Natality by Jennifer Banks

Natality by Jennifer Banks

Author:Jennifer Banks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-03-16T00:00:00+00:00


—5—

To Be the Instrument

In the 1990s, American academic and memoirist Saidiya Hartman traveled to Ghana to trace the history of the transatlantic slave trade, to understand how so many lives had been destroyed and how slaves had been born. The trip wasn’t just an academic research project; it was personally motivated, too. Hartman wanted to “excavate a wound” from her personal past as an American descendant of slaves. Who were her ancestors? Where did they come from and what were their histories? Visiting the forts and storehouses, the slave markets and fortified towns, the mercantile centers and the communities throughout Ghana that had been so thoroughly pillaged, she looked for evidence of broken ancestries, trying to understand how those family lines had been ruptured. She titled the book that emerged from these travels Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route: her testament to birth, disrupted mother-lines, and loss.

Her thinking back through her slave mothers takes her not to a family house, village, or tribe—but instead to a grotesque nativity scene, an underworld lodged in the bowels of the earth. She had been drawn to Ghana primarily for one reason: the country has more prisons, dungeons, and slave pens than any other West African nation. Dark, buried cells play a particular role in her account of slavery and its lost mothers. “Every tale of creation I had ever read,” she writes, “began in a place like this—in the underworld, in the bowels of the earth, in the gloom of man’s prehistory. The cradle of life bore an uncanny resemblance to the grave.”

The place she is referring to is Cape Coast Castle, a structure built in 1674 by the British to warehouse slaves—one of the two largest castles on Africa’s Gold Coast. When I hear “castle,” I think of upward, ornamental spires, but this castle burrows downward; the slave pens were built deep in the earth, with vaulted cellar chambers designed to impede escape and rebellion. Visiting the castle’s vaults, Hartman sees a tomb, a dank cellar with perspiring walls that she describes as the earth’s open wound. The floors of the dungeons look like dirt, but they’re covered in inches and inches of human remains—dead skin, dried blood, caked feces.

Surprisingly, the British didn’t see the dungeons as tombs. They imagined them as wombs. As the Royal Africa Company and the Company of Merchants saw it, “the dungeon was a womb in which the slave was born.” In those cellars with their oozing walls, in those sites of death and disease where slaves slept, made love, gave birth, and died in their waste, stolen people were transformed into slaves; they were forced to shed their pasts and leave behind their natal lands to inaugurate their new lives as commodities. If the dungeons were wombs, then the Middle Passage was the birth canal, Hartman argues, through which the slaves journeyed outward into new lives, a new world. Instead of records of births in church registers, family diary entries, or birth certificates issued by the state, for slaves one finds only records of sale.



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