A poet engaging colonial memory might write about the way European colonisation's destruction of African political, cultural, and spiritual systems created the conditions not only for slavery but for the ongoing devaluation of Black knowledge and achievement; Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage" draws on colonial memory by situating the slave trade within the broader history of European expansion and conquest, connecting the specific trauma of the Middle Passage to the wider project of colonial domination; A student poet might explore colonial memory through the figure of a great-grandparent who was educated in a colonial school system and taught to despise African languages, tracing how that self-alienation passed down through generations; Audre Lorde's poetry engages colonial memory through its recovery of African and Caribbean cultural inheritances, insisting that colonial suppression did not succeed in destroying the cultural knowledge it targeted; A contemporary poet might write about colonial memory in relation to medical knowledge, exploring how African healing traditions were dismissed as superstition by colonial authorities while European medicine claimed universal validity and authority; The linguistic dimensions of colonial memory, the loss of African languages and the imposition of English, French, or Portuguese, are a recurring subject for diaspora poets who write about the experience of inheriting a coloniser's language as one's mother tongue