Remember,Me: An Interlocking Narrative of Black Women’s Past and Present

I hate this paper. Downright despise it. In fact, during the process of researching and writing, I referred to it as the impossible paper. Consequently, I endured several bouts of writer’s block. I remember one particular episode.

Picture it: coffee brewing, television muted, and me sitting in front of a fully charged iPad holding a yellow notepad filled with scribblings from last night’s reading. Every couple of minutes, I’d lean back in my chair, rereading the abstract. Then, I’d come back to the computer screen, fully committed to begin writing. Nothing. I’d repeat this action several times. Still nothing. I was stuck, and no amount of rereading an abstract would work.

Why was this paper so hard to write? I am familiar with autoethnography and have used it to write several papers before (Ferdinand, 2009, 2015a, 2015b, 2016a, 2016b). I’ve discussed it at conferences, reviewed journal submissions using it as a method, and I am even in the process of writing an autoethnography of motherhood. Every time I use it, I consult the work of Ellis and Bochner’s (2000) seminal essay, “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, and Personal Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject” found in the Handbook of Qualitative Research. Denzin and Lincoln’s (1997) words are a mainstay in most of my writings:

Autoethnography is setting a scene, telling a story, weaving intricate connections among life and art, experience and theory, evocation and explanation . . . and then letting it go, hoping for readers who will bring the same careful attention to your words in the context of their own lives. (p. 208)

But even knowing all of this, I was at a loss, and I think it was largely due to the subject matter.

I had committed myself to exploring Black womanhood. To be exact, these were the words I used in the abstract: I posit that the contemporary plight of African American women can be better understood with an examination of her predecessor, the enslaved female captive. I even proposed to go further by showing the correlation between the past and the present, of connecting historical and modern-day oppressions, and subsequently describing the impending effect on me as a diasporic subject. I thought I could simply construct a narrative of parallel lives, giving voice to the enslaved captive woman and the modern African American woman.

Unfortunately, I drastically underestimated the difficulty of this paper. I assumed that the words would flow freely from my mind; instead, they just danced around in my head:

enslaved female captive;  violent actions;

symbol of brutality;  disjointed subjectivity;  colonization;

     domination and oppression;  bridging the past with the present.

Then, I read Cho’s (2007) article, “Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora,” and I saw the ways she weaved her identity as a displaced Korean subject with Korean history, painting a picture of how it feels to search for one’s history amid silence and shame. I thought I could follow the same model. So I started conducting more research to strengthen my story. And what I found troubled me so much that I hated it.

I hated reading about the current state of Black womanhood. Hill-Collins (2000) describes the ways that Black women exist in a matrix of domination where intersecting oppressions are organized around structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power. Pratt-Clarke (2013) describes the devastating effects of this, stating, “Many African American women have essentially been re-enslaved through incarceration, unemployment, poor education, and disenfranchisement” (p. 108). I was saddened to learn that “Black women and girls are also disproportionately subjected to police violence, accounting for 20 percent of the unarmed people killed by police since 1999, despite being just 7 percent of the population” (Duffy, 2016, p. 103). And I hated to see that 15 Black women were killed in violent police encounters over the past 15 years:

Tanisha Yvette  Miriam Shelly  Darnisha

  Malissa Alesia Shantel  Rekia  Shereese

  Aiyana Tarika  Kathryn  Alberta  Kendra  

These are the names that are never spoken.

I kept reading. I learned that in education, “Girls of color are disproportionately led away from academic and professional success to what are commonly referred to as the school-to-prison and the school-to-low-wage-work pipelines” (Lewis & Shifman, 2014, p. 31). I read all of this. And I kept going. I learned of the staggering statistics regarding Black women’s health, noting that they “experience disproportionate high rates of adverse health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, lupus, adverse birth outcomes, and untreated or mistreated psychological conditions” (Giscombe, 2010, p. 668). I even learned how Black women’s fertility is controlled through law and legislation. Take, for instance, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Center, where in 2010, 148 incarcerated women were subjected to forcible tubal ligation, most of whom were African American. Roberts (2014) writes, “One of the chief ‘social problems’ upon which the state is fixated and deploys as justification for punitive intervention, including forms of coercive birth control, is the perceived hyper-fertility of black women” (p. 1778).

I even began to question my own identity as a Black woman, especially when I learned of the stereotypical lens in which Black women are viewed that Hill-Collins (2000) describes as the mammy, matriarch, jezebel, and the welfare mother. I already assumed that I was viewed as a mammy at my university (Ferdinand, 2016a), but I didn’t even think about how my very presence may induce some to see me in other stereotypical fashions. In many instances, the stereotype masks as truth as Boylorn (2013) shows, which inevitably paints a distorted picture of Black women. hooks (1995) describes how these controlling images are created to “serve as substitutions, standing in for what is real” (p. 38). It is these images that Harris-Perry (2011) claims leads to the misrecognition of Black women in society. She writes,

When they confront race and gender stereotypes, black women are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion. (p. 29)

But here’s the conundrum. I learned that Black women are at once invisible, seen through only stereotypical manifestations, yet simultaneously hypervisible. Young (2003) writes that

the black body is a body that is always on display, always on stage, and always in the process of its own exhibition. . . . [It] is not a blank screen against which meaning gets projected. Instead, it is the core text already infused with meaning. (p. 114)

Henderson (2014) concurs, writing that “the black woman’s body is always public—always exposed. This positioning complicates any attempt on the black woman’s part to assert agency over her life, her person, her body” (p. 952). In many ways, this has led to the exoticization of Black women, with Yancy (2008) noting, “Not only is the Black female body exotic, it is a site of contradictory investments, at once desirable and undesirable, known and unknown” (p. 9). Sarah Baartman (Hottentot Venus) comes to mind, whose skeleton hung from rack #1603 in the Museum of Man in Paris until President Nelson Mandela urged the French government to return it to South Africa. Spillers (1987) aptly sums it up:

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,”’ God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented. (p. 65)

I wasn’t shocked to learn all this information; I guess I just hated seeing it in writing. And since the body is “a social script” (Alexander, 2004, p. 522), then it comes as no surprise that the Black woman’s body has been rendered silent in the midst of stereotypical associations.

I read all of this, and hated it. And then I got angry. The same type of anger that R. Griffin (2012) describes,

I AM an Angry Black Woman. Unapologetically, rationally, and rightfully so. I am blistering mad! I am frustrated and enraged! I am devastated, and my blood is boiling at a temperature so hot that I think my heart might stop beating at any given moment. (p. 138)

My anger became such a dynamic force that it affected my behavior. I started thinking about the things that people do not have the right to do to me. For instance, when a White, male professor questioned my credentials to teach, even commenting to my students that I was not a “real” professor, I sought this man out, and immediately challenged his notion of a young, black, dreadlock-wearing female professor. I felt just like Celie in The Color Purple (1985): “I may be poor, Black, I may even be ugly. But dear God, I’m here! I’m here!”

This paper was igniting a fire in me that I desperately sought to control, but I couldn’t. So I took long breaks from it. But I was always brought back.

****

I could hear the sadness in my mother’s voice. She never cried. She told me that she comes from the generation of women before women cried. But when I picked up the phone, I could hear a quivering in her voice.

“Hey, what you doing?” She asked, almost in a whisper.

“Working on this paper.” I replied. I was really just staring at the screen.

“Oh, how far have you gotten?”

“Not far enough. I just cannot seem to tackle this topic. It’s hard to write about.”

“Well, I won’t bother you. Just call me back.” She quickly replied.

“No, no, no. It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

She began to tell me the importance of the date: June 7, 2016. In a shaking voice, she explained that June 7 marked the date where she had been employed as a domestic housekeeper for a White couple for 40 years. Through her tears, she talked about how she was 69 years old and had no significant accomplishments. To her, she wasted her life. In her ramblings, she wondered (and was disturbed) about her life experiences. I tried picturing her crying, but I couldn’t. I just listened.

She spoke almost in dry heaves when discussing how she dropped out of high school to get married at the height of the civil rights movement, lamenting that if she had just held out a little longer, she would have experienced her full rights as a citizen. Through deep sobs, she talked about her regrets of not walking through the door that had just become ajar for her. She kept going, finally saying, “Shit. I could’ve done more with my life.”

I listened, and I hated it. Hated it because she couldn’t see what I saw. She couldn’t see the bravery and fortitude it took for a woman like her, raised in the Deep South during Jim Crow to poor sharecroppers, to become a wife and mother of six while working and maintaining a household. She couldn’t see that she made something out of nothing, overcoming obstacles that would easily decimate someone else. Instead, all she saw was her failure. My mother blamed herself when I’d rather she had considered the words of Mary Church Terrell (1940):

I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, but had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain. (p. 427)

I tried intervening in her thoughts by even referencing some of the research I had done.

“Mom, don’t beat yourself up about that. You did what you had to do. Besides, as a Black woman, your life choices were limited at that time.”

“But I could’ve done more. I could’ve. I should’ve left that occupation when other black women were starting to leave.”

“The system affected your life, Ma, in particular the race-based, race-segregated job economy that limited African American women to low-status, low paying menial jobs. Ma, it almost assuredly cemented your status as a second-class citizen.”

All of this fell on deaf ears. Instead, she switched subjects. She stopped crying long enough to say that she was planning to vote for Hillary Clinton in the next presidential election. She continued, talking about various topics, the weather, her new church attire, and so on. But I was stuck. I kept thinking about Hillary Clinton and my mother. I couldn’t let go of the fact that Hillary Clinton is a year younger than my mother, but her life choices and experiences were and continue to be very different from my mother’s. Clinton even acknowledges her privileged position, commenting, “My worries are not the same as black grandmothers” (Lee & Merica, 2016). But my mother was done with this subject, clearly from her shift in topic. However, I wasn’t.

So I went back to the topic that I hated so much. I learned about Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells (HeLa Cell) were taken from her without her consent in 1951 (Skloot, 2010). Her cells have been used in over 60,000 experiments and have resulted in important medical developments in treatment for a range of illnesses and diseases, including cancer and infertility. But it wasn’t enough. So I kept going. I learned about the eugenics program that operated from 1909 to 1963 that forcibly sterilized more than 60,000 Americans, mostly poor Black women. T. Griffin (2013) writes, “This idea of cleansing the world of its unwanted citizens morphed to mean, almost exclusively, preventing Black women from becoming mothers” (p. 32). I thought about these events that took place during my mother’s generation. I felt lucky to be alive.

This was too much for me. My anger remained salient. So, I took another break from this topic, hoping to run away from this harsh confrontation with the past. That was until my daughter jolted me even further into a devastating history.

****

Rajah burst into the room smiling from ear to ear. Jumping up on the bed, she excitedly asked, “Mommie, have you ever heard of Ida B. Wells?”

“Sure I have,” I affectionately replied. “I know Ida B.”

“How do you know her?” I asked.

“My teacher talked about her in class. I think I need to know her,” she offered.

“Okay. I’ll see what I can find.”

The next day I took a journey to Strands Bookstore in Manhattan. I left right at the peak of the morning commute, but I didn’t care. I was on a journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan specifically for my daughter. I stood between scores of people on the crowded train. At every stop it made, I anxiously counted down the remaining stops in my head. Finally, I arrived at the East Village bookstore.

I walked in the store and immediately found a sales associate to help me. I told him I was searching for a children’s book on Ida B. Wells-Barnett. He immediately told me to follow him upstairs.

We went up the stairs, passing rows of books, some of them about historic fiction, mystery and adventure, and even science fiction and fantasy. I was truly amazed at the wide selection. But then we arrived to a tiny section for African American history. Down on the bottom shelf, muscled between books about Blacks in baseball and Jackie Robinson, lay a short piece on Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I had traveled 45 min on a crowded train and was pushed and shoved in commuter’s frantic rush to get to work, only to find this insanely small section of Black history. I not only was disappointed, again, I was angry.

But I didn’t raise a fuss. I grabbed the book, flipped through it, and took it downstairs to the cash register. After paying for it, I promptly left the store with the book in hand. When Rajah returned from school, she wanted to read it together. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I instructed her to read it to herself first and assured her that we would read it together later. I needed time to process this. And my anger brewed! It was just as R. Griffin (2012) says, “We forget to remember Black women” (p. 146).

And so, I began researching about Ida B. Wells-Barnett. It is through her story that I learned more about lynching. I learned of a particularly gruesome one of an African American woman. Kambon (2015) tells the story of Mary Turner, who was brutally lynched by a White mob after accusing them of murdering her husband. Kambon describes it as such:

The heinous mob then set about its fiendish work of tying her ankles, hanging her upside down from a nearby tree, dousing her in gasoline and motor oil and then setting her on fire while still alive. . . . A prototypically sinister white man stepped out of the mob and slashed her abdomen open with a knife causing her still-alive baby to fall to the ground. The baby was able to manage but a single cry before her little head was crushed under a white man’s filthy boot. (p. 50)

Apparently, this was just one of many acts of violence inflicted on Black women.

Much to my chagrin, I kept getting pushed further and further into this subject. I read through Harriet Jacobs’ (1861/2001) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to get a clearer picture of the Black woman’s experience during slavery. Imagine the irony of this situation: I am learning how Harriet Jacobs was prevented from being a mother while a slave, yet I’m using her story to strengthen my knowledge about Black women so that I can adequately articulate the Black woman’s experience to my own daughter.

It is from Jacob’s narrative that I learned that Black women were used to “produce new chattels—units of production—for the plantation machine” (Philip, 1997, p. 76). Jacobs herself described women as having “no value, unless they continually increase their owner’s stock” (p. 49). I learned that she had but a single purpose, as McKittrick (2000) notes, “to construct, preserve, define and build modernity: The New World as well as the slave system . . . the mechanics of slavery” (p. 227).

I never shared this information with my daughter, although we did finally read Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s story together. And amid the anger, my hatred for this topic grew, which brings me to the present moment.

****

Why did I want to write this paper? I knew very well about the enslaved captive woman upon conducting research for my dissertation in 2006 when I visited Elmina and Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. I knew about the structures significance to the transatlantic slave trade, and, especially, their importance for heritage tourists from the African Diaspora. Tillet (2009) writes,

The heritage tours allow post-Civil Rights African Americans to render and to remember the transatlantic slave trade as essential to the formation of their African Diasporic identities. On these tours, the slave fort epitomizes the larger African American quest to rediscover a point of cultural origin. (p. 125)

I entered the slave dungeons in search of my roots. I was going home to find myself, and I needed her, the enslaved female captive, to do that. Finding her in the past would give me all I needed to understand myself in the present. She would have all the answers to the questions, Davis (1997) believes African Americans ask themselves, “Who am I? Why am I here? How do I return home?” (p. 156). I liken my quest to Calafell’s (2005) journey to Mexico City in search of Malintzin Tenepal. She writes, “If only I could find her then perhaps I could find myself” (p. 48).

Unfortunately, the enslaved female captive wasn’t there. Instead, I stood on 18 inches of a corroded heap of blood, exfoliated skin, and feces. A mere plaque replaced what was once her presence:

In Everlasting Memory

Of the anguish of our ancestors

May those who died rest in peace

May those who return find their roots

May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity

We, the living, vow to uphold this.

It was just as Hartman (2007) says, “The slave was for all intents and purposes dead, no less so than had he been killed in combat. No less so than had she never belonged to the world” (pp. 67-68). The irony of this situation is that the absence of her in the dungeons mimics my very presence here in the United States in that we both possess a liminal status as dispossessed subjects of a nation. She no more belongs to the African continent than I belong to this one. Richards (2005) notes, “The absence of artifacts performs African diasporic identity, for dispossession of a specific history, loss of a coherent, complex universe of values and practices, constitute the very grounds of our identities in America” (p. 626). Like Calafell (2005) found of Malintzin Tenepal, the enslaved captive woman “exists in a complex space of absence and presence” (p. 480).

And in writing this essay, I had to confront the reality that there was no written story about her, nothing in the historical documents I could quickly refer to in explaining her experience as a captive at Elmina or Cape Coast Castle. Spillers (1987) notes that “we get very little notion in the written record of the life of women . . . in ‘Middle Passage’” (p. 73). Well, we get nothing by way of the enslaved captive woman in the female dungeons. I remember reading a partial description by Richard Wright (1954):

a tiny, pear-shaped tear that formed on the cheek of some black woman torn away from her children, a tear that gleams here still, caught in the feeble rays of the dungeon’s light—a shy tear that vanishes at the sound of approaching footsteps, but reappears when all is quiet, a tear that was hastily brushed off when her arm was grabbed and she was led toward those narrow, dank steps that guided her to the tunnel that directed her feet to the waiting ship that would bear her across the heaving, mist-shrouded Atlantic. (pp. 341-342)

Still, I needed more. I, then, had a huge responsibility: to resurrect her.

****

Let me out! Let me out! I do not belong here. I do not belong behind these bars. This iron is straining my feet and neck. I am caged, but I am not an animal. Let me go! Let me go! Do not touch me. Stop spraying that water—it is cold! Move your hands! What is it that you want? To violate me? Go ahead. I know what resisting leads to—the death room—a 7-by-10 foot cage with no window or air. Or an iron cannonball placed at my feet while baking in the blazing sun. I am physically chained, but I am not ready to die. Which do I choose?

I hear you as you climb the steps to your church. I hear your worship. Your joyous melody is a dagger through my heart. The rhythm of your feet crushes my soul. Who is this god you worship? Does your god not hear my cries from beneath your church pew? Your church is not worthy of the inscription written above the doorway: Psalm 132—Zion is the Lord’s resting place. This is his habitation or everlasting resting place. This, St. George’s Catholic Church, is not built on holy ground. The ground that supports this church is soiled, rotten, and untenable. The ground that buttresses this church is stained by blood, sweat, and tears. This ground, this auction, this market, this unfathomable place is death.

This is not my home! This is not my village! Who are these women? One hundred and fifty unfamiliar faces. What is this “hoeregat”—or whore hold, as I hear you call it? I stand in this spot and menstruate. Blood slowly trickles down my legs to the floor. I stain the ground. But, this is my spot! This is my spot! I cannot share it with the other women. These few inches are all I have in this world. I will sleep right here tonight, this spot saturated in blood, urine, and feces. This unfamiliar place—its mortar, its brick, its cement—soaked with my excrements. Twice-a-day washings in the sea don’t mask the odor. In this sweltering dungeon and dank atmosphere, I smell of suffering. I slightly hold my breath as not to breathe in the foul odors or the sulfurous air from the ammunition in the adjoining tunnel. The chipped gravel underneath my feet cuts me as I stand. You have made me an item in this trading supply post. How precious am I, that cannons surround this fortress as it does? The stench of this place is overwhelming, but I am not bothered. I AM this dungeon, and it is me.

My fate is sealed. I see the ships awaiting my arrival. I—naked, starved, and malnourished—pass through a six-inch slit in the wall. My diminutive stature allows me to easily slip through the makeshift doorway. I try to take one final look at these shores, but the gray misty haze is too thick. I can see the Atlantic Ocean—this betrayer of humanity. I can never return here—this is the point of no return. I am herded into a small canoe that takes me out to a larger ship where your countrymen wait with lusting eyes. My skin burns from the violent scrubs used to cleanse my body. I hear the echoing sounds of flutes and drums and my body is told to dance.

I am pushed and shoved into a tight narrow space. I have no room to move. My body lies flat on this surface. I am chained to two women: one who is dead and whose decomposing flesh assaults my nose—her lifeless body clinging to the corroded chains—and the other who is pregnant and whose birth pains cause violent shacks. Her vomit splashes over my face. It does not harm me, for I no longer have a body. Chains now replace what were once hands. Shackles are now known as feet.

Who am I? I was marched 300 miles inward to this coast. I have been raped, beaten, starved, burned, and broken. Who am I? I have sat in a dungeon for months instead of in the peacefulness of my village. I dream of my family, not knowing the comfort of their touch. Who am I? The vile hands of men have ravaged my body and the spoils have damaged my mind. Who am I? You count me as “kop,” or head, but my new name is . . . .

****

I write this section cautiously, considering Spivak’s (1985) words that the subaltern is still unable to speak when the story is rewritten by others. I know my account of her life cannot be confirmed. I know there are no public records to dictate the truth of it—it is fiction. But, like Morrison (1990) says, “What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image—on the remains—in addition to recollection to yield up a kind of truth” (p. 332). The truth that I am offering here resides not in facts or figures but in the emotionality of the experience I am beckoning. Banks and Banks (1998) write, “Facts don’t always tell the truth, or a truth worth worrying about, and the truth in a good story . . . sometimes must use imaginary facts” (p. 11). I offer this fictional account as a way of theorizing Black women’s experience, particularly in light of Black Feminist Theory, which encourages the centering of Black women’s lives at the center of analysis. The story I tell here is not unlike the one that Toni Morrison tells in Beloved. Or the one that Edwidge Danticat explores in Breath, Eyes, Memory. In keeping with that tradition, I use fiction as a way to theorize the experience of the enslaved female captive in the slave dungeon. Christian (1987) finds,

For people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing is often in the narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play of language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. (p. 52)

Although this account is based on my experience as a tourist of the dungeons, which alone is a complicated locale as Halualani (2002) suggests, I wrote her story in an attempt to give voice to a silent experience.

And then I got writer’s block again. I leaned over my chair in desperation. The strained muscles in my neck contracted in agony. I sat still, unable to muster enough strength to write a single word. I think it was because I hated what I was writing. I hated erasing who she was before. No longer was she a Fulani woman who weaves baskets. Or a local Ewe midwife responsible for bringing in the next generation of her clan. She no longer believed in Chukwu or the Yoruba divinity, Orisha. I had reduced her just like colonization did, as Aime Cesaire (1955) says, to “thingification” (p. 42) In essence, I replicated the colonial experience for her, falling into the trap of “colonial discourses and tropes—appropriating, re-employing, subverting and inverting them” (Dunn, 2004, p. 487).

And even worse, I made readers gaze upon her black body in the same way as the colonial masters, a “process of seeing without being seen” (Yancy, 2008, p. 6). I couldn’t escape what I was doing; I was stuck in the colonial language. Maybe it is as Morrison (1992) says about the contradictory nature of the Black woman’s body. McKittrick (2000) describes it as “occupying a contradictory positionality—because they are speaking from alterable gendered positions . . . black women produce diverse narratives that both re-inscribe and debunk the racial tropes that emit from their bodies” (p. 224). I hate to think that I may have contributed to the powerlessness of the captive, which Spillers (1987) describes as a “theft of the body—a willful and violent severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” (p. 67). And now I’m left with the aching feeling that I failed to do justice to her traumatic experience. Cho (2007) gives me two alternatives: “to remain silent and allow the ghosts to wither away after several generations, or to speak and set the ghosts free” (p. 165). I chose the latter.

In freeing the ghost, I opened up the possibility of different readings of this written experience. Like Carillo Rowe (2011), my writing disrupts time and space to recover the trauma experienced by colonial conquest. In fact, I follow her path with the creation of the enslaved captive in that I “situat[ed] her. . . within history as an embodied and interconnected subject—to provide a conceptual leverage not only to excavate, but to rewrite and heal the colonial legacies” (p. 128). It is this idea of reconstituting time that Davis (2008) expounds on in her writing. After she was visited by three enslaved Black women, Davis realizes her spiritual connection to the African matrilineal diaspora, and how this connection is what offers her a space for healing in the academy. She finds, “I am experiencing the continuity of African memory where time is the spiritual connection between shadow and light, ancestors and the living” (p. 180). In Carillo Rowe’s, Davis’s, and even Calafell’s (2005) work, time is collapsed as a way of linking the past and the present.

Considering it from this perspective forces me to reexamine my purpose in creating the fictional narrative of the enslaved female captive. What was once a bit murky to me when I began has become crystal clear to me now: I am challenging memory, time, and history by reimagining it and the relationship between reremembering, slavery, and diaspora. This account hinges on the idea that slavery is a trauma embedded in the cultural memory of African Americans and that remembering it offers the possibility of redressing the vestiges of its assault. In “Remembering the Wretched: Narratives of Return as a Practice of Freedom,” Queeley (2011) writes,

In constructing texts that seek to peel away and examine the layering of colonial/post-colonial experience, the memories of people whose lives have been distorted or erased by the victors of history are released, their violations articulated, and their inner lives recollected and reclaimed. (p. 113)

In telling the story of the enslaved female captive, I am returning her back to herself—a process of bringing her into full being—but also to the historical memory that has erased her. To remember her, I reimagine the past but also reflect on myself in the present as a way to redeem us both.

This can also be considered a decolonized practice. Although Fanon (1963) asserts that “decolonization is always a violent event” (p. 1), he also highlights the freedom achieved as a result. I am writing out of the space of the postcolonial subject as a practice of freedom. This writing highlights a struggle but also a commitment to symbolically reclaim, name, and return to the community the cultural past and identity of which she has been deprived. Clearly, decolonization is an empowering move when considering it as hooks (1995) does:

Decolonization calls us back to the past and offers a way to reclaim and renew life-affirming bonds. . . . We connect ourselves to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the limits of the colonizing eye. (p. 71)

Aligned with this new understanding, I can breathe a little bit easier now and rest assuredly in the decisions I made in telling her story. I feel confident that I have at least attempted to reconcile the past with the present as a way of engaging both “the story and its story” (Pathak, 2010, p. 7).

****

When writing this essay, I saw all the women that ghost this document. I saw Sarah Baartman standing alongside Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I saw Mary Turner holding Henrietta Lacks’ hand. I saw Harriet Jacobs stroking my mother’s head. I saw Mary Church Terrell reflected in my daughter’s image. I saw the enslaved female captive standing in front of the 15 murdered Black women. I saw them all. And I saw myself, standing amid rows of Black women who have been demoralized and demeaned by some of the worst sins committed against their very bodies. I saw them all wiping tears and smiling. We never said a word. But I thought about Young’s (2003) statement:

To look at my skin, my own body and my image reflected in a mirror is to see not only me standing there looking at myself—but also to view the various parts of these other bodies that ghost my own. I am the embodiment of their experience of the body. (p. 146)

As such, this writing is a sort of collective remembering of the Black woman’s experience, a way of narrating lifeworlds and cultural experiences that have been discarded, and worse, retold from those in power. As a postcolonial subject, I am responsible for giving voice to their experience, to “delve into the wound” (Carillo Rowe, 2013, p. 129). When I write from this position, I not only interrogate what it means to fuse my subjectivity within the text, I also articulate a plethora of cultural experiences specifically rooted in colonial histories—those things deemed too terrible to tell. Like Kemp (2000), “I have been singled out by the spirits of my ancestors to tell their story” (p. 12). These are dead stories that only seem to come alive through this writing, thereby only illuminating a small piece of a larger never-ending story. Esposito (2003) states it clearly: “There are ghosts that infect these writings, histories that masquerade as memories, violences that mark me, you, that mark all of us with blood—but, even worse, with forgetting” (p. 229). And truly, forgetting is what I would hate most.