JAMAICA
Kamau Braithwaite Speech
First ten then twenty, first twenty then two hundred, first two hundred then two thousand, first two thousand then two hundred thousand, Africans, slaves, lucumi, tears, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, a million, tears, tears, lucumi, a million, two million, three million, five million, materialism, building hotels and plantation houses, brothels, ten million, twenty million, twenty-five and thirty million, flight, flight, fuel, tears, tears, tears, lucumi; thirty million, forty million, fifty million, the draining of the lake of Mexico, the draining of the continent of Africa, destruction of the fountains of the youth, lucumi, tears, tears, tears to feed the hungry missile mouth, tears, tears, tears. Where is the bison of the Prairies, the water spirits of the Pacific Indians? Where are those fifty million Africans torn out of town, torn out of mother, torn out of soil and soul? Can you expect us to build houses here, to build a nation here? Where will the old men find their flocks? Where will you make your markets? Lucumi, lucumi, tears, tears, tears.
I thought I would begin my meditation this afternoon by invoking that impression of our condition. As I watch you here with the light going and you sitting under this canopy, I get the strong feeling that we are still on those slave ships that came across the Atlantic, that you know only so well how to sit shoulder to shoulder, in this space, this intensity, that you are reliving in a sense this future from which you have come, but which increasingly I realize that we have not yet fully understood the meaning of. What is the meaning of middle passage? What is the meaning of the trip from Africa of not ten, twenty, thirty, but of twenty, thirty million people over five hundred years? This is one of the most cataclysmic events in human history. And yet as we sit here touching shoulder to shoulder we are not really fully aware of the enormity of that crime, nor are we aware of the wonderment and the wonderfulness of the achievement of surviving it and transcending it. And I am very glad to hear the Governor General when he spoke this afternoon speak very much of the success that has come out of this experience, because, you see, we have been too ashamed of it, that is our problem; we have never understood slavery; we have never understood the experience of middle passage; we have never understood the meaning of water, which is not only death and destruction and strangulation, but birth, rebirth, baptism - for goodness sake. So this afternoon I want us to think about these things and I want to thank Mico for inviting me here. To me it's a very important occasion. As far as I know it's the first time in the British Caribbean that we are in fact celebrating the presence of slavery in our midst; it is the first time that we are trying to understand the very nature of solidarity and fragmentation, so that I feel very happy to be a part of this enterprise and I want to thank you, Mr. Principal and Kusi and all of them who have invited me to be here.
My first concern, as I hinted, is about this business of people not understanding this remarkable history. I just want to stress, I can't stress enough just how important this history is. The Jews, of course, speak about their holocaust and we hear it all the time and they've written books about it and made films about it and we are all very much concerned about what happened to the five million Jews in the second world war; but what happened to African people, what happened to us? The descendants of these people of Africa is even more amazing, more alarming, and worthy of much greater consideration. Why, for instance, has been this erasure of history? Why is it that we don't really know what happened on the middle passage? Why is it that we don't know about Equiano and some names that I shall mention as I go along. Why is it that in this age of communication we are so ignorant of our own past and therefore of our own selves? There has been this erasure of history; there has been the erasure of memory and there has been the erasure of culture. Or rather I should say, an apparent - and this is very important - erasure of history, memory and culture because it is there if we have eyes to see it, if we have the sensibility to feel it; but as far as things go the victim, ourselves, we are supposed to feel ashamed and victimized. That is the first amazing psychological feature.
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