BEFORE WE ARE BORN
Alex Jr. Kich
Some children remember a place where they have never been.
Children begin to draw the same place.
They live in different contexts, should not know each other and describe images with small variations: shapes, paths, spaces and presences that seem to belong to a memory older than their own lives.
At first, adults look for familiar explanations. Influence, coincidence, cultural repetition, leading questions. But the drawings accumulate details that make each isolated explanation less sufficient.
Beatriz moves to the center of the investigation when she realizes the problem is not only in what the children draw, but in how naturally they speak about it. For them, it is not exactly a discovery. It is a memory.
The book follows the attempt to investigate the phenomenon without turning children into instruments. The more adults press for answers, the greater the risk of manufacturing exactly what they want to prove.
Before We Are Born approaches an old question without turning it into doctrine. It does not aim to prove reincarnation, a past life or religion. Its terrain is stranger: what if part of human identity carries information that did not begin at birth?
- Series
- Cosmological Chronicles
- Volume
- VI
- Original title
- ANTES DE NASCERMOS
- Author
- Alex Jr. Kich
- Status
- In development
The setting is deliberately everyday: houses, schools, children’s drawings, interviews, hallways and families. The contrast between the ordinary and the impossible sustains the book.
The phenomenon does not arrive from the sky. It surfaces on sheets of paper, in spontaneous remarks and in play. The human scale keeps the story from becoming abstract: the mystery passes first through the hands of a child holding a pencil.
Beatriz
Central figure in the investigation and an important bridge to The Archive of the Dead. She must protect the children while trying to understand what they seem to know.
The children
They do not work as a supernatural chorus. Each keeps her or his own voice, fear, distraction and personality. The phenomenon is more unsettling because it appears mixed with the normality of childhood.
Lia
A recurring counterpart who takes part in different faces of the Archive. Her presence here links origin, time and the question of continuity.
Helena Saldanha
One of the recurring Helenas in the collection. Her role preserves the rule of recurring counterparts: the repetition of the name points to different attempts, not to a simple chronology of a single biography.
The human conflict lies between protecting and investigating. Adults want answers, but children must not become laboratory material. The book asks how much of our curiosity remains legitimate when the object of study is a vulnerable person.
Before We Are Born unsettles the very idea of a beginning.
A biography usually has a clear marker: we are born, we live, we die. The novel introduces memories that seem to arrive before the first chapter.
The question need not be “is there life before life?” A more fertile formulation is: how much of us really begins with us?
Families hand children language, habits, fears and stories. Genetics hands over other inheritances. The book extends this logic into a territory where memory too may precede the individual.
But there is an essential care: the mystery must not erase childhood. The children remain children. They do not exist to utter solemn riddles all the time.
Philosophically, the volume also confronts the idea of a closed identity. Perhaps being someone is not having a single origin, but crossing continuities we cannot map.
Children’s drawings, chalk, a house, stick figures, impossible memories, repetition and the word “wait.”
Intimate, emotional and growing mystery, with the extraordinary surfacing inside familiar, childlike situations.