The Ghost of Ex-Boyfriend's Past

I never thought this would happen to me. Truly, I am disturbed and surprised on multiple levels, but for the last week, my biological clock has started ticking. There is this foreign little voice in my head that is saying MATE FOR LIFE, look at that baby, what are you doing, you could be making little people , whereas before it was more like have another mojito and get on a plane to Brazil, date, but don't get trapped, that guy is cute, but gotta keep it moving. Imagine my dismay.

So in the midst of this life altering randomness, I have been visited by the ghost of ex-boyfriends past. What is it about dating someone new that inspires the old to come out of the woodwork? Whenever I meet a cute boy, suddenly all my exes start popping up. It's like vampires at a coffin convention...and me without garlic and a stake.

My first visit came on facebook from a dude I'd neither seen or heard from since 2003... "Hi, I miss you. What have you been up to?" Really? Then when I returned from Ghana, as soon as I turned my phone back on I had a text message from the crazy Gemini...who doesn't exactly count as a boyfriend, but don't tell him that, he seems to think otherwise. And then the icing on the cake, was a message I received from the Big Round headed Loser. He asked his other ex girlfriend (who is actually a good friend of mine....we didn't meet until we were both exes) to wish me a Happy B-day. I repeat, my ex asked his ex to deliver a message to me...which is just so wrong in so many ways. Yes, I know he doesn't have my number or know where I live...so arguably it would be difficult for him to get in contact with me...but that was the point. Right. My last words to this dude were "I hate you. I regret ever knowing you. I am erasing your number right now and I will never talk to you again. Don't call me." Was I unclear?

Okay, so I am taking these events as a sign, a test of sorts. It is clear to me that at some point I would like to get married and have kids, and that this side of 30, that might be a sooner than later type of thing, so perhaps these exes are popping up as an experiential lesson in forgiveness, what not to do again, and letting go.

Step one forgive. The first two exes on the list...well I had almost forgotten that we even dated, so that in of itself says we're good on forgiveness, but the Big Round Headed Loser....that's another story. I did some forgiveness work around the time when we broke up. I started by burning his picture, then Mz. Blu and I broke a lot of glass bottles (which I recommend, it's very healing). And then I moved into prayer. I meditated. I blessed him. I wished him well, then I let it go....okay, I thought I let it go, but whenever he pops up I still get annoyed, which to me says maybe there is more left to do.

But how do you get rid of someone you've already gotten rid of? Me and the Big Round headed Loser don't talk. I don't see him around. We never did really run in the same circles. So I decided to go visit my local reike healer. And apparently there were still a lot of energetic chords binding us together. This is all new to me. Energy work and chords and whatnot weren't covered in the curriculum in Madison West High, nor subsequently in college or grad school. Once I learned about our connecting chords, my instinct was the sever them immediately, but my healer suggested we work first on trying to diminish them and so we did this mediation where we shrunk the chords and as they got smaller, even as I was thinking to myself...what the hell is a chord, I mean what is it made of, do I even believe in this....I found myself suddenly sobbing. All the feelings I thought I'd left behind, the sadness, the missing our friendship, the grief of what could have been came flooding back to me and I was overwhelmed.

I loved this person. I loved him and he loved me and we still couldn't make it work. And that's okay. We were friends and now I avoid him because every time I look at him I remember one more missed opportunity. I don't want him back, but I don't hate him either. I just want to move on. And now I think I might be able to...

A Poem I Wrote At Cape Coast...

RETURN

I thought I saw my mother,
my own face passed me on the street.
I turned to follow,
retracing the unpaved alley of red clay
between the houses and clothes lines,
children playing in the scrub grass
each step littered with broken things
bottles, shells, and forgotten letters
I followed her
to the river's fork
waded into the muddy water
that didn't wash me clean
of this wondering what if...
of this who I could have been
would have been,
if the butterfly had stood still.
But even the tiniest of breezes,
the soft whisper of money
from hand to hand,
are the bricks and mortar of
my irrevocable present.

Still, I thought I saw my father
so I followed him
down the narrow blade of sea,
past the boats and village
through the buying and selling
the selling and buying
chaotic chatter of the market,
to the fresh painted white walls
the backdrop of my nightmares and waking dreams.

I know this place.
I've been here before.
The fortress walls
are only seashells
housing the echos of infinite sorrow
coated in the resin of salty tears,
blood,
life fluids,
stolen.

I thought I saw my mother,
my father,
my cousin,
my brother,
my lover,
my friend...
I thought I saw my sister,
but then I remember,
I am an only child,
a lonely child
sailing on the one way arrow
of linear time
where there are some places
you can travel back to,
but you can never
really
return.

Returning

When I was 16,my mother and I spent a month in Senegal. During our trip, we visited Goree Island, home to a fortress that held tens of thousands of captives before they were shipped across the Atlantic to become slaves. I had never been to a slave castle before. I knew about them, that there were fortresses all up and down the west coast of Africa, the major ports of the slave trade, where my ancestors were imprisoned until shipped to the Caribbean and traded for rum or to the US for field work.

I remember the chill in the air. Senegal in July is sticky hot and most of the places we went didn't have any air conditioning, so you would think I would have felt relieved to be inside the cool concrete walls, but I wasn't. It was haunted. I could feel the sadness steeped in every wall of the fortress, with every breath of wind from the sea, I could hear someone crying, but there was no one there. I held the chains and shackles, I stared out at the ocean through the Door of No Return and I mentally decided not to return to another slave castle.

So there I was in lobby of the Alisa Hotel on my third day in Ghana deciding whether or not to visit Cape Coast. We had just missed Panafest (or the Pan African Festival), which is a biennial celebration where people from all parts of the African Diaspora return to Ghana to celebrate survival and to be freed through a ritual cleansing of all the psychological wounds of losing our roots. In the end, I decided to go, mostly because I didn't know when I'd have the chance to go back. The bus ride was close to 3 hours from Accra, though it didn't feel that long. I spent my time catching up on my journal when it wasn't too bumpy or just looking out the window.

Ghana is so beautiful and green with it's rich red soil. The day was overcast and the gray reminded me of Seattle in that it only served to highlight how lush and green the land was. As we passed through the city out towards the country there were rows and rows of stores selling everything from shoes to wicker furniture, all outside on the side of the road. We passed bed frames and kebab vendors and hair salons and laughed at the business names that seemed so long. Christianity is very popular so there were signs like "God, my strength and my redeemer shoe store" or "He is able Barber shop". I had chosen to embark on the journey with several other conference participants, four professors and a librarian, all of us Black and from North America (there was one Canadian and the rest of us were from the US). We chatted along the way. Some of us took naps, but I noticed that as we got closer, the energy began to shift. People were getting nervous. I remembered how much I really didn't want to do this and wondered why I had chosen to go.

We pulled up to Elmina and were instantly bombarded with high pressure sales. Buy this bracelet. Come to my shop. Here, don't you like Ghanaian kente cloth. It's handmade. We squeezed past the throngs and crossed the narrow wooden drawbridge and suddenly I felt like I was in that movie Sankofa, where the main character goes back in time. The walls are so white, eerily freshly painted. I had to use the restroom, which was down a long walkway, when I came back everyone was gone and I had this momentary panic of not wanting to be caught alone. I crossed over through the castle gates and bought a ticket, which seemed strange...like paying at the beginning and the end of a 400 year bus ride. Inside the walls, but away from the main castle was a restaurant...which really brought home the commercialism to me. Even when we're not being sold, we are still a commodity. The fortresses that were the last point of contact between our ancestors and their homes are now still places of business and somehow that makes me queasy.

We did not eat at the restaurant...all of us finding the idea abhorrent...but we paused there for a moment before going on the tour. The first thing I noticed was that our tour guide was sporting a red Coca Cola t-shirt with his name and UNESCO on it...as those are the two major sponsors of the tour. We worked from the bottom to the top passing through each room as our guide told us about the psychological warfare tactics employed on the prisoners of Elmina.

Elmina was first built by the Portuguese in 1482 as a trading post. The Dutch took over the fort in 1637 (and subsequently the gold coast in 1642), followed by the British in 1871. In the 1990s it was turned into a "World Heritage" site by UNESCO and refurbished.

Inside the Castle, where a chapel used to be, there is a small museum depicting the history of the people who have lived near the castle for years, as well as those who were caught and held captive until pushed through the "Door of No Return" and onto the ships that were the primary agents of creating the Diaspora.

Many of the people who were captured were from the interior regions and had never even seen the ocean let alone heard it's roar. They were imprisoned in dark cells with very little light or space and no bathrooms, meaning they were literally sitting in one another's refuse, listening to the sound of the ocean for days and nights. There was no bathing...except for when the governor chose a woman to rape, then she was stripped and bathed in the courtyard in front of everyone and led to his room. If she fought or refused, she was chained to a post and left outside, naked for days as punishment. As we ascended to the higher rooms of the castle...the places where slave traffickers stayed, there were windows and open space, large rooms and separate bathrooms. These people did not live like their captives. There were no bars on their windows. It's deplorable. I can't think of words strong enough to express how evil and soulless those people had to be to do that to other people. Slaves were treated worse than criminals, worse than animals.






During our time at Elmina, a few White tourists came in to tour. None of us wanted to look at them or talk to them at all. Some of the professors I was with remarked on how it seemed somehow unfair that we should even have to share space with them during such an emotional journey...but surprisingly, I was more upset by our Ghanaian guide. He took us to the Door of No Return, which we each passed through without discussing...as though this was the entire purpose of the trip. To return. Then our guide talked about re-christening the room that we were in "the room of Return". And in that moment I felt such a disconnect with him and with Ghana and with all the people around me. From the windows of the castle you could see the sea on one side and then rows and rows of boats and a thriving market place. All I could think of is that someone...some African person sold my ancestors into slavery. And I felt so hurt and so betrayed. I wasn't prepared to feel this way.

After growing up in America, I've (unfortunately) gained a certain amount of comfort with the low level animosity I feel towards White people in general (not so much on an individual level, but as a group)....this tends to spike when I experience racism...which is (also unfortunately) not all that uncommon. On my trip to Goree, I remember hating White people for what they had done, but I didn't think much about the Africans that had been left behind, other than that they too had lost so much, how their families and lives had been forever altered.

This was my first time coming to grips with the fact that my people had been sold by my people. There are arguments that slavery was so radically different and much more humane in African societies that the slave traders didn't know how brutal and soul crushing American slavery would be...but then there were those who knew, those who smelled the stench of the fortresses and saw people being brutally mistreated and still took the money, and still sold out. And here I was feeling like all these Africans just got to go on with their lives. Their families were torn apart, but they got to keep their land, their traditions, their identities. They continued on, whereas we were destroyed and recreated... phoenixes with nothing more than vague history and genetic predispositions to tell us who we were. I had never really thought about it like that before. It hurt.

Up until this point in the trip, I had felt such a unity among the diaspora. I felt more comfortable in Ghana than in Senegal...which could have been partly because we were at the VIP hotel, plus there were less language barriers and also I've had a whole decade of travel experiences since then and really learned how to travel. I remember my first impressions of Africa. I felt so excited to be in a nation of Black people, and yet I had never felt so foreign, so American in my life. I had a good trip, but I wouldn't say that I felt particularly unified or even particularly African, whereas in Ghana, I was surprised to feel at home. It was for me, as my mother had described it 20 years earlier, a place where I saw myself around every corner.

But Elmina was painful. We took a long time on the tour. There were tears and prayers. We hadn't brought any offerings, though there were wreaths and flowers from many groups who had visited during Panafest, including a plaque that was unveiled while the Obamas were visiting. We made our way to Cape Coast, the other big castle. This one had many more cannons and a much more intense museum. It was even bigger. There were more people visiting and none of us could bring ourselves to go on another group tour, so we split up and wandered on our own, thinking our own thoughts, grieving in private, save for those annoying people trying to sell us stuff. Sister, come to the gift shop. Do you need a tour guide? No. I don't want to buy anything. No I don't want to sell anything. I don't want to be bought or sold, I don't want to barter, I don't want to be here, I don't want to remember, I don't want any of this to have been true. But it is.

I didn't sleep well that night. The following day, I managed to get up and attend the conference. I went to a session of North Africa that was really cool and then I settled down to watch a film by a young African American film maker named Juanita Brown, called Traces of the Trade. If I had known what it was about, I never would have watched it, especially not when I was still raw from Cape Coast, but I'm glad I did.

The film Chronicles the journey of the DeWolf family. Katrina Browne had always known that she had come from a family that owned slaves, but no one had ever really talked about it. During her investigation into her family history, she discovers that her ancestors were not simply slave owners, but that she came from a family of the "largest slave trading dynasty in US history". After 1808 when the slave trade became illegal in the US, the DeWolfs continued by shipping slaves to Cuba. Katrina (who is White) and 9 of her White relatives embark on a journey to Rhode Island then to Cape Coast, Ghana then to Santiago, Cuba, retracing their routes and learning more about their families role in the slave trade. Juanita Brown accompanied them on their journey.

I can honestly say that I would not have had it in me to voluntarily accompany 10 ultra-privileged, ivy league educated (but in many ways very ignorant),White people on a trip to discover their roots as slave traffickers. And then to be responsible for helping them process their feelings around it?! I haven't reached that state of zen, and I commend Juanita, knowing it took her several years before Katrina could convince her to join her on the trip. Yet in watching this very powerful film, I found myself feeling really kind of excited. Here were White people really doing some work and trying to understand their place in the world. Yes, they went through that annoying guilty stage...which oh so many of my hippie, granola, grad school colleagues seemed to be stuck in....but then they really moved through to grapple with the now what question. At the time the film was made, Katrina was in seminary, studying to be an Episcopal church...which brought up an entire other discussion about the ways in which Christianity and churches were complicit in the slave trade and in general in preserving and protecting the White supremacist patriarchy.

I come from a family of Episcopalians, and while I am now a member of the Center for Spiritual Living, there is a part of me that will always see the Episcopal church as my home. This film reminded me of why. Katrina and a few of her other Episcopalian family members decided that for their part of making amends they would petition the church for reparations. They went to the Episcopal National Convention (an annual affair that many of my family members have attended) and spoke about what they had learned and why the felt the church had a duty to do what they could to make it right. Katrina also went back to Rhode Island, to the Episcopal church one of the DeWolfs had built (with slave trade money), to talk about her trip and about going to Ghana during Panafest and being a witness to many Africans of the diaspora returning to blessed and healed of their scars. Some of her family had asked if they could be blessed and the African American priest had agreed to do it, but also suggested that maybe they ask their own elders for blessings. Well, not only did the Episcopal Church pass the resolutions for reparations, but after Katrina gave her sermon, the priest at that church offered a special blessing for any who were willing to accept it...and everyone did.

I cried so hard. I cried because I felt hopeful that if these people could made amends are really do some hard work on understanding what happened and how the past has created the future, that maybe there weren't so many differences between us...or that maybe we could find some common ground. It is a strange juxtaposition to be a Black woman in White America, especially to have grown up in predominantly White middle class spaces. When DuBois wrote about double consciousness in the Souls of Black Folk, I understood immediately what he was talking about, though I would argue that there are more than two consciousnesses at work in my daily life as an African American, a woman, a feminist, a straight queer activist, and all the other ways in which I identify and am identified. And there are times, even within my most intimate friendships where I feel a sense of separation, as though the pieces of my past and present that come together to make up who I am, are still in conflict with those same parts and pieces of other people. I have felt this with my friends who happen to be White and also sometimes with my friends who are Black, but who had a different upbringing than me.

Watching this film and taking the trip to Cape Coast accomplished two major things: one is that my trip showed me an area of forgiveness that I need to do a lot of work on and two, the film gave me the gift of watching someone else's journey of making amends. I want reparations. I don't need 40 acres and mule, but an apology and acknowledgment from the government wouldn't hurt....considering that it's standard protocol. After the internment, the US government apologized and made amends with Japanese Americans. After the trail of tears and the systematic genocide of Native Americans across tribes, there was an admission of wrong doing and several tribes received land and casinos.

But more than reparations on the big scale, I would like to make amends on a personal level. At this point in my life I am not at all interested in educating White people about privilege and power. I do think it should be done...just that I don't have to be responsible for it. What I would like to do is work with other people of color, specifically people within the African diaspora to bring unity among our very separate communities. As the DeWolf family had their own conversations and helped one another to process how their history has impacted their present, I would like to have conversations with not just my family, but other Black people about our identities and where we can go from here. There is no way to go back in history, but there must be a way to return to peace and to compassion so that these types on inhumane atrocities don't take place again.

Presidential Akwaaba

So much happens everyday, it feels like I've been here for a month. Since I arrived I have been taken with all the Obama Akwaaba posters. Akwaaba means welcome. And Both Barack and Michelle were thoroughly welcome on their trip to Ghana last month, the evidence if everywhere from the US flags with Obama's face superimposed on them that wave from many taxi dashboards and the Obama dashikis and t-shirts in the market. I too feel like I've gotten the presidential welcome. This is a totally VIP trip. On our second night in Ghana, my mother and I went to dinner at the home of her friend and colleauge Abena Busia. I was still a kid when they published their book together (Theorizing Black Feminism) so I guess I never really knew the Abi was the daughter of a former president of Ghana. My mom recounts the story of her first time in Ghana. She was a student at Spelman University and here at the University of Ghana at Legon for a 6 week study abroad. She says at that time Abi's father's picture was on a lot of billboards because he was running for president. It was the first time she had ever had the realization that in other countries Black men were presidents.

Flashing forward, Abi's father was elected and subsequently deposed by a military cue. The family was sent into exile, so Abi grew up in England, Holland, Mexico, and the States. Recently the new government has been trying to make reparations. When they were forced into exile, they had to leave their home and it was turned into a military barrack. Now the home has been returned to them and restored. At first I thought we were pulling up to a hotel, it was so big and grand and beautiful. Dinner was fabulous.

The next day we went to the Kwame Nkruma memorial park where he and his Egyptian wife are buried. Nkruma was the first president of Ghana. The Ghanaian National Symphony Orchestra played while we had a laying of wreaths and the opening ceremony for the ASWAD Conference. We were joined by his daughter Samia Nkruma who is now a senator. She gave a great speech, but she was late to the ceremony, so I had time to go check out the Kwame Nkruma National Museum, which was filled with beautiful black and white photos that told the story a very interesting man. After the ceremony, during which representatives from the world wide Africa Diaspora laid down wreaths, we went to the University of Ghana at Legon for the first panel of the conference, lunch, a tour, and the plenary address which was given by the Vice President of Ghana...who I got to meet. Now I must go to the market. I have pictures of everything and more and more to say. It's been amazing.