In 2021 after discovering a listing on eBay for a colonial postcard featuring a nude Egyptian woman, I was left with infinite questions. I imagined asking the women subjects: Who are you? What is your name? How do you refer to yourself? Where are you from? Where was this photo taken? What are your interests? What are your dreams?

In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman (2008) asked, “how does one tell impossible stories?” to mitigate the limits of the archive in relation to Transatlantic slavery. Guided by Hartman’s critical fabulation framework, my study is an attempt to “tell impossible stories” of Egyptian colonialism that centres the agencies of women subjects. I created an archive of fourteen postcards and analyse these images-as-artefacts in relation to colonial cultural mythologies, guided by Amira Jarmakani’s aesthetic critique in Imagining Arab Womanhood (2015), Hartman’s critical fabulation (2008), and by artistic interventions, such as the exhibit Making the Postcard Women’s Imaginarium (2022) curated by Salma Ahmad Caller.

I argue that, through centring sentimentalities in academia, honouring the experiences of individuals beyond ethnographic evidence, and respecting the agency of colonial photographic subjects, then we can mitigate the limits of the archive, and build an understanding of colonial visual culture that is nuanced, multiple, and full of individual human narratives.