Art of the African Diaspora 2022 selection, Elmina Chic (2019), Ghana, West Africa
When I decided to go to Ghana, West Africa, it was to see the famous slave dungeons: Elmina and Cape Coast. I’d been to Gorée Island in Senegal and Juffureh[1] in Gambia. Neither stirred ancestral energy. Well, I felt something stirring at Juffureh simply because of the female chief’s welcome. She was Alex Haley’s kinswoman. I felt the welcome in her smile and her assertion and raised fist: “Obama!” I felt welcomed, certainly seen. It was unlike Gorée, where I felt nothing inside, except intellectual horror when I saw the solicitude paid to the French. Of course, this trade in Black kins-people was terrible; however, it would not be until I was led into these wombs several years later alone, with Seestah IMAHKÜS Njinga Okofu Ababio (One Africa), another Diaspora mother of the continental drift, would I truly feel a tangible lingering trauma.
Even then I felt no immediate inclination to release the hurt. I didn’t feel safe enough to let my imagination or blood memories travel into spaces I might have difficulty returning from. The trade in African ancestors is a deep ravine or tunnel I am still trying to find my way from. I was born into this legacy at once strong and bold and tenacious. I think I needed the congestion and confusion, consternation and unknown fear – tears or anguish to enable release. All this breathing space allows too many unwelcome thoughts. Ideas reside where I just want quiet—I put my left hand over my right and sink into what is long forgotten.
As I walked the fort, I was outside my body – an animate corpse looking into holes and bed chambers, then into cells for the unruly rebellious ones who never left the tombs. My feet were adhered to sticky blood soaked floors, feces caked – I didn’t fall down, yet felt pulled into a darkness I used my phone flashlight to illuminate.
There was a nonchalance of the disaffected: “You feel too much,” the uniformed guides and guards said as European descendants of the perpetrators walked silently nearby. Many of them had African descendent wives or girlfriends. I had to negotiate a discount. Why should I pay to visit these ancestral gravesites? “For the upkeep,” I was told. The same is true for the journey. I have never vacationed in Africa. It is a journey filled with hardship. When is fun deprivation?
Elmina is one of many, slave dungeons along the Gold Coast, in Ghana, West Africa. The edifice is weathered, haunted by memories visitors carry in suitcases past customs— Inheritance spilled between this location and that to come in a land beyond our ancestors’ wildest imaginations. Neither prey nor indigenous predators knew the cost of this severance, breach, hole filled with Black bodies which from then to now, do not matter. Value has always been a negotiable yet tangible notion among traders in Blackness, especially once the commodities were no longer worth the dollars[2] they were printed on. Drowned, repatriated, imprisoned, worked to death and then recycled—Black memories are stirred here—this space both sacred and profane. Elmina is a gravesite. We visit to put flowers on the mounds, to feed the wandering ghosts, to pour water on stained walls, dash floors, leak into tunnels.
We walk these hallowed chambers where our ancestors suffered fates worse than death, because despite the casualties, many captives lived. They didn’t live long, but they reached outposts in the Pacific and Caribbean, Indian and Atlantic oceans where they wrote a new Black chapter.
There are no return tickets to Elmina dungeon and other waystations. The exit migration was one way for most descendants. There is mystique and lore attached to these geographic spaces. We fantasize about homecomings. Pilgrimages. Alex Haley’s "Roots" the prototype. And for some, there is this welcome. For me, there was none.
I was seen as a reverse negative. White woman in Black face.
157 years post-Civil War conclusion, I, an African Diaspora descendant, questions landmarks like this. Landmarks that lament, reinjure and sanctify victimhood—Elmina Dungeon a stop on a Black History Reeducation Tour. What legacy does this promote? Reparations. Land. Healing from the MAAFA? Are such sojourns a path to reunification? African Americans are what was left, forgotten, discarded. We are the fragile egg the Sankofa bird holds gently in its mouth. Akwaaba! Welcome?
posted by Interchange @ 10:53 PM
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