Nobody knows…

We are who we are because of our past and so our lives seem to follow a predetermined pattern. Our realities are not isolated, instead, they form a part of a common human experience, connecting us to one another. We hail from an archive that is embedded by our very essence, our bodies, skin, names and language. It is as if each of us; those who came, suffered and left, those who are still here, suffering, and those who are to come,  are all tied together by a string, knotting us together, across time and space, relentlessly tugging on.

This is our story.

But what does it mean when this story begins with loss? One would presuppose that that is where it will end. To be branded as an outcast before you enter the world, to only be read in terms of failure, all through an incidence of birth. How can one reconcile with such a suffocating reality, or more, how does one escape it?

This is how I read Hartman’s story.

Nobody knows the trouble that I’ve seen
Nobody knows my sorrow
Nobody knows the trouble that I’ve seen
Glory hallelujah

The loss that marks her beginning is that of a home and it is one that follows her throughout. It is a deeply troubling kind of search, a void that only seems to grow and a displacement that never ceases to stop. But it is also one that is never visible to anyone outside this history. Since it cannot be attached to a physical entity, her loss takes on the quality of being intangible and therefore invisible. It is torturous because it is tied to her inner self, reifying her position as a stranger and isolating her further in the depths of an irresolvable longing.

But she tries. In her efforts to place herself within the impossible history of slavery, to accrue some kind of value where there seemingly is none and to legitimize her search, Hartman exhibits a unique kind of pain. The pain of hoping. She goes back to Ghana, the promise land, where all of Africa’s children are welcomed to find a place called home, only to find herself more at odds with the world she inhabits. What is this persistence she displays to find some potentiality of another world within the ruins of Elmina Castle? Why does she need to prove her historical invisibility? Is it not enough to know that someone who was kept captive in those dungeons, someone who made it through the ‘Middle Passage’, someone who made it to the cotton plantations in the deep South did finally make it to Emancipation? Why does she need to put a face to the imagined figure, a name to the face, a story to the name? Simply because this world is not enough for her, because there is something more waiting to be found, because she has yet to be discovered.

And maybe still, it is impossible. The history of slavery is an ongoing one, it has not reached its end, and it may never. It begins with the story of loss and so rebirths loss. If the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it is because we are still looking for an exit from the prison. This loss becomes a structuring mode of the narrative of decolonization. It shapes our associations with the present and the future and becomes a story that is too stubborn to move on. I do not wish to call for acts of restoration for that is a given. Instead, I want to simply acknowledge this fact, to pay respect to those who have only ever known this to be their truth. I want to stand witness to this reality, to these troubles because that is all I can afford to offer. I do not know the troubles they have seen, I do not know the sorrows, but I stand before the world to hear them say: