to the challenge of finding interpretative frameworks and starting points. How do I begin to understand Nora’s story? And on a personal level, how do I incorporate it into my life? Memorial hair jewelry was typically made from a loved one’s locks while they were still alive as a preemptive mourning measure. Preceding photography, these intricate pieces held physicality post-mortem while functioning as a portrait. Hailing from the tradition of holy relics, Victorian hair pieces differ in that they speak to an emergence of individualism. Using the wire-work technique, an individual’s hair would be woven and shaped into flowering wearths. 

Nora was executed because she had allegedly killed her husband, Ketchell Trap, who worked as a police constable in Orange Walk, Belize. Historiography suggests that the court decision to treat the case as a murder of a police officer, rather than as one of domestic violence, reflects the insecure state of Belize’s budding nationhood (in the following year, 1964, Belize was granted full internal self-governing).

I came across the only photograph that exists of my great aunt on the cover of a song entitled YES NORA LIVES. I never met Miss Nora (nor even my grandmother, Miss Winnie). I have never been to Belize (or to India, the country indentured servitude saw my ancestors displaced from, for that matter). My rendition of this Miss Nora, using the hair of my mother, my sister, my close friends, and myself, is not the portrait of an individual as much as a collective portrait in an attempt to make removal through successive diasporas and generations material.

Portrait, made from hair and wire, 2019