middle passage
For Mother's Day we went to the Detroit Institute of the Arts and viewed the traveling Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art. One sculpture that stopped me and I have gone back to numerous time in my memory was Chicago artist Richard Hunt's bronze Model for Middle Passage Monument (1987). That we have no monument in America recognizing the Middle Passage speaks just as loudly as the fact I do not recall being taught anything about this large section of American history in the East Lansing public school system:
Middle Passage: the leg of the Atlantic slave trade that transported slaves from Africa to slave markets in North America, South America and the Caribbean. It was called the Middle Passage because the slave trade was a form of Triangular trade; ships left Europe with goods for African markets, sailed to Africa where the goods were sold or traded for slaves in the African slave markets, then sailed to the Americas and Caribbean (West Indies) where the slaves were sold or traded for goods for European markets, and then returned to Europe.
The most we have in memorial is Mr. Hunt's model, showing the front half of a wooden ship hull, representing the boats that carried men, women and children to the Americas. And while these are not the same schooners I have been romanticizing my entire life, it gave me pause to think the same boats I have seen as symbols of escape and bounty and youthful liberty were also capable of horrific deeds. And while my slim family tree had no hand in the Atlantic slave trade (as far as I can gather my father's side was living quiet Jewish lives in the Ukraine as clock makers, while my mother's side came to Georgia as itinerant Italians; both around the turn of the last century) it affects me just as it affects you.
I find it curious that so few modern poets who did not have direct family experience with the Middle Passage have written so little on the subject. Why is that? It is still part of our collected history, even if it is a shameful part. Perhaps it is because if many of us begin to scratch the surface we shall find our forefathers were intricately bound up with the Middle Passage in ways that will be far from flattering? Perhaps. Or, more likely, today's poets are far more comfortable creating book after book of word salad that never challenges anything, never means anything, never risks anything. We live, after all, in the great postmodern age, where things like lyrics, apologizes and narrative flow are terrible banalities. As if we were above banality. As if we had the prerogative, privilege, divine right to be above all of this. As if.
There lies the dockyard, creak of rig, jib, boom;
their masts puffing out sail. There whisper blue
peppered foam, scag glittering crests. There gloom
the dark broad seas. The seas I love and you
fear and all who furrowed through, all who flew
over fallowed blue waves, all of us, all
of us now speak this language. Who came? Who
went off on that middle passage? Those tall
masted ships hold words I do not recall
being taught in school but my ignorance
is as wide as these wide seas and these small
hulls hold more stories of human grievance
than I'll ever know but it's a passage
we all speak of, this language, this knowledge.