by Najha Zigbi-Johnson

I recently read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman. In so many ways, I am still making sense of their work, and how both novels are at once historical, mythical, and fictional. Through her masterful storytelling, Gyasi invites us into a world that weaves between the Gold Coast and North America, moving through histories of inter-ethnic conflict, the bleakness of both enslavement and post-emancipation, as well as the importance of ‘return.’ Differently, yet with the same force, Hartman traces the history of the slave trade through her own journey along a slave route in Ghana. In pulling from historical archives, and asserting new ones in the wake of total loss and death, Hartman lifts up the utter brutality of slavery and its unsettling afterlife. Both hauntingly beautiful, Hartman and Gyasi’s work have become the conduit through which narratives of Trans-Atlantic Blackness, slavery, and death (re)emerge. [1] At a psycho-spiritual level, it is as if both women have been chosen as vessels through which the dead, our ancestors, get to tell their stories and speak themselves into existence.

I often think about what it means to be the descendant of enslaved people, who survived and persisted, yet ostensibly died early, with years stolen from their precious lives. I think about what it means to be relatively free, to be a student at Harvard, a complicated place, that offers seemingly limitless possibilities to its chosen few, and also what it means to live in this moment of wild uncertainty, marked by a new iteration of virulent white supremacy and global environmental catastrophe. If anything, what settles me and allows for glimmers of hope and faith, is the truth that my ancestors are alive within me, experiencing this life alongside me. Rooted in African cosmologies that both affirm the presence of ancestors and look toward future generations of people who will inherit this earth, my understanding of time, space, and belonging is being reconstructed by notions of Blackness and Diasporic experience. In exploring the memory of slavery alongside more present examinations of Ghana and transnational Blackness, Hartman and Gyasi reframe notions of temporality, in which Blackness exits along a continuum of entangled, non-linear experiences that defy the logic of forward moving time. Time, I am beginning to understand, has different meaning for different people. And for peoples of the African Diaspora, shaped by the Trans-Atlantic crossing, time is a very peculiar thing. Fundamentally, slavery and colonialism, and its past associated events continue to impinge on the present reality, making history tangible and current. [2]

Temporality marks Gyasi’s work as we are exposed to the alternating experiences of Maame’s descendants through time and space. From Esi being stolen and shipped off to the Americas, and Ness her daughter, who struggles to remember her mother tongue, to H, a miner turned union leader, and Willie, his daughter, who eventually settles in Harlem, Gyasi offers vignettes of life and struggle that are marked by diverse experiences of Black subjectivity. Particularly, it is experiences of captivity, (whether through enslavement, forced labor in the coal mines, or the binds of nonconsensual marriage) which become markers for the passage of time for characters in Homegoing. Thus, I believe one can explore the absence of freedom as a modality through which time is constructed for Black peoples across the Atlantic world. Time, something inherently relative to those who experience it, seemingly takes on new meaning with an altered sense of relationality for those who are held in captivity. In the bowels of slave ships atop rough seas, or in the fecal infested dungeons of slave castles, I can only imagine the ways in which time is warped by darkness and death, and how days turn into weeks, and months turn into lifetimes.

From 1619 until the legal abolition of chattel slavery in December of 1865, Black peoples were enslaved in the United States. That is nearly double the amount of time we have been ‘legally’ free, though slavery persists in myriad of ways, and most notably through this country’s diabolical carceral system. In some ways, this current epoch of relative freedom has become a space of liminality, existing between the experience of enslavement and the possibilities of racial equity. Yet as we continue to live in a time marked by global imperialism and the death dealing realities of white supremacy, it is what we know to be true, a past marked by utter brutality and inhumanity that feels closest and most tangible. To this point, Hartman writes in the chapter “So Many Dungeons” that “if slavery feels proximate rather than remote and freedom seems increasingly elusive, this has everything to do with our own dark times. If the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it is because we are still looking for an exit from the prison.” [3] Hartman remarks on the same page to a similar point that:

“History doesn’t unfold with one era bound to and determining the next in an unbroken chain of causality…. the point isn’t the impossibility of escaping the stranglehold of the past, or that history is a succession of uninterrupted defeats, or that the virulence and tenacity of racism is inexorable. But rather that the perilous conditions of the present establish the link between our age and a previous one in which freedom too was yet to be realized.” [4]

Like Hartman, I understand my life as marked by the persistence and continuing relevance of slavery’s afterlife. Similar to the ways in which ancestors continue to shape and inform the lives of their descendants throughout the Diaspora, slavery’s afterlife remains present today in 2019, and I think it always will. This is not to say that Blackness and the Diaspora is simply marked by the melancholy of racism and its associated experiences, but that even a forward moving sense of Blackness will forever be bound to and shaped by the past. While I dream of a world free of lynchings, where Blackness exists unfettered by the violence of whiteness and colonialism, I hope the past remains embedded in our present psyches. At a spiritual level, unearthing the history of enslavement also means uplifting our ancestors and calling them into this present moment, with the hopes that they will guide us, and that we will listen.

Najha is a second year Master of Theological Studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School, exploring Black Diasporic religions and culture. She is also the founder of the course, Freedom School: A Seminar on Theory and Praxis for Black Studies in the United States, a student-led popular education colloquium at Harvard.

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[1] Saunders, J. Patricia. (2008) “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 7.

[2] Haensell, Dominique. “TOO MUCH FUTURE? TIME’S ONLY NOW: Temporality, Haunting and Resurrection in Yaa Gyasi‘s Homegoing (2016)” John F. Kennedy Institute, FU Berlin. pg.7.

[3] Hartman, Saidiya. “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.” So Many Dungeons. Farras, Straus, & Grioux: New York, 2017. pg. 111.

[4] Ibid.

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Works Cited:

Gyasi, Yaa. “Homegoing.” Penguin Random House Books: New York, 2016.

Haensell, Dominique. “TOO MUCH FUTURE? TIME’S ONLY NOW: Temporality, Haunting and Resurrection in Yaa Gyasi‘s Homegoing (2016)” John F. Kennedy Institute, FU Berlin.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.” So Many Dungeons. Farras, Straus, & Grioux: New York, 2017.

Saunders, J. Patricia. (2008) “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 7.