At House in Exile – YES! Journal Options Journalism

“If I didn’t outline myself for myself, I’d be crunched into different individuals’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” —Audre Lorde

As an individual of trans expertise, I feel ceaselessly about what it has meant to call myself. As a baby, pink-frilled attire, shiny patent-leather Mary Janes, and itchy white stockings signaled to the world that I used to be a woman. I used to be gendered feminine, and, consequently, my surrounding neighborhood adopted a number of spoken and unstated cues about elevate me, punish me, and restrict my entry to pleasure. 

Even now, as an agender androgynous particular person, I really feel the lingering results of these classes. They’re so acquainted to me, caressing my cheeks like a mom’s contact. However I’m not a woman. I’ve by no means been a woman. And, now, pronouns like “she” and “her” clank in opposition to my physique, a ringing reminder that the world will at all times have a job for me. Whereas studying Hannah Durkin’s 2024 guide, The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Misplaced Tales of the Final Captives of the American Slave Commerce, this expertise—being violently and completely forged in a job, renamed and remade, assaulted, crushed, and compelled into situations not made for human souls—stored arising for me. Even after the situations of that casting have fallen away, we nonetheless really feel the tremors.

Durkin’s guide provides a small look into what that have could have been like for the Yoruba-speaking individuals who had been kidnapped from villages—in what could be present-day southwest Nigeria, extending into Benin and Togo—and bought into enslavement. These individuals, who principally labored as farmers and foragers, had been kidnapped within the mid-Nineteenth century because the transatlantic slave commerce turned closely reliant on Indigenous captors, on this case the Dahomey warriors, to provide enslavers with prisoners from African tribes in neighboring communities. A lot of these taken had been youngsters or younger adults, thought of too younger to endure the rites of passage that will sign maturity of their communities. This meant they had been primarily anonymous and with out the belonging of older villagers.

Whereas the 2022 hit movie The Girl King chronicled the Dahomey tribe’s function within the slave commerce, Survivors of the Clotilda tells one other aspect of the story. The Dahomey, who had been additionally weak to captivity and enslavement, aligned with white captors out of self-preservation and shortage, hallmarks of worldwide racial capitalism. “Dahomey’s imperial development and engagement on this commerce was in all probability precipitated by a want to guard its personal residents in opposition to the specter of transatlantic enslavement,” Durkin writes. 

As Durkin notes, enslaved individuals not often stored their authentic names. As a substitute, they had been met with terror from the second they encountered Dahomey fighters, who typically ripped them from their communities below the cloak of evening. They had been made to observe their fellow townspeople decapitated and maimed. Then, they had been compelled to march alongside the heads of the slain as a reminder to by no means insurgent. The Dahomey stored them in putrid situations till white slavers got here to gather their human items. The Dahomey knew that to be part of one’s personal tribe—one’s personal individuals—was to behave as if one was human. And, within the eyes of white captors, the Yoruba-speaking captives actually weren’t.

The stolen souls hidden within the cargo maintain of the Clotilda had been suspended throughout house and time in what Durkin calls “transatlantic dislocation.” Through the transition from their houses to a international land, they turned unnamed and unpossessed vessels, out there for a white patriarchal tradition to pour into and assign which means. As scholar Hortense Spillers wrote in her 1987 Diacritics article “Mama’s Child, Papa’s Possibly,” “These captive individuals, with out names their captors would acknowledge, had been in motion throughout the Atlantic, however they had been additionally nowhere in any respect.”

It’s an unimaginable sensation—being ripped away from all the pieces and everybody one is aware of and despatched alongside an unknown journey. Forged in darkness, veiled by the intentions of the ship’s masters, this voyage was dually outlined by the facility and privilege of rich slavers and the refashioning of the African townspeople and kids into tradable commodities. These people had been rendered invisible by a system meant to clean away the African continent and its numerous traditions, ceremonies, and practices. 

That’s the rationale the Clotilda, the ship on the middle of Durkin’s guide, is so essential. Its ultimate voyage in March 1860 was not solely unsanctioned but in addition one among many expeditions meant to steal people from the continent of Africa, forcing souls into slavery at the same time as anti-slavery sentiment was rising throughout the globe. 

It’s no surprise that the Yoruba-speaking individuals on the Clotilda’s final expedition—a liminal tribe shaped alongside the waves of the Center Passage—thought their captors had been going to eat them. “Fears of white cannibalism had been widespread all through West Africa through the period of the transatlantic slave commerce,” Durkin writes, earlier than mentioning abolitionist Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 memoir, through which he wrote about “his abject terror of being eaten.” On the time, rumors had been circulating alongside slave ports in southwest Africa that these white-skinned, gibberish-speaking individuals weren’t solely slavers however within the enterprise of consuming human flesh. In consequence, although most of the captives on the Clotilda had been starved to inside inches of their lives, some nonetheless selected to not eat for worry it will make them extra attractive prey for cannibalistic white captors. 

Younger women and girls who survived the bowels of the Clotilda had been met with one other flesh-eating monster: the plantation’s systematic sexual, bodily, and baby abuse. Captives had been transported alongside the Alabama River to southern Alabama and jap Mississippi, an space known as “The Black Belt” as a consequence of its wealthy, darkish soil. This area, recognized for its sweltering temperatures, was fueled by barbaric slavers who cracked their whips, compelled sexual relations between enslaved individuals, and maimed their slaves to maintain them from escaping alongside the Underground Railroad.

Durkin tells the story of 1 Clotilda survivor, Dinah, who was so small when she arrived within the Black Belt at age 13, that she was bought for a dime to a vicious slave proprietor named Timothy Meaher. When she was taken to Meaher’s plantation, Dinah was housed with two Indigenous males and two white Individuals for the only goal of subjecting Dinah to repeated rapes with the hope of her changing into pregnant. Meaher’s objectives weren’t distinctive; he and different slavers wished to make the most of the partus sequitur ventrem authorized ordinance established by the state of Virginia, which mandated that youngsters born to enslaved girls took on the situation of their mom. This meant that, irrespective of the liberty standing of their organic father, youngsters born to enslaved Black girls had been already in bondage. 

This lack of authorized safety for enslaved Black girls and women was typically exploited by white slave house owners who would, themselves, repeatedly rape their captives. These girls may neither consent nor deny the advances of any man, particularly not their grasp. Their flesh was not theirs. One slaver named Charles Tait used this loophole to abuse younger women he enslaved, resulting in 58 enslaved youngsters being born on Tait’s property between 1819 and 1834.

When Dinah turned pregnant, one other pubescent enslaved baby was despatched into the slave quarters to take her place. On this method, enslavement turned a method to make and remake gender. It labeled younger women’ and girls’s our bodies as not solely property of their slave house owners but in addition of the enslaved males with whom they shared quarters. The visceral and weak nature of captivity made the ecosystem of slavery not solely racialized however deeply gendered.

Even after the abolishment of slavery, the surviving members of the Clotilda tribe longed to return to their homeland. Somewhat than decide on a land the place they’d skilled a lot brutality, they looked for a method again to the plush bushes and the scent of fruit within the air—the scent of house. However the highway house by no means got here for them. As a substitute, they remained in exile for the remainder of their lives, struggling to outline freedom in a spot they known as Africatown in modern-day Cellular, Alabama, the place they had been surrounded by different beforehand enslaved Black individuals. 

Maybe this historical past resonates so deeply for me as a result of there are components of me that at all times really feel exiled, even after I’m at house. There are components of me that lengthy to return to a spot that I neither concretely keep in mind nor possess proof of ever having been. It’s an odd and peculiar feeling to be completely displaced—and to have to just accept that displacement as a result of it’s the one method ahead. 

However then there are the tremors, the reminiscences, the aftershocks. The trauma by no means leaves the physique, and the specter at all times looms over the flesh. Freedom, although tangible, is at all times textured by this rigidity, of being eaten alive and spit again out. The flesh isn’t the identical.