Born To Belonging

Although it is a point raised in the nascent portion of these two chapters, the discussion about ancestry is always one that I find particularly interesting. Wise states, "Even if you don't directly inherit material advantages from your family, there is something empowering about the ability to trace your lineage back hundreds of years, as so many whites but so few persons of color can....The exercise provided, for the whites at least, a sense of pride, even rootedness; not so much for the African American students." This excerpt struck me from the context of my own experience with ancestry. In 1925, African American poet Countee Cullen published a book of poetry, including the well noted "Heritage," which raises the famous inquiry: "What is Africa to me?" Wondering about this question even led, in part, to my study abroad experience in Ghana last year. I kept a journal while there and after visiting Cape Coast and El Mina slave castles, which approaches Wise's discussion about ancestry from a different perspective. So I offer the following, without any critical analysis other than what's already been written:

“Black Americans snapping pictures, as Saidiya Hartman says, is the result of a ‘growing sense of despair and an exhausted political imagination incapable of dreaming of radical change.’ It is this context that I’m fascinated with.   Enslaved Africans, the captives, held in bondage physically, mentally and even spiritually whose descendants, still suffering neo-bondage, neo-slavery, neo-colonialism, seek to capture those very same captives whose legacy they claim, lament and embrace through a narrow lens manufactured and produced by another captive- in this sense, economically- to construct a tangible manifestation of ownership in a world dominated by identities so innately interwoven with a history of inhumane treatment. Staring through the lens, finger poised on the shutter, the captive past meets the present bondage in a dance of self-destruction. Ingrained in this moment for the photographer is the desperate necessity to grapple with feelings of neglect and abandonment, a perpetual inability to simply belong: my seventh grade heritage day in white roman catholic school when I asked my Black gram to make me sweet potato pie because I had no concept of ancestry. Frederick Douglas begins his autobiography with the crushing assertion that he never knew the date of his birth; that is, he could not trace when his existence began in the world. The hopelessness about locating myself in history I felt that day echoed Douglas’ sentiment of having no true beginning. All other students in the class claimed some Irish or Italian ancestry and were basking in the gluttonous consumption of endless containers filled with Irish potatoes. My teacher approached my untouched pie, inquired if it was pumpkin which I denied, and then she walked away without a word. Even the crumbs of identity that tasted sweet to me were valueless in the eyes of the masters as I stood unimpressively alone, worlds apart, on the auction block of heritage.

Western epistemology has taught us that to own is to know. And in that flash, as the pain, anguish, resistance, survival and tragedy we wish to illuminate is bathed in white light, the captive past has once more been enchained within our memories, unbound from the struggles against exploitation and dehumanization fought by those “nimble-fingered” workers one, two, three worlds away. The tyrant ships the finished product, washed clean of the blood, sweat, tears and shit that produced it, only to be burdened with the endless task of toil until the day it dies, to be tossed away- as it is not useless- in an unmarked grave of some invisible land. Yet we are seduced by the scent of hope that this flash will transform the suffering of the past into milk and honey, our promised land-—one in which we belong—cognitively distanced form the cries for human empathy of those unseen, invisible right beneath our nose. Stepping outside the UN World Heritage site, we briefly are blinded by this flash, thinking the dark oppressive stench of history gives way to the sweet enlightenment we've anticipated. But we face instead a city bathed in blood- that red coating lining the bottom of your pant legs- a perpetual reminder of the Black-fleshed Nazarenes who once walked this very soil, whose existence meant suffering in the land of the fishers of men. And within this, we become captive to this scent of hope: addicted to the promise of freedom. Longing that the barriers we have built, demarcating the center from the periphery, being from non-being, existence from nothingness will fade away like a worn photograph whose edges we can only caress and wonder what they once held, yet no longer burdened with the spiritual strife that has defined us. With the click of a shutter, with the gentle embrace of a groove on a dirtied wall, with a deep breath of meditation, we hope to capture their suffering, transcending life itself, exhaling joyously that at least we can embrace the feeling of being home, of belonging ‘with all its promises and dangers, where the stateless at last might thrive.’ And we hang it neatly in our minds as our framework for revolution.