Introduction

On the night of his twenty-first birthday, Otis Hampton, the protagonist of Isidore Okpewho's Call Me by My Rightful Name suddenly began to react uncontrollably to the sound of heavy drumming. His arms would fly in multiple directions as if they were hinged to a gyroscope. His legs would move like they belong to somebody else. The second time he experienced the strange sensations, Otis started to utter mysterious words that were later deciphered to be fragments of Yoruùbá oríkì praise chants. The initial efforts to decode the words and save the budding basketball star from a total breakdown stretched from Boston to Los Angeles to Evanston, Illinois. It involved an eminent anthropologist, a highly respected linguist, and an intellectually adventurous psychiatrist. To fully understand why the brain of an only child of a solidly middle-class black family is hijacked by demons of African appellative poetry, the elder Hampton, ordinarily indifferent to cultural matters, agreed to fund a trip to where the Yorùbá live in Nigeria. In Yorùbá country, the Hamptons and their psychiatrist discover that some kind of cryptic memory of slavery has forced itself on Otis. Slavery, like the proverbial guest who brought his own bed, has occupied Otis's head. The intrusion of enslavement's century-old unconscious on Hampton is so persistent that the mental primal site has to be excavated in a layer by layer process that takes eighteen months to accomplish at Ijoko-Odo (Valley Side Ijoko), a small town that used to be called Ijoko-Oke (Uphill Ijoko) before Hampton's valiant ancestor was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the mid-nineteenth century.

The transatlantic travelogue writer in Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound gets to Ghana out of his free desire to attend Panafest, an annual gathering for celebrating the unity of black cultures and for reiterating the salience of slavery's brutality in the dispersion of black people throughout the Atlantic world. While Hampton followed the mysterious directions of molecular memory—the scars on his head and shoulder incarnate the devastating injuries slave catchers inflicted on his ancestors at the moment of capture—to Nigeria, Phillips voluntarily sought out Dr. Ben Abdallah, a celebrated Ghanaian playwright and theorist of pan-Africanism. Whereas the Hamptons receive a largely friendly welcome, Phillips's encounter quickly takes a testy turn when the traveler from the diaspora questions the purpose and sincerity of Dr. Abdallah's insistence on returning to the past: "If it is past, then surely it is past for a reason" (144). The Ghanaian scholar responds that the "best way forward is to look to the past and see what we left back there, and then make sure that there is nothing there that we should have brought with us to the present" (145). Unlike members of Hampton's ancestral family that happily help him reconnect to his past and make peace with his restless psyche, Dr. Abdallah speaks like a disinterested scholar when questioned about how slavery's history is taught to young Ghanaians at school: "It is taught … With the understanding that those sold into slavery were not always that good, and that in some respects they got what they deserved. The people running the slave forts were people of God, for after all Cape Coast Castle was the site of the first missionary school" (148). According to Dr. Abdallah, the slave forts also cradled Western education and, by implication, every civilizational gain that came with it to Ghana. This ostensibly realist theory of the history of African slavery stuns the traveler from the diaspora beyond belief. Unaware of the contradictions in his thoughts, Abdallah goes on to speak about the decaying remains of the forts, this time shifting the responsibility of preserving the past to Phillips and his fellow travelers from the diaspora: "These are holocaust sites for those in the diaspora, but none of you are doing anything about these places. … It is your history, and their decline is not the fault of the Ghanaians. Do you think we need to be reminded about slavery? We know" (148–49; emphasis added...