Silent Roots: Fatherhood, Slavery, and the Poetics of Memory is a research and creative project that stems from the author’s experience of the relationship between fatherhood, oral literature and cultural memory in Assiut. Aiming to culminate in an interactive book, it combines poetry, investigative research and archival images, accompanied by audio recordings that serve as a living archive. Beginning with childhood memories of her father’s storytelling, it follows the reverberations of slavery in Assiut and its impact on collective and individual narratives, possibly linked to tales passed down from enslaved people who were sold in one of Egypt’s largest 19th-century slave markets. It also examines the meeting points between modern poetry and folk literature and the layers of historical depth these traditions might carry. Silent Roots is a search for the father and for a silenced women’s memory that could find refuge only in poetry.