The Middle Passage and the Liminality of Blackness
The 28th Annual Middle Passage Ancestor Remembrance Ceremony was held on Saturday, June 14, at Brittlebank Park in Charleston, SC. Every year, the ceremony provides a gathering space to honor the memory of our ancestors who were subjected to the traumatic and disorienting experience of the Middle Passage. Traditionally held at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, Remembrance Day is an opportunity for collective reflection and healing. I have not been physically present at Remembrance Day since I moved back to Greenville in 2016; and though I planned to attend this year, I was kept at home by unforeseen circumstances. In my determination to honor the memory of my ancestors and elevate their spirits, I put on all white, came outside on my balcony with journal and laptop in hand, and spent the day in reflection about the Middle Passage and its messages.
The Middle Passage speaks to me as the creation site of a liminal Blackness that is integral to my diasporic consciousness. During my graduate studies, Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez provided a framework for understanding the meaning of Blackness and diaspora while simultaneously leaving room for those meanings to evolve. I primarily focused on the chapters concerning dance because they were most relevant to my research topic. Accordingly, dance was the medium through which I came to regard Black movement as a vehicle for the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Black identities, cultures, and cosmologies and the diasporic connections and divergences that form the expansive and multitudinous tapestry of Blackness. Black Performance Theory laid the foundation for me to understand Blackness and diaspora as inherently driven by transformation through movement.
In the Foreword, D. Soyini Madison describes Blackness as “born and reborn as something uniquely itself” (Madison 2014, vii), conjuring the idea of transition and fluidity alongside a certain stability in its distinctiveness. Later in the Introduction, DeFrantz and Gonzalez collaboratively characterize diaspora as continual, protective, unifying, and strategic (DeFrantz and Gonzalez 2014, 9). Though the voluntary and involuntary movement of African peoples across geographic borders preceded the Transatlantic Slave Trade and is an ongoing process, the Middle Passage as a site of remembrance is significant to diasporic consciousness because it is the birthplace of a liminal Blackness that encourages us to dialog across space and time in order to identify and affirm ourselves, no matter the space or time in which we are located. Movement forms the connecting threads of the conversation and enables an expansive, multitudinous Blackness to emerge.
In Nadine George-Graves’ chapter, “Diasporic Spidering: Constructing Contemporary Black Identities,” she defines diasporic spidering as “[t]he multidirectional process by which people of African descent define their lives” and “[t]he lifelong ontological gathering of information by going out into the world and coming back to the self” (George-Graves 2014, 33). The concept of diasporic spidering underscores the role of movement as a means toward establishing, defining, and transforming Blackness, and thus affirming ourselves and each other. Through the character of Anansi, whom George-Graves describes as a “liminal presence,” she explores the fluidity of African agency in a perpetual state of change and instability.
The Middle Passage calls my attention to such expressions of agency, as well as how those expressions of agency enable an expansive Blackness to emerge out of the uncertainty and disorientation of the liminal space. Agency among African peoples being forcefully carried across the Atlantic Ocean encourages me to consider how Black ontologies and epistemologies lie outside of white Western conceptions of kinship and connection. I think about the line delivered by Killmonger in the Black Panther movie, “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships,” and how people criticized the line on the reasoning that Killmonger would not have ancestors who died a watery death. That incomplete reasoning discounts kinship bonds that exceed the nuclear family unit. Remembrance Day reminds me of a narrative central to diasporic consciousness: we all cousins. So while I may not be directly descended from those who demonstrated their agency by choosing death over bondage (though the possibility of direct descent remains open for various reasons), I honor them as my ancestors. And they are among the many ancestors who teach me to regard death as sacred transition and possibility beyond the limits of what whiteness deems rational.
Thus, the Middle Passage alerts me to a Blackness that endures through and beyond death and opens the possibility of kinship beyond the category of human. In Rivers Solomon speculative fiction novel, The Deep, he tells the story of an underwater people known as wanjiru who are the descendants of pregnant women thrown off of slave ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean. In the Afterword, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes — members of the experimental hip-hop trio, clipping. — trace the creation of The Deep from the “original mythology” that states and inquires, “During the greatest holocaust that the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?” (Diggs, Hutson, and Snipes 2019, 158).
Yetu, the novel’s protagonist, is the historian among the wanjiru, and she is burdened with the painful and body-ravaging responsibility of remembering and imparting the History to her kin. This ritual, known as the Remembrance, collapses the distinction between the wanjiru and their ancestors, including the two-legs, or humans, as well as between past and present. The wanjiru experience the History as if they are living it. At the end of the novel, a two-leg named Oori receives the memory of the womb from Yetu, thereby gaining the ability to breathe underwater and descend into the depths of the ocean (Solomon 2019, 150). Finalizing the story with Oori’s descent into the ocean strikes me as a brilliant representation of the imperative to regard the liminal space as a space of in which Blackness is born and reborn in varying forms, yet maintains connections across the variance. Moreover, Solomon’s conclusion suggests that accessing and awakening embodied memory not only strengthens diasporic consciousness and connection, but also requires ways of being and knowing that exceed the limits of Western ontologies and epistemologies. The dialog across space and time is the traveling that brings one back to the Self.
In a similar vein to Solomon and those who inspired his novel, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, looks to the ocean as a site of remembrance and healing. Like The Deep, Dub: Finding Ceremony extends kinship and ancestry beyond the human being. Reflecting on her development of the collection of prose poems and her engagement with Wynter’s work, Gumbs writes in the introduction:
I had to understand that when I reached out for my ancestors I couldn’t (like population geneticists do) just stop at some point of relation that would be marketably salient to my ego’s prior understanding of who I am now. My listening began to include speakers who have never been considered human. And while that category of the never-considered human tragically includes my enslaved ancestors, my disabled ancestors, my queer and indigenous ancestors, and everyone subject to the police radio codes Wynter writes about in No Humans Involved, it also generatively includes whales, corals, barnacles, bacteria, and more. Kindred beyond taxonomy (Gumbs 2020, xii).
I sometimes go to Dub with questions whenever I need a word of guidance or a point of reflection to help me understand my unfolding as a Black queer woman of the South and to decipher the liminality inherent to my being. In my absence from the Remembrance Day ceremony, I asked my ancestors to speak through Dub and guide my reflection. They spoke back from the section aptly titled “remembering.” In the below excerpt from the poem, I found confirmation of movement as a vehicle for reaching and dialoging across space and time:
how could the waves we sent become words you could hold, or could they? if they would be flutters in your heart would you yet know them? pulses in your thighs, would you still know what to do? and then you started dancing. all of you. any of you. and that’s when we knew to keep sending the messages. that’s when we knew that you knew (Gumbs 2020, 24).
Movement holds memory and is a means of accessing histories and cultures held in and expressed through our living bodies. I have previously conceptualized neo-traditional West African dance as a somatic movement practice that allows me to engage narratives that emerge out of my moving body and to use my moving body as the vehicle to speak back to those narratives and to identify and locate myself within the diasporic web as well as within the oppressive systems that attempt to cut my connection from the web and the survival strategies within it.
As an embodiment of the liminal, fluid, and expansive Blackness birthed by the Middle Passage, my initial concern as I embarked on my scholarly and creative journey was with identifying and locating myself by finding points of similarity and connection that would affirm a root. And then I read The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy. He defines the Black Atlantic as a transnational, intercultural, and fractal structure of exchange and transformation among Black folks in the Americas, Europe, and Africa (Gilroy 1993, 15). Gilroy’s framing called me back to the aforementioned diasporic spidering concept and the idea of diaspora as a processual, ongoing, and strategic phenomenon. Although The Black Atlantic was published two decades prior to Black Performance Theory, I read the latter during my graduate studies, and I did not read Gilroy until a few years later when I was working as study guide writer for SuperSummary.
Gilroy’s text made me consider more seriously that perhaps this singular root is an imaginary and elusive thing and that who I am is the culmination of routes. There is no singular root for me to identify because I was shaped in movement. Remembrance Day calls my attention to that truth. Remembering those who did not reach the shores of the so-called New World is to embrace that liminality is a feature of my identity. It is to consider possibilities of ancestry and kinship beyond what can be neatly traced or identified by name, and it is to recognize that I am perpetually in a state of becoming, redefining myself over and over again as I travel pathways of discovery.
Remembering those who did reach the shores is to remember that the ocean is not the only route. I think of the people who were “seasoned” in the present-day Caribbean islands and then transported to the North and South American mainland; those who came through the Charleston port and were sold or fled up the state or further south to Alabama and Mississippi; the free Black people who escaped the racial terror of the Jim Crow South and created new lives and cultures in Michigan, Ohio, New York, and elsewhere; those who took trains, planes, and cars to wherever new they wanted to go. All of these people carry living memory in their bodies, and their movement enables Blackness and Black ways of being and knowing to expand beyond geographical and conceptual borders, across and through time, and in multiple divergent and convergent ways.
Remembrance Day offers the wisdom that I am a part of the tapestry of an expansive and multitudinous Blackness that takes various forms and strategically adapts to particular circumstances in its insistence on survival. That wisdom, alongside the role of liminality in it, is comforting because the shape of my being often feels unstable. I am composed of many parts, and over the course of my life, I have found myself going through many rearrangements. I think that I have spent the past few years in rearrangement, and this ongoing consideration of the role of Black movement in the creation, transformation, and maintenance of diasporic consciousness and Black identities, cultures, ways of being, and ways of knowing provides the opportunity for me to travel my multiple routes, glean what I need from those paths and the ancestors along them, and begin to better understand all that is shaping me.
Citations
DeFrantz, Thomas F. and Anita Gonzalez. 2014. “Introduction: From ‘Negro Expression’ to “Black Performance.’” Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. Duke University Press.
Diggs, Daveed, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes. 2019. “Afterword.” The Deep. Saga Press.
George-Graves, Nadine. 2014. “Diasporic Spidering: Constructing Contemporary Black Identities.” Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. Duke University Press.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. 2020. Dub: Finding Ceremony. Duke University Press.
Madison, D. Soyini. 2014. “Foreword.” Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. Duke University Press.
Solomon, Rivers. 2019. The Deep. Saga Press.