Delia
“In the diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity.”
Dionne Brand, 2001, A map to the door of no return, p. 29.
We inherit the legacies of that which has come before.
My last name, Douglas, is Scottish.
It is the name of a plantation owner.
As a descendant of the enslaved, I am part of the Black diaspora that is the result of the trans-Atlantic Slave trade that kidnapped, exiled, and relocated peoples of African descent to stolen Indigenous lands across the Americas.
I am here because of my ancestors’ fierceness, courage, determination, and sacrifices.
I strive to honour their rebellious lives and embody their wildest dreams.
In thinking about the link between past injustices and present violences and inequities, I am thinking about how history is alive, and that forgetting, and remembering, are ongoing racial gender sexual projects.
In thinking through the relationship between our racial past and present, I have found sociologist Avery Gordon’s notion of “haunting,” very helpful. Gordon uses the term to establish a link to the “living effects, seething and lingering, of what seems over and done with, the endings that are not over” (p. 195).
Black life in the diaspora is inextricably linked to the ever-evolving reverberations of Atlantic chattel enslavement, and its inimitable scale of amassing persons, and the inordinate violence and death involved to generate wealth (Hartman).
This month I have been reflecting on our inheritance in the context of a past that is in fact not past, to consider what remains in an era that Saidiya Hartman has brilliantly described as the “afterlife of slavery.”
According to Hartman, the afterlife of slavery refers to the fact that “Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery” (p. 6).
Black folx carry the imprint of the commodity – the difficulty of breath, gratuitous violence, denial of our personhood, and lack of bodily autonomy (including but not limited to autonomy from state violence, and autonomy regarding sexuality, gender identity, and expression).
In particular, the presence of people of African descent throughout the Americas what Bonita Lawrence and Zeinab Amadahy describe as “stolen people on stolen land” (p. 125).
For peoples of African descent, a sense of belonging remains a contested and ongoing site of struggle.
Returning to Dionne Brand, we remain affected by the unrelenting threat of captivity via the myriad restraints and constraints that seek to confine and/or exclude us from society.
In addition to mortality, there is the loss of jobs, of opportunity, of safety and stability, of home, of homelands, of misrecognition, the denial of dignity, of our humanness.
All told, the losses are innumerable and ever present, existing along a scale that cannot be easily conveyed owing to the various conditions and identities that structure the diverse experiences of Black folx.
Given our distinct relationship to property and its consequences, we are summoned to different things, and the exigency is uneven.
Alongside inconceivable registers of loss and grief and the most recent iteration of the movement for Black lives…
What remains is love, hope, freedom dreams, and refusal.
Hope and love underwrite our determined efforts, to imagine, dream, and build a world that “might be otherwise.”
We are because of our ancestors, known and unknown.
We have never stopped resisting.
We have never accepted our abjection.
In the spaces through which we travel, we continue to ‘make ourselves known’ (Fanon).
We live
We love
We dance
We laugh
We refuse
We rise….
Resources
Amadahy, Zeinab, & Lawrence, Bonita. (2009). Indigenous peoples and Black people in Canada: Settlers or allies? In A. Kempf (Ed.), Breaching the colonial contract: Anti-colonialism in the US and Canada (pp. 105-136.). New York: Springer.
Brand, Dionne (2001). A map to the door of no return. Toronto, ON: Doubleday Canada.
Fanon, Franz. (1967). Black skin, white masks. (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press.
Gordon, Avery (1998). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Hartman, Saidiya V. (2007). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.