A Word and Its Inhabitants
Peter Forberg
Located 2 km off of the southeastern the coast of Dakar is Gorée Island. Now known for its gorgeous views of the ocean, pleasant beaches, and abundance of art vendors, the island’s history rests with a much more troubled enterprise: slavery.
As one of the last stops in Africa before the trek across the Atlantic, perhaps even the last stop, Gorée became a hotly contested port for slavers, its ownership changing hands between the Portuguese, French, and British many times throughout its days of human trade. And for many slaves, it was the last time that they would be on the continent, kept in the Maison des Esclaves, or House of Slaves, where opportunities for renegotiating their status were bleak. Upwards of 20 slaves were kept in rooms no larger than a queen sized bed, and the “punishing room,” the space underneath the stairs leading up to the merchants’ chambers whose odd proportions might make it large enough to hold one bicycle, held an unknown number of slaves at any given time: humanity mattered little to slavers.
What occurred at Gorée demands an exhaustion of pain. There are the children’s quarters with slats that allow their parents to peer in, the mixed-race women who took to seducing poor Europeans beneath their economic status in order to escape slavery, preserving their ancestral homeland and wealth, and the shipwrecked masses still being uncovered by their geographic descendants, plunging deep into the gap between hope and history, flashlights in hand. However, this is the reality of the past; it is hardly the reality of the present.
The Maison des Esclaves is draped in pastels. Its soft red paint aligns itself with the delicate morning yellow of a neighboring building, as do all of the major structures on Gorée. They are painted in gentle tones of sky blue, spring green, and sunset orange, like Easter Egg shells, fragile for the life they once held. The streets are pulled straight from European villas, with wooden balconies overlooking uneven cobblestone paths line with trees and flower bushes that have climbed along windowsills, creating a lush overhead canopy that blocks out the harsh sun, letting in little beams of kind sunlight. Everywhere there are tapestries of brilliant rainbow montages capturing the rustic lives of rural villages or the hypersexualized African woman covered by cloth if at all. Musicians bend questions into lyrics as they strum out dancing melodies on their koras, singing about this European tourist named Jacques from Marseilles that they just met, and vendors of little percussive instruments bellow their heavily accented renditions of “Replay” by lyaz when they hear English being spoken. As we swap coin for sugar peanuts and sweet bissap juice, the tour of the island moves farther and farther away from the history of punishment.
“Dignity,” the guide says, explaining how the island’s name came to mean this sense of honor through some portmanteaus and linguistic borrowing. Our professor laughs under his breath and says to me later, “Dignity for who? And who named it that way?” For him, “dignity,” is just a word, regardless of the language that owns it, empty without evidence of its existence. He talks frequently about the power of narrative, explaining how the story of Gorée has been almost entirely left up to a flock of untrained tour guides and colonial-apologists. Even as I wander through the emptied rooms of human suffering, it’s difficult to summon up the same solemnity that I’ve felt wandering through closed-down American prisons, scaling cannons on the beaches of Normandy, or pouring over slave stories in Civil War museums. Portuguese tween tourists take selfies and throw up gang signs, hearts and names are Sharpie’d onto the walls of holding areas, and a tour guide cracks jokes as Europeans line up to pose for pictures in front of a scenic ocean vista, ignoring the former cells they walk past. The trauma of American slavery, ever-present in our daily conversations about race and marginalization, is painted over by humor and merchandise.
“It is common that horrible things happen in beautiful places,” my professor will later say in class. And Gorée is a beautiful place. In its historical niches, there are abandoned churches of old Christian conquerors, prisons for colonial criminals, art-lined cannons for naval defense, and boarding schools that once housed budding radical African thinkers (and one still in operation that might still, named after the deeply moving author Mariama Bâ). Here horrible things happened, where people eat Nutella crepes and dangle their feet in clear blue-green ocean. Here horrible crimes were punished but more committed, where tourists pose in a cheesy heart-shaped statue. Here painters maintain crumbling aristocratic mansions, where slats were carved into every building for firing muskets. Here Senegalese women lost control of their bodies, families, and fortunes, where children sell peanuts and women pester tourists into buying bracelets.
Here the Senegalese have chosen to rewrite history, and someone like me cannot be the judge of that decision. At some point, a friend points out that she’s toured prisons still in use in her home country, and the cells are even smaller. Coming from a place untouched by Atlantic slavery, she asks, “Why are the Americans being so cautious about offending someone? Terrible things happen everywhere, we just choose to forget about it.” Therein lies the problem. The right to forget and the right to forgive. French honeymooners and American college students don’t have the right to do either, asked to follow the lead of those who live on the island. But while some Senegalese choose to forget, others, like our professor, is fighting to keep the narrative alive, to make the island remember its pockets of horror. What the islanders choose to do with these memorials is ultimately still up to them.
I choose to err on the side of caution, and I take to heart what my friend said: everywhere has its tragedies, but that doesn’t discount any individual one. The world is filled with opportunities to respect and remember its inhabitants, and it offers a way to protect and preserve itself for those yet to come. Gorée is a part of a complex constellation of human error in reasoning, in action, and in language. It is home to these things, and its existence seeks to correct them in the future. And that is something worth paying attention to.
The only picture from the Maison des Esclaves is of the graffiti. The round building is the prison.
