The Middle Passages of Black Migration

JENNY SHARPE

The middle passage is a particularly charged signifier within a black literary imagination. Carl Pedersen calls it "arguably the defining moment of the African-American experience." He identifies a literary geography that extends the signification of the middle passage beyond the historical moment of the African slave trade, when the term narrowly referred to the second or "middle" portion of the triangular trade route between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In response to a Eurocentric perspective that considered the middle passage as a rupture with African culture, there developed an Afro-centric one that sought to establish continuity with Africa. Pedersen, however, is interested in those writers who charted a third path. For Afro-Caribbean intellectuals such as C. L. R. James, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott, the transatlantic passage of enslaved Africans did not signify the absence of black creativity, as it did for European colonizers. Rather, it signaled the beginning of a new creolized and hybridized culture. To the Afro-Caribbean writers that Pedersen identifies, one can add black British writers such as Caryl Phillips and Fred D'Aguiar, who have fictionalized the lives of slaves who journey back and forth along the transatlantic trade route, and artists such as Keith Piper and Lubaina Himid, whose seascapes memorialize the death and suffering of slaves who experienced the middle passage. These black British writers and artists not only resurrect middle passage images in order to let the dead bear witness to the past, they also transform those images so that they can speak to the more recent migration of people from Africa and the Caribbean. If, during an era of black power and nation building, the middle passage signified a fundamental connection with Africa, the term has more recently been deployed to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of diaspora into a vital and ongoing process. The routes traveled by black migrants do not necessarily retrace the same paths of the slave ships: they cross continental Europe, the English Channel, and the Caribbean Sea. The theoretical "routing" of a transatlantic black diaspora thus involves not making the multiple crossings cohere into a single narrative but rather maintaining their temporal and spatial disjunctures and discontinuities.

This new imaginative geography is present in Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), which invokes the ship as a chronotope for charting the temporal and spatial axes of a transatlantic culture. The ship, for Gilroy, represents the crisscrossing of travelers and cultures along the triangular slave trade route, which is a movement that complicates a simple, linear narrative of a black diaspora originating in Africa. Instead of denoting a foundational connection with Africa, the middle passage in Gilroy's black Atlantic model represents a "catastrophic rupture" that hurtled diasporic space into a linear temporal order. Alluding to Gilroy's explanation, James Clifford suggests that the middle passage does not simply exist as a past moment in time because its trauma continues to be repeated. "For black Atlantic diaspora consciousness," he observes, "the recurring break where time stops and restarts is the Middle Passage. Enslavement and its aftermaths—displaced, repeated structures of racialization and exploitation—constitute a pattern of black experiences inextricably woven in the fabric of hegemonic modernity." Time, for a transatlantic black diaspora, is broken; the past can, and does, coexist with the present.

The simultaneity of past and present is incorporated into the narrative structure of two literary works that metaphorically extend the middle passage to contemporary conditions of black migration. Caryl Phillips' novel A Distant Shore (2003) tells the story of an African refugee who is smuggled into post9/11 Europe as a traumatic journey that mirrors the middle passage and ends in death. Edwidge Danticat's short story "Children of the Sea" (1993) allegorizes the middle passage for conveying the present hardships and future uncertainties experienced by Haitian boat people fleeing the political instability of their nation. Both works suggest that although the waters modern migrants cross may not be as vast as the Atlantic Ocean, their voyages are no less perilous than the ones made by slaves. They transform received images from the past in order to critique the present treatment of black refugees. They also, however, harness the symbolic value of the middle passage as the beginning of a transatlantic black diaspora for rethinking its meaning. Both works expose the limitations of a diaspora model that suggests a unified history and destiny of all peoples of African descent. A Distant Shore revives a middle passage memory to show the isolation of the black man living in the diaspora, while "Children of the Sea" frames that memory with a Haitian worldview that offers a counternarrative to the middle passage's broken temporality.

Phillips often deploys the middle passage as a metaphor for the psychological state of homelessness associated with migrancy. In A Distant Shore, two intersecting narratives about an African refugee and a divorced English woman show how the term "stranger" does not apply to immigrants alone. "England has changed," observes Dorothy, a retired schoolteacher, about the former mining town where she grew up and to which she has now returned. "These days it's difficult to tell who's from around here and who's not. Who belongs and who's a stranger. It's disturbing. It doesn't feel right" (3). Here the sense of homelessness applies to a middle-aged English woman who is estranged from a hometown that offers her no asylum, equal to its treatment of the lone black inhabitant, Solomon Bartholomew. Their shared state of mind makes them shipmates in the turbulent national waters. The white woman is also connected to the black man as the potential recipient of his story. "This is a woman to whom I might tell my story," he thinks. "If I do not share my story, then I have only this one...