The Mother is dead and is to be buried. The night of the wake, her daughters gather for the first time after being estranged for years. This tale sways between family secrets and intimate wounds, the desire to never look back and yet the necessity to honor our ancestry: digging through the archeology of silence plaguing a matrifocal family, Raphael’s Islands questions the ability for anyone to write themselves free from the atrocities of slavery and colonialism and by doing so, healing themselves, their dead, and hopefully humanity.