by Dionne Brand
All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle Ingenia of people in foreign lands.
Albrecht Durer, 1519,
when he saw artifacts that had been sent, together with six
Aztecs, by Hernan Cotes to Charles V
II
Katherina alt 20 jar: “I have drawn the portrait in charcoal of Faktor Brandao’s Secretary. I drew a portrait of his negress with metal point.” Katherina was the servant of a Portuguese factor, Joao Brandao. The Portuguese at the time controlled the shipping routes to Asia and Africa. Katherina was African, enslaved. Durer was also a collector of exotica: parrots, tortoises, monkeys, Chinese porcelains, African ivories, coral, cane arrows, fish skins, buffalo horns, coconuts.
All artists are involved in their time.
Captive and Inhabited
I
1
Those men, raiding villages, leading coffles, throwing buckets of water, those examining limbs and teeth, those looking into eyes for rebellion, those are the captors who enter the captive’s body. Already inhabiting them as extensions of themselves with a curious dissociation which gave them the ability to harm them as well. Slaves became extensions of slave owners — their arms, legs, the parts of them they wished to harness and use with none of the usual care of their own bodies. These captive bodies represent parts of their own bodies that they wish to rationalize or make mechanical or inhuman so as to perform the tasks of exploitation of resources or acquisition of territory. These captive bodies then become the tools sent out to conquer the natural world. Of course they aren’t merely tools but the projections of the sensibilities, consciousness, needs, desires, and fears of the captor.
2
Henry Louis Gates sits across from a man in Kumasi. He has come to Africa to film a PBS scene about African civilization, the Middle Passage, the Door of No Return; the connections between the Diaspora and the continent. The man across from him is Black; he might be a descendant of a slave trader, as he is a descendant of a prominent family in Kumasi, and Kumasi was a major trading centre for slaves. I expect an intelligent, dispassionate discussion about the geopolitics of the time. Suddenly a plaintive and childish question from Henry Louis Gates: to paraphrase, “Why did you sell us?” The Kumasi man of course has no answer. His look is sheepish — as if he is implicated in the present. Gates, a usually sophisticated erudite, is completely genuine, as if addressing a brother or an uncle or a cousin. Nothing matters, not the geopolitics, not political history, not colonialism, not all the time in between. Gates picks up after centuries as if they had spoken only days or months or even just a few years ago; as if he knew this man and had simply been waiting until he saw him in person to ask him, “Why did you sell us?” I switch the station, suddenly embarrassed at the question and the answer. There is no answer. The Door of No Return is ajar between them. I can see its impossibility. They are as in an old remembered attitude. Gates, in all his other explorations of the continent, is the quintessential American traveller, oohing and ahing about wonders, skeptical about claims of civilization, lecturing about civilization, fearful about being in Africa, revelling in the occasional familiarity and pointing out dissimilarity wisely. But here, faced at last with the man from Kumasi, he asks a childlike question to which there is no answer.
3
Not a few in our Country fondly imagine that Parents here sell their Children, Men their Wives, and one Brother the other: But those who think so deceive themselves; for this never happens on any other account but that of Necessity, or some great Crime: But most of the Slaves that are offered to us are Prisoners of War, which are sold by the Victors as their Booty.
… But yet before we can deal with any Person, we are obliged to buy the King’s whole stock of Slaves at a set price; which is commonly one third or one fourth higher than ordinary: After which we obtain free leave to deal with all his Subjects of what Rand soever. But if there happen to be no stock of Slaves, the Factor must then resolve to run the risk of trusting the Inhabitants with Goods to the value of one or two hundred Slaves; which Commodities they send into the In-land Country, in order to buy with them Slaves at all Markets, and that sometimes two hundred miles deep in the Country: For you ought to be informed that Markets of Men are here kept in the same manner as those of beasts with us.
— Letter, William Bosman, 1700
In another portion of the documentary, Gates brings several African-Americans to the Door of No Return — a slave castle in Ghana, Elmina. They stand or sit in various states of emotional collapse as Gates probes them on whether they know that their ancestors were sold by Africans. They reply no. The knowledge seems to add greater sadness to them. The scene is full of silences. Even a film editor cannot cut out or put in such silences.
4
More than two hundred years ago a strange variation of Gates’s conversation with the man from Kumasi took place between a man captured into slavery and the British explorer Mungo Park.
As I was one day conversing with the slaves which this Slatee had brought, one of them begged me to give him some victuals. I told him I was a stranger, and had none to give. He replied, “I gave you victuals when you was hungry. Have you forgot the man who bought you milk at Karankalla? But (added he, with a sigh) the irons were not then upon my legs!” immediately recollected him, and begged some ground nuts from Karfa to give him, as a return for his former kindness. He told me that he had been taken by the Bambarrans, the day after the battle at Joka, and sent to Sego; where he had been purchased by his master, who was carrying him down to Kajaaga.
5
“It is not enough just to have a map. We need a cognitive schema …” What if the cognitive schema is captivity? Then Gates can only ask his question, his question without expecting an answer, because it is a question, really, of the heart. Surely the intelligence of the heart knows there is no answer worth hearing, no answer able to salve its breakage. No answer is forgivable and forgiveness, to tell the truth, will not do.
II
1
The body is the place of captivity. The Black body is situated as a sign of particular cultural and political meanings in the Diaspora. All of these meanings return to the Door of No Return — as if those leaping bodies, those prostrate bodies, those bodies made to dance and then to work, those bodies curdling under the singing of whips, those bodies cursed, those bodies valued, those bodies remain curved in these attitudes. They remain fixed in the ether of history. They leap onto the backs of the contemporary — they cleave not only to the collective and acquired memories of their descendants but also to the collective and acquired memories of the other. We all enter those bodies.
The Black body is a domesticated space as much as it is a wild space. It is domesticated in the sense that there are set characteristics ascribed to the body which have the effect of familiarizing people with it — making it a kind of irrefutable common sense or knowledge. It is a wild space in the sense that it is a sign of transgression, opposition, resistance, and desire. The Black body is culturally encoded as physical prowess, sexual fantasy, moral transgression, violence, magical musical artistry. These ascriptions are easily at hand for everyday use. Much as one would use a tool or instrument to execute some need or want.
2
The Black body is a kind of “naturalized” body in the popular culture. Appreciated in athletes, musicians, singers; absent in the public discourse as associated with the scientific — the scientific being the remaining range of activity, activity having formal authority. In Western culture the natural is always captive to science. When unappreciated, the Black body is shown walking, single file or double chained, in film footage of prisoners in bright orange overalls or in prison boot camps as young offenders, or in sweeping shots along barred prison interiors which strangely, filmed in colour, look like black-and-white film. So dominant are these images, so compelling, that their affectat
ions have been adopted by young people who wear baggy trousers which hobble their feet into the shuffle of chained prisoners in ill-sized clothing. Other styles of captivity have also been adopted, such as the one-legged trouser hitched to the knees, not to mention of course the multinationals like Benetton whose ad campaign featured prisoners on death row, a good many of whom were Black. The many permutations and inversions of the original captivity leach into the contemporary popular discourse and the common sense. These captives, the contemporary young people in orange overalls, give off the essence of danger, of emotions out of control which have to be suppressed, of a violence, if not put under control, which will come down like a flood on the whole of society. Most of these young people are incarcerated for drug use or petty drug dealing, and one cannot miss the scowling presences these images cast, nor the code they transmit.
In many senses the Black body is one of the most regulated bodies in the Diaspora. Perhaps the most regulated body is the female body, any female body, but the Black body is a close and symbolic second. (The female body is also a “naturalized” body — like the Black body having no ability to articulate itself outside of its given “natural” functions. It too is a domesticated space, a space taken over by a process, cultivated into a symbol.) By regulated I mean that there are specific societal functions which it is put to, quite outside of its own agency — functions which in fact deny and resist its agency. It is as if its first appearance through the Door of No Return, dressed in its new habit of captive and therefore slave, is embedded in all its subsequent and contemporary appearances.
3
The Black body is signed as physically and psychically open space, almost always in the Diaspora. A space not simply owned by those who embody it but constructed and occupied by other embodiments. Inhabiting it is a domestic, hemispheric pastime, a transatlantic pastime, an international pastime. There is a playing around in it. There is marvel at its strength or grace or speed or agility. As well, there is a constant manipulation of its transgressive trope. More than marvel, of course, there is the not unwilling commercial exploitation of the Black body.
I hear my neighbour downstairs enter Shaquille O’Neal’s body every night of the NBA championships this year, 2000. He, my neighbour, is white, I don’t know of what origin. I have glimpsed him sometimes — average height, average weight, thirtysomething. We fight, he and I, over his noisy bathroom fan, which he keeps on all night long. He has a sleep disorder; he needs the fan’s sound to block out all the little sounds that wake him up. We both watch the NBA championships. This is what I hear: Each time Shaquille scores a basket, he, my neighbour, makes an ecstatic, painful sound as if he is entering Shaquille’s body, inhabiting Shaquille’s powerful arms, his beautiful head, leaping into Shaquille as Shaquille leaps in the air. The sound my neighbour makes startles me. It is guttural yet it soars; it is sexual, it hits every register of passion. I stop watching the game; halt my own dance into Damon Stoudamire’s bouncy legs, his speed and fakes. This is entering the body valued.
Or when while watching the Olympics in Seoul, the whole nation, Canada, entered the body of Ben Johnson for 9.79 seconds; entered his thick muscular legs tuned to their powerful swiftness, his determined face, his breathing precisioned and loose, the entire locomotion of him straining to contain our invasions and break the tape. The utter victory of him, the fabulous elation, when the nation and he reached beyond what it was humanly possible to do, which is the quest of humanity. And then several hours later the unceremonious decamping when his steroid use was discovered, the nation fleeing from his body like parasites fleeing a skeleton which had now become the evil Black body. The body valued and cursed in 9.79 seconds.
I am not suggesting that only whites enter Black bodies. I am suggesting that we all enter the Black body embracing its symbolisms. Inhabiting the Black body is also an act in which Blacks engage. We all take part in its mask, its performance. The Black body is a common possession, a consumer item. Technology has made this possible even beyond the borders of the original discourse. So that a young person in Azerbaijan or Texas or Istanbul or Stockholm can embody Michael Jordan with an innocence which belies but nevertheless witnesses the loaded narrative.
Looking at Black Entertainment Television’s Midnight Love, a music video show, I notice the extreme sexualizing of both the male and the female Black body. It is not the colonizing watcher who creates these bodies; these extremely sexualized bodies are created, and inhabited or invaded, by Black women and men themselves. It is a curiously complicated doubleness. The Black person inhabits the Black body which is a cipher of the dreams, memories, horrors, and fears of Black bodies, in a performance of sexuality cut through with racialized assumptions of the Black body as “overly” sexual (whatever Puritanism that concept contains). This performance is primarily for an audience of Black people who are invited to join in this inhabiting and invading. The performances themselves are further exaggerations of sexual prowess; the sexual prowess is itself performance. At times inadvertent and at times mocking, these videos execute the racialized fantasy of the Black body.
The trope of captivity is so compelling that it is curiously entwined in interpretations of romantic love. In a playful song, “911,” full of double entendre, singers Wyclef and Mary J. Blige sing to each other that someone should call the police for their heartbreak. They infer that this love of theirs would get them life in prison. Or when rappers Ja Rule and Vita rap “Put It on Me” they enact a scene with Ja Rule in prison having left his lover set up outside with an expensive house and jewellery. They rap of a love that will survive incarceration. In one line Ja Rule tellingly signifies that the world does not belong to Black people else he would give it to his lover.
4
How to describe this mix of utter, hopeless pain and elation leaning against this door? Caribana, on Lakeshore Boulevard in the city of Toronto. There are some one million people there, some are costumed, all are in the throes of the most unfettered pleasure; dancing, singing, joking, eating. This is the major Black festival in Canada, Caribbean in origin, Black now in enactment. For there are Blacks from the United States who make the trek to Toronto for the festival. Among the million there are myriad “origins.” Flags representing these origins are wrapped around heads, torsos, and legs, carried in hats, in hands, and by babies. Every once in a while a band leader or DJ comes along and calls out these origins: “Anybody from …?” placing a country or territory after the preposition, to which there are screamed acknowledgements from sections of the crowd. The carnival itself is situated in slavery. It was a celebration of Black liberation from forced labour during that period when people would mock the dress and parody the ways of slave owners, when they would claim their souls as free from the slavery of their bodies in shows of artistry and imagination. Here, dancing along the lakeshore, there is ecstasy, abandon, the graceful intelligence of the body. Well, perhaps it’s not such a paradox after all. Though the meanings are always slipping. This dreary door which I’ve been thinking about, though its effects are unremitting, does not claim the human being unremittingly. All that emanates from it is not dread but also creativity. This comes to me as I am standing, listening to the music, mouthing an inane soca lyric that commands me to jump or shake.
“Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative.”
1
I happened on this line by Derek Walcott in his book The Bounty. I cannot know precisely what he means but I recognized something in it. Or perhaps something in it called me. It described perfectly my desire for relief from the persistent trope of colonialism. To be without this story of captivity, to dis-remember it, or to have this story forget me, would be heavenly. But of course in that line too is the indifference, the supplication of prayer. Yet I want to think that perhaps there is also regeneration in its meaning.
“We need to have a cognitive schema as well as practical mastery of way-finding …” To reclaim the Black body from that domesticated, captive, open sp
ace is the creative project always underway. There are many stories, fables, and secrets in the Diaspora about the way home to Africa. In Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead’s great-grandfather flies off to Africa; a song remains in the folklore, “a song” which leads Milkman to his own flight of salvation in the arms of his friend Guitar.
O Solomon don’t leave me here
Cotton balls to choke me
O Solomon don’t leave me here?
Bukra’s arms to yoke me
Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone
Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home.
Stories of Africans flying home to Africa or walking home on the ocean floor abound in continental America and the archipelago. Africans born in Africa were said to know how to fly. If when they arrived in the Americas, one legend has it, they did not eat salt, they could fly back home. Salt would weigh them down or turn their blood.
There is a story of a woman, enslaved, called Gang Gang Sarah who walked up the hill at Moriah, Tobago, climbed the silk cotton tree, and flew all the way back to Africa.
When I was a child, old people told these stories with the greatest equanimity, perhaps only lowering their voices as if telling an important secret in case one needed, at another time, a way out.
In Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust, upon reaching the shores of the Americas the captured turn and walk back into the water, their chains weighing them down, their faith of return unflagging.
A relative of mine was said to have walked out into the water at Guaya. Flinging his ring back to shore, he instructed it, “Go tell them I’m drowning.” I do not know if he was trying to find his way home.