A Descendent’s Return to the Door of No Return
What follows is an edited journal entry, originally written on June 27th, 2019, after a visit to the Door of No Return in the Maison de Esclaves (House of Slaves) on Gorée Island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa.
Today, among other things, I returned to the Door of No Return. While I’m doubtful that my ancestors passed through this specific door, it was, nonetheless, a deeply symbolic, emotional, and spiritual return for me.
Out of the 20 million enslaved persons who were stolen from the shores of Africa and shipped across the Atlantic, only 30,000 left through this door. So the chances are slim that I am linked to one of those unfortunate souls that experienced the horrors and traumas of Gorée Island; however, even if my Ancestors did not leave through the door that I solemnly stood in, they nevertheless experienced a similar nightmare somewhere else along Africa’s long Atlantic coast.
Whether on Gorée or in another House of Slaves, I know, both academically and emotionally, that my ancestors experienced deep trauma and tragedy. I know this academically because of the countless hours and days I have spent pouring through the pages of Black history. Emotionally, I know the pain of my Ancestor’s experience more deeply than a text book could ever convey; after all, their pain still echoes through my DNA.
Sitting aboard the ferry as we crossed the stretch towards Gorée, gentle waves were rocking the boat as a thin breeze brushed against my back, sending shivers through my spine as I watched the island looming ominously in the distance.
It all felt so familiar. As though I’d made this journey before. Fear gripped me like hands rising from the sea surrounding me. It was the fear of those that had made that canal crossing centuries before me. The fear of what awaited my ancestors welled up within me and threatened to tear itself out.
A cry was building from a place deep within my soul that I hadn’t been aware of before.
“YEMOJA! Please Save Us!”
The cry echoed through my bones, but failed to escape my lips, as I looked out across the vast oceans of Mami Wata. Yet she did not answer my cries, my ancestors cries, only accepting those who cast themselves from the boat — those whose bones may still lie at the depths of this stretch of ocean.
My tears barely registered as ripples in the ocean; they could not change the tides and carry us back to Africa.
Never would I, my ancestors incarnate, be able to return home. From here and for eternity, I would experience horrors the likes of which I had heard not but whispers. Whispers that cannot and could not contain the screams that I would shriek nor the bone-rattling pain that would follow me to an early grave.
Whispers and rumors could never contain the tragedy, turmoil, and trauma of the living hell that I would walk. Everyday was a new form of pain and suffering. Centuries of suffering came to mark my ancestors’ existence.
That is. Until that fateful Juneteenth day in 1865 when we gained our freedom — or so we thought.
But what is this freedom that we’ve gained? There is no freedom without free movement, free experience, free expression, or any of those freedoms, opportunities, and privileges that allow an individual to fully realize the beauty of their humanity and individuality. Yet, in 2019, a full 501 years after the first enslaved Africans were abducted, we still have not experienced those true freedoms.
At least not as a collective.
There are certainly those precious few privileged Black Bourgeoisie, Black Capitalists, and middle-class Blacks who have been fortunate enough to taste “freedom.” Yet, even for us precious few, is our freedom truly freedom when it comes at the expense of consciously having your every move, thought, and syllable policed?
Policed not by the white folks around you, but policed by your own self.
We police ourselves out of the fear that if we expressed our true humanity and brilliant individuality that they’d do everything in their power to relieve us of our so-called freedom. Just look at Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the MOVE 9, and all the other Black political prisoners that have had their freedoms stripped from them because they dared to be Free.
We have all seen the murdered martyrs and the political prisoners, and it scares most of us straight and keeps us from fully expressing ourselves. For even if they don’t lock us up, we know that they will only accept us so long as we color within the sharply defined lines that have been drawn for us by the white supremacist power structures which surround and support this society.
Our freedom is perverted. Even if we managed to eliminate white supremacy, our freedom — were it still based on the current socioeconomic structures — would remain perverted. This freedom that we have in the United States is not, as we have been told, secured for us by the sacrifices of those brave soldiers who put their lives on the line.
No. At least, not only.
Instead, our freedoms are largely afforded to us at the expense of the suffering among those “South” of us. In the same way colonial empires were built on the bloody backs of the colonized and enslaved, our present post-colonial “super powers” (as they’ve fashioned themselves) continue to support themselves on the shoulders of the Third World masses.
The Third World masses, including Black Americans, continue to face colonialism, exploitation, and borderline enslavement. Albeit in a less overt and vaguely more benign fashion.
A fashion that has made structural violence vogue.
My Return to the Door of No Return — and Mother Africa — during the 2019 “Year of Return” has marked for me a moment.
A moment that I struggled to define as it was occurring, but one that I will look back on throughout the years and understand. I will understand what it means and what it meant. Understand how that door, that house, that island, this country, and this trip shaped the course of my life.
Given who I am now and who I aim to become, I will never be the same person I was before I stood perched in that doorway, having returned when the world said I wouldn’t.
How could I be the same after standing in that door and after looking into the eyes of Zana?
Zana, the merchant woman from Gorée, whom I met on the ferry. Zana who told me “100 people, 100 shops. There is a lot of competition on the island.”
If only that competition could become cooperation, I wonder if their situation could improve? But in this era of globalization and neocolonialism, the conditions of the island — like the conditions of other former colonies — are not of their own making.
They did not choose this fate, nor did any of the rest of us. Yet here we are, struggling for our survival against systems of violence designed specifically for our suffering. After what I saw, I knew that it is up to me and my generation to continue the Black Radical Tradition of our Ancestors and this long March to Freedom.
No one should have to live in a world where there is only one concern on people’s mind. Instead, as Zana said,
“Everyone wants to Survive.”
