Sean Kingsley - Enslaved: The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

For me, Enslaved is an attempt to give a voice to the millions whose voices were silenced.

Samuel L. Jackson

Simcha Jacobovici & Sean Kingsley

Enslaved

The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Preface by Brenda Jones

Dedicated to all those, past and present, who have been enslaved.

T he descendants of enslaved peoples represent an inconvenient truth. Conceived in a boiling cauldron of naked ambition and insatiable greed, we are the progeny of a false belief that the vestiges of untold violence, theft, human degradation, and exploitation can somehow escape their unholy origin and launch into a kind of buoyant forgetfulness. This imagined culmination of all the darkness that came before is a wishful, radiant resolution, a voyage into light to a place where every crime is not only forgotten, but somehow erased. The perpetrator is left clean, pure, and fully absolved, regardless of the heaving damage of the original sin.

After all, who could not justify what any creature believes it must commit within the primeval struggle to survive? Existence is paramount above all other values, wouldnt you agree? So, if some threats require the momentary sacrifice of the soul, the choice is swift and overwhelmingly justified. The soul has an infinity of eons to purge any trace of violation and return finally to oneness with the light.

Maybe had you or I felt the gnawing anxiety of that hunger scratching for relief or the humiliated nakedness of a poverty so persistent it birthed a bitter identity maybe if we knew firsthand the generations of longing to be bathed in riches, and maybe if we had barely survived the freezing darkness through ages of deprivation, perhaps we would sympathize with the furious demand of this greed. Perhaps But if we have learned anything over the course of these last six centuries, maybe, just maybe, we now comprehend that what is eternal can never, ever be erased. We can delay and evade its insurgency, seem to temporarily impede its appearance, but what was meant to be can never be eradicated, even by atomic force. Life can never be completely stamped out. Its remnants will reconstitute if a will beyond our own was its Creator.

Even a valley of dry bones can still be uncovered, unearthed, and scraped together to convey the most salient, present-day truths. Of course, all the gorgeous details are lostthe locks of sumptuous, thick hair, the interesting curl of the lips that runs in the family, those deep-set, penetrating eyes passed down through generations. And the tender details of each individual story are gone tooall the secrets forged in terror, the recollections of amazing grace extended by the Spirit even in the most dire circumstances, the trauma of capture and its impact will never be precisely known or submitted to a lineage of protection passed down by the tribal griot from generation to generation.

Every treasure more than twelve million people were birthed and blessed to convey has been lost. There are spaces in timelapsessilence across generations of uncertainty. There is so much we will never know, but what we need to know, the essence of the lesson their lives were meant to teach, remains there. It is still available, found in evidence, strewn across the ocean floor waiting to be reconstructed and remembered to share its unvarnished treatise on the human condition.

The descendants existence conveys the disturbing reminder that there is no place to hide as long as the soul remembers even a tinge of its violent origin. Somehow the truth of that inception is always borne out. Our origin can never be erased. You might believe the miseducation, indoctrination, institutionalization, acceptance, wealth, fame, or a subsistent life led in abject obscurity would minimize any trace of memory to its tiniest insignificance. But the truth is the more you have, the more readily you realize that having does not satisfy. The more you have, the more clearly you hear the call of the inner life.

The more you know, the more you realize that forgetting is an illusion. It is remembering that is freeing. References to the Middle Passage resonate throughout African diaspora literature and art. What cannot be recounted by experience is reimagined, repurposed, visited by the mind again and again.

It is remembered in Paule Marshalls Praisesong for the Widow and Toni Morrisons Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece Beloved. It is the backdrop of Charles Johnsons National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage, the fictional story of a fateful voyage on a slave ship, and also the foundation of V. S. Naipauls Trinidadian classic by the same name. The great playwright August Wilson begins his tour de force ten-play cycle capturing each decade of the twentieth century with Gem of the Ocean, involving a psychic voyage to the bottom of the ocean floor to a great city of bones occupied by the spirits of our ancestors who leapt to their death or were killed and spared the sacrilegious indignities ahead.

In the verse of Slave Driver, Bob Marley remembers a turmoil he never experienced, and his rage is fresh as though it happened only weeks before. Even a modern-day bard, Jay-Z, speaks of the anomaly in his Oceans rap. He muses on the irony of his wealth juxtaposed with the tragic origins of his ancestors. He depicts himself in a tuxedo, riding in a fine car and still remembering what the soul can never release. It has never been forgotten, no, not even by those who know only that it happened and nothing else. Forgetting is an illusion but remembering is well on the path to liberation.

The descendants of enslaved peoples represent all of this inconvenient truth. We are born in innocence, but we learn quickly that we are the living, breathing embodiment of a harvest of crime and centuries of violation others wish they could forget. Our existence is a reminder of an indelible inception, but it also conveys an abiding hope. We mean a mistaken past can indeed lead to a promising future. Yes, we are the living evidence that truth pressed to earth will rise again, that you can kill a human being, as activists and revolutionaries say to ward off the terminal potential consequences of protest, but you cannot kill the idea that person represents.

Secretly, even to the perpetrator caged by his or her knowledge of unforgivable sin, it is a relief to know that, despite the darkest of intentions and the horror of the crime, there is a divine spark that can never be erased. Only so much damage can ever be done. If only they knew our survival is a dynamic part of the offenders dream of salvation. Our existence teaches, the one powerful lesson all war and violence ultimately convey. That truth applied to human existence has the capacity to quench the insatiable hunger and bring an end to shame forever.

The words have been spoken since the beginning of time by poets, sages, and philosophers. Lately a moral leader, Rep. John Lewis, said it best; We are one people, he would preach, one family, the human family. And we all live in one house, the American house, the world house. We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will all perish together as fools. He would say, every human being is a spark of the divine, and once we become deeply aware of the sanctity of all life, we will be destined to build what he called a Beloved Community, a nation and a world society at peace with itself.