About the Avatars

Background for the Avatars


Zaire


Zaire’s grandparents were young newlyweds when they were forced to leave their home in the Congo after the dictator Mobutu rose to power in 1965. They came to the United States in the late 1960s, carrying both grief and hope for a freer future. In 1972, their son was born.


Wanting his name to help him belong in America, and inspired by the freedoms they felt were possible there, they named him Darby, an English name associated with freedom.


Darby later met Lily in college. Lily was politically active and deeply engaged in the movements for racial justice that continued in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Her parents and grandparents were American, descended from ancestors who had been brought to America generations earlier through slavery.


When their son was born in 2001, Darby chose the name Zaire. He wanted the name to call forth the beauty of the great river once known by that name rather than the painful legacy of dictatorship and exile. To him, it carried the image of something deep, living, and enduring. Lily loved the name too, because of its African roots and the way it connected past and future.


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Amara


Amara was born in 2003. In 2013, when she was ten years old, she moved to the United States with her parents after they were invited to join the Film and Media Department at UC Berkeley. Before that, they had been teaching at the National Film and Television School near London.


Raised in an atmosphere of art, ideas, and urgency, Amara grew up watching her mother become deeply involved in Black Lives Matter. Through her mother’s passionate activism, Amara herself became aware from a young age of injustice, protest, and the unfinished work of freedom. She was also deeply moved by the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.


Her parents were highly regarded at Berkeley and often consumed by their work, which left Amara on her own much of the time. Her time alone eventually transformed into her cherished solitude. She became a free spirit, fiercely intelligent, creative, and rebelled against what seemed to her to be a broken government that had lost so much of its vision, its dignity, its trustworthiness … and as well … its compassion and humanity.


In 2022, Amara met Zaire while taking classes in Berkeley’s Film and Media Department. There was an immediate spark between them—creative, intellectual, and quietly electric.


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Caela


Caela was born in 2003 and grew up in Southern California. In 2021, shortly after beginning her studies in Berkeley’s Film and Media Department, she met Amara.


Caela’s favorite poet was e. e. cummings because he refused to conform to expectation. His poetry opened for her strange and beautiful depths of love, joy, intimacy, and freedom. She loved what was unconventional, alive, and unguarded.


Alongside her studies, Caela sang and played keyboard and guitar in a local band. Music was not simply a way to express herself; it was one of the ways she discovered more of her truer self in a world that did not make sense to her.


Her mother was a devout evangelical Christian and a stay-at-home parent. Her father was a physicist at UCLA. Caela loved her mother, but felt wounded by the judgment she experienced from her whenever she did not follow the religious path expected of her. Her father understood this tension and encouraged her to choose a school farther from home, where she could breathe more freely and become herself.


With strong grades and guidance from some of her father’s friends who taught at Berkeley, Caela was accepted. For her, Berkeley was not only an academic opportunity, it was a threshold into another life. And it not only gave her freedom to deepen and expand her relationship with music … it also gave her a safe place to explore the unseen and the mystery within life.


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Tahuya


Tahuya turned twenty-four in 2026.


A few months before he was born, his grandfather lost his wife. In the years that followed, his grandfather would tell him the same story again and again—the story of how he was named.


He told Tahuya that among some peoples of the Pacific Northwest, the owl was regarded as a guardian spirit of wisdom, mystery, and balance. In the stories he passed down, the owl was known as Tahuya, the Keeper of Secrets, a presence who appeared when people had lost their way and needed guidance back to themselves. Tahuya, he said, was the spirit who helped restore balance and led the lost toward a land of abundance. He would remind his grandson that the Guardian Owl still lives in the hearts of the people, as eternal as the mountains and the endless sky, and that guidance remains available to those who know how to listen.


When Tahuya was born, it was his grandfather who named him. He never called him by the names his young parents had given him. They had not stayed together, and neither was ready to raise a child. So his grandfather raised him in Sonoma Valley, California.


He also taught him that in the Wappo language, tso means earth or ground, and noma means home or village—together evoking the spirit of Sonoma as a home grounded in the land.


Tahuya inherited his grandfather’s love of music. Under his guidance, he learned to play many instruments, and the two of them sang and performed together for years at local gatherings, pubs, and restaurants. Music became their bond, their refuge, and their way of speaking to the world.


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Solina


Solina and Tahuya were childhood friends. They grew up only a couple of blocks apart and first met in a local park when they were small. Tahuya’s grandfather knew Solina’s family well, and they often invited both Tahuya and his grandfather to dinner.


As children, Solina and Tahuya loved to pretend they were songwriters and performers. They made up songs about an earth that could cry when chemicals were poured into it, about great waters choking with plastic, and about happy animals who could speak. Tahuya would play guitar while they sang, and in time he taught Solina how to play as well.


As they moved into their early teens, Solina’s family relocated closer to the vineyards, where her mother and father could earn better wages. Her grandparents had also worked in the vineyards, and her parents had followed that path. Though the move was only to Healdsburg—about forty-five miles away—it felt much farther. She and Tahuya rarely saw one another after that.


Years later, when they were both twenty-one, Tahuya and his grandfather came to perform in Healdsburg. There, Solina and Tahuya saw each other again. Something that had never fully disappeared came alive at once.


After that reunion, Solina began singing with Tahuya and his grandfather. As his grandfather grew older and began to slow down, he stepped back more often, content to watch the two younger musicians carry the music forward. He sensed the bond between them—something musical, soulful, and quietly destined.