In early days our forebears sold their kinsmen into slavery for minor items such as beads, mirrors, alcohol, and tobacco. These days, tune is same, only articles have changed into cars, transistor radios, and bank accounts. Nothing else has changed, and nothing will change in foreseeable future. Ken Saro-Wiwa Conservative estimates established by Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database determine that between fifteenth and ninenteenth centuries, nearly twelve million African people were held as cargo on ships destined for Americas and slavery. Those who survived what we call the Middle Passage found that life in Brazil, Caribbean, and North America was violent and brutal, and entailed such a traumatic break with their own personal pasts and milieux that they encountered what Orlando Patterson has described as social death (38). Likewise, trans-Atlantic slave trade had an immediate, detrimental, economic, demographic, political, and impact on African societies and cultures and continues to do so well into twenty-first century. On coast of Africa, loss of millions of people, even spread over three centuries, significantly impaired Africa's growth to extent that Walter Rodney describes it as source of Africa's underdevelopment (113). Though some of these changes--such as increased warfare, loss of lives, and transformations in meaning and determinants of wealth--would have been self-evident to people who were living in Africa at time of slave trade, we can also identify larger trends from our position of temporal distance. The traumatic effects of trans-Atlantic slave trade have had centuries to unleash themselves, unlike those of other equally dramatic but more recent historical events like World War I, Holocaust, or bombing of Hiroshima. Now, in postcolonial and post-independence era, historians, critics, and creative writers are in a unique position to describe long-term effects of one of most significant traumas of African past. This position of temporal distance is unique not only in that it provides a more extensive appreciation of effects of trans-Atlantic slave trade, but also in that it provides an opportunity for us to reconsider our conceptions and definitions of in general. The term trauma, as it is understood by psychoanalytic authors from Sigmund Freud to Cathy Caruth, is characterized by a (Caruth 3). However, of mind ... is not, like wound of body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that ... is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in nightmares and repetitive actions of survivor (Caruth 4). Thus, is both an immediate experience, a wounding, and belated effects of that wound. This double valence of term trauma lends it potential for an expansive temporal longevity. Though most psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic critics limit extent of to life of individual who personally suffered initial wound, recent critical interventions have understood to last beyond event and even beyond life of an individual. Notable among these critics is Marianne Hirsch, who describes phenomenon of grief passed down through a generation of Holocaust survivors to their children. Though second generation did not personally experience Holocaust, they lived with constant haunting specter of that traumatic era in their lives nonetheless. Naming this condition postmemory, Hirsch argues that memory of a past that a person has never lived can persist, though it has ceased to exist, because many second-generation survivors feel compelled to re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate, to replace, and to repair (243). The sense of distance and belatedness that postmemory inflicts on this second generation is revelatory of sense of loss that they experience, a loss of ability to actively respond to originary that they, from distance at which they stand, have no ability to prevent or alter. …
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Jan 29, 2011
Luciane N Cruz + 4
Open Access