Abstract
With this essay on decolonizing ways of knowing, I seek to understand the phantom histories of my father’s French family. Filling in silences in written family accounts with scholarship on Marseille’s maritime commerce, African history, African Diaspora studies, and my own archival research, I seek to reconnect European, African, and Caribbean threads of my family story. Travelling from New Orleans to Marseille, Zanzibar, Ouidah, Porto-Novo, Martinique and Guadeloupe, this research at the intersections of personal and collective heritage links critical genealogies to colonial processes that structured the Atlantic world. Through an exploration of family documents, literature, and art, I travel the trade routes of la Maison Régis.
Highlights
I remember a lot of cleaning, washing and folding sails, scrubbing the deck, sanding teak and varnishing it, and playing cards, picnics, and swimming in the deep cold waters of the Mediterranean. The prints he gave us did not have anything to do with the boats I knew as a child. They were large, color reproductions of paintings from the port of Marseille, France where he had grown up—the three-masted schooners and brigs were the kinds of ships involved in long-distance trade
I did not have any direct experiences of the city growing up, my father’s ancestral connections in Marseille are part of a Provençal genealogy that includes twohundred years of connections to West and Northern Africa through work and trade
I stopped in Marseille to visit my with a Ikeen interest in all aspects of Ithe experience, heincultivated family
Summary
When I was in my early 20s, my father, Claude Régis, distributed prints of ships to all of his children. I did not have any direct experiences of the city growing up, my father’s ancestral connections in Marseille are part of a Provençal genealogy that includes twohundred years of connections to West and Northern Africa through work and trade Claude and his siblings came of age during the German occupation of the city, and my father joined the army straight out of high school. The truth is, in Marseille, I felt everyone looked like me This was a city of brown-hair, brown-eyed folks—whether they came into the city from Provence long ago or first, second or third generation citizens with family histories in La Réunion, Senegal, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Greece, Spain, or Italy..
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