For the first few days in Accra I only had one thought: it is wonderful to be surrounded by black people. I don’t think I ever realize how psychically isolating living in a predominantly white world is until I come up for air in an all-black space. And to be in an all black country! Not just one neighborhood or family gathering, but everywhere—the grocery store, the restaurants, the schools, the best neighborhoods and the worst, drivers and passengers, across every gender, wealth, and educational divide—everyone is black. It was glorious.
Article continues after advertisement
Black Americans have been deprived of our own history or shown its violent ends so often that it is almost unsustainable to go rooting around in the timeline. I only seriously interrogated it a decade ago—when Obama was President and having a splash of ethnicity was in, ancestry.com reached its cultural zenith. My maternal grandmother started popping up on the doorsteps of distant cousins and my paternal grandmother lamented our lack of the Native American genes she insisted upon. From my own test I learned that I am genetically whiter than I thought (and was pleased that that did not elate me as it would have when I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, wearing my “Oreo” moniker with pride) and that my non-European roots are predominantly Nigerian, with a smattering of percentages from the neighboring countries with Western ports. The little pie-chart reaffirmed the uncharted history I could already guess at, offering the barest genetic touchstone beyond, “we all came from Africa.”
Of course, I have always considered my immediate family history to be more influential on how I move through and understand my position in the world than any computer-generated graph. My mother’s feeling of racial displacement as a mixed kid bears on my understanding of blackness and sometimes leaves us at odds around colorism. My white grandmother will hit me with an incisive racial observation and then I’ll recall that she did go ahead and marry a black man in 1969, five years before Kentucky would repeal its anti-miscegenation laws. I am aware of being a product of who and what came before me, but I never considered the extent to which that is, must be, true. In Ghana, I got the first stirrings of recognition, a faint pluck on a thin thread, that I have an origin point beyond the accounted for branches on my family tree. I felt like I was being called to remember something. As we drank palm wine out of hollowed gourds, as I noticed the ease and the frequency of laughter in conversation, as we sat by an inhospitable ocean in the shadow of Cape Coast Castle, I could feel myself entering the continuous stream of time; like I was a dash hovering above a broken line, being coaxed into place.
*
I have only ever known something important about myself by reading it in someone else. I could feel that my time in Ghana had seeded something, but it couldn’t find root until I came across Segu, the first novel in a series by Maryse Condé. Segu is the story of the once-powerful Traore family and the internal and external forces that rent it apart. It is a sprawling story beginning in present-day Mali but spanning much of the northwestern parts of the continent including Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, and Nigeria; not to mention the characters sold into or making their fortune by the slave trade in Brazil, Portugal, England and the waters between. Condé sets her family drama at an inflection point in Africa’s history, ensnaring three generations in the colonialist, capitalist, and religio-political fervor of the 18th and 19th centuries. From my side of the Atlantic, I had only ever considered this time in history as a great kidnapping. Reduced by this narrative, Africa becomes a static Eden, from which its populace was stolen and forced to become the displaced American. I had not thought of what the shifting tides would mean for the continent; that whatever idealized untouched vision I may have had would have been destroyed as well, if it ever existed in the first place.
Condé scraped against something made tender in the short span of thirteen days, in a country I cannot claim even by the smallest genetic marker.
Towards the end of the first book, Islam is sweeping through Africa from the North and East. When it finally arrives in Segu, the native Bambara are backed into a corner. They have dwindled in power such that they cannot take on the two warring Islamic factions that threaten them and so must ally with one (their former enemies) to prevent total annihilation by the other (the new and pressing Toucouleur Empire). The alliance comes at a cost: the Bambara must renounce their native religion, destroying all evidence of fetishism, and embrace Islam, at least in appearance. By this point in the narrative, we’ve seen the kingdom of Segu and its dominant families in a downward spiral. There is too much external pressure, too many children leaving the fold, for it to maintain its hold on the region. The generation we are left with, grandsons of the narrative’s first patriarch, abandon dominance for survival; Condé presents a vision of what is lost in that struggle.
“Small groups of tonydons, supervised by Fulani, entered every house in Segu, going through the series of courtyards to the huts containing the pembele and the boli. They took them out into the daylight, then brought them to the palace square and the bonfire…Fur, bark, roots, bits of wood, tails of animals—all were consumed by the cracking flames. The tonydons brought a harvest of sacred objects from all over town, smashing the red stones that represented the ancestors and couldn’t be burned…Tools belonging to distant ancestors and kept hidden in holes in the ground, a reminder of the ancient underground dwellings of the smiths at Gwonna, were taken from their shrines…Then they dragged the holy men to the square and stripped them of their necklaces of horns, teeth, leaves, and feathers, and their belts hung with magic charms.”
There is a door in Cape Coast Castle—I would think there is one in all slave castles—called “The Door of No Return.” I had never before imagined myself inside the door. I am insulated by water, forced to consider only the stateside atrocities. Reading Segu I caught this echo of grief—a religion and a way of life that was never mine to lose felt taken from me. Condé scraped against something made tender in the short span of thirteen days, in a country I cannot claim even by the smallest genetic marker.
Baldwin wrote that the American black man is “unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow.” How am I to forge any real relationship with my African origins? I don’t speak the languages. I have no family. I don’t know the history and while researching I must always question: as told by whom? Save the glaring fact that somewhere along the line someone survived insurmountable odds and then so did their children and theirs, I have no ties, the thread frayed beyond repair. And for the first time I felt that as something severed rather than inherited circumstance. I wondered what all that lost knowledge was—what were the stories, who were the gods, what would I be sure of and what would I question? Who is preserving that knowledge today? Or is it truly gone—lost at sea or crushed underfoot—and what is it replaced by? What comes after the great colonial smash and grab? To what history am I beholden?
*
This last question is asked by Eucaristus (born Babatunde), a son in the third generation of the Traore family. These are the late patriarch Dousika’s grandsons; children he has never met, children who have never seen their native home, raised on plantations and ships in the middle ground between enslaved and free. He is first of the age I am settled in: the age of the “free” black man. Without his father, who was stolen from Segu as a child and eventually executed in Brazil, Eucaristus is left to constitute some new identity that is neither accepted in the new, modern white world nor tethered to a homeland. He briefly encounters his uncle Malobali, who tells him of the beautiful Joliba river, of the city standing proud like an impregnable woman, but these are the nostalgic stories of a man who has long left home, and Eucaristus has the sense that to long for this home would be to long for something already lost. He is left to make his way in the towns “created by white men…born out of the trade of human flesh.” Excelling academically, Eucaristus is urged to become a missionary, his best chance at a comfortable life: “To Christianize and civilize Africa—that was his fate.”
We hold the history of the world, a completely contradictory, impossible history, in our bodies. That makes us luminous, it makes us heavy.
Though he longs to find the world his uncle painted for him, Eucaristus is issued a promise: education will save you from your race. This promise is extended today to any black Ivy League student; it was certainly extended to me. Not every student takes up that promise, some may even outright reject it, but it is offered to all of us as if meeting a universal need. And it is seductive. There is access. If held in the right light, there are even brief moments of reprieve from the constant push towards the edges of American society—it is a false promise, but in the flicker of time before that is made clear, it offers a tantalizing image. In the undergraduate residential colleges at Yale, there is a basement tunnel system that connects the dorms to the dining hall, library, and any other facilities that might entice the country’s most ambitious teens; it is an unseen closed circuit, maximally convenient for long hours of thought insulated from the ugly realities of the outside world. In the dark of Connecticut winter I would shuffle from my room to the dining hall, wrap toast in a napkin, refill an already drained coffee cup, and yawn up the curved stairs to the small round tower library that crowns Pierson College. There I might pass an entire day, quarantined from any messy present-day struggle, steeping in the minds of the great men who made the world.
Before Eucaristus embarks for London he meets and falls instantly in love with a Jamaican woman named Emma Trelawny, a name that sets her apart, “the name of men and women who never accepted slavery.” She questions Eucaristus, wary of his apparent reverence for England and the English; she presses him on why he would want to go study there. Eucaristus defends himself, “It’s a sort of wager!” he explains. “I think the white man’s model will impose itself on us whether we like it or not. And soon the world will belong to those who know how to make use of it.”
Though I had a head start on Eucaristus, raised as I was in a mostly white family, I took up the same wager. Yale perfected what I already knew: how to make use of the white world. Which is really learning its languages, customs, holding dear its darlings, and arguing without emotion. Know the canon. Become frictionless. The trick is that there is no making use of it without its exacting a toll. Eucaristus, after suffering a humiliation from some of his pupils in Lagos, berates himself as a “creature of the whites.” The most insidious thing you are taught when you are black and smart is that one will eventually negate the other. You will be able to “pass” as it were, elevated above your less lauded peers, fluent in the dominant language.
“The idea of white supremacy,” Baldwin writes, “rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply “contributions” to our own) and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders.” Eucaristus’ vision of the future has come to fruition. The white man’s civilization has utterly blotted out anything that came before it. And he is not yet aware of the price of his bet. Higher education is a perfect machine. Eucaristus describes his old college as “a factory producing what the English traveler Mary Kingsley called the ‘Negroes in trousers.’” The scales do not fall from one’s eyes while in the machine. For Eucaristus, the truth—that he would forever be outside of the white world regardless of how well he stuck to its rules—came as a sudden, irrevocable fall. Somewhere I too must have gained this knowledge; encountering Eucaristus in Segu was like looking at old photos of myself. I felt the same kind of pity, the same kind of compassion, and ultimately winced at his coming into consciousness, remembering the pain of my own. We cannot go back. Eucaristus and I have both been cleaved from the root, though at least he knows what he is weeping for: “the purity of his Segu ancestors which he had lost forever. Segu, a world closed in on itself, impregnable…He would never bathe in the waters of the Joliba, and draw from it strength and vigor. He would never recover the proud self- assurance of that past.” By the same token, we cannot totally assimilate. We are forced to create something new.
*
When Eucaristus leaves Lagos and arrives in London, he’s surprised to find he hates its loud, filthy anonymity. He had idolized it as the capital of the world but as he walks between landmarks, he is aware of being watched. “In coffeehouses all conversation would stop, and hundreds of pairs of unbearably bright eyes—gray, blue and green—would stare at him.” Eucaristus retreats into his room at the seminary and sobs, dreaming, keening for Segu.
After Ghana I too travelled to London. Upon arrival, I felt the uncoiled relief at being alone in a familiar place. I’d only been to London twice before, never alone and never for very long, but it is the model for most of the institutions of my life, for the city in which I live. I, unlike Eucaristus, am fluent in traffic, in trains, in wandering. I walked for miles on my first day. It was the kind of gorgeous English spring day even most Londoners have only read about. I ate alone at a pub and watched over my book as people filed in after work for a trivia night I didn’t know about on the back patio—coworkers, groups of old friends, reluctant significant others meeting the former for the first time—no one looked at me. To be noticed could mean to be in danger—we are not so far from Eucaristus’ London as that. But I am more likely to be afforded an unmolested evening, a black woman totally at ease in the heart of her destroyer/creator.
What must I make of myself, what must I kill or adopt in order to make sense of myself? There is grief and joy in the death of simplicity. I do not easily find home in Africa though I am from there. The things I have been taught, the things I love—a particular version of education—have been at one time weaponized against me, then used as molds to forge me, and now are so much a part of who I am that to reject them would mean to reject myself. There is one thing, possibly the only thing, that I do know: black people are dense with meaning. We hold the history of the world, a completely contradictory, impossible history, in our bodies. That makes us luminous, it makes us heavy. I guess I am trying to walk with all of that and take better notice of my bootprints in the sand.