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  • The Door of No Return? A Journey Through the Legacy of the African Slave Forts: An Excerpt*
  • Daniel Jerome Wideman (bio)

Where does your story begin?

All of our stories begin in the womb. In darkness, surrounded by water. The world we are about to join just a series of echoes, muffled rumors from beyond the warm walls. The womb our first colony. Attachment to the mother-land a visceral cord of connection. Womb-colony utterly dependent, yet this tunnel between two worlds accommodates two-way traffic flow. A relationship so close that what is exchanged is not just the means of sustenance, the deliquescent waste, but the effluvia of consciousness itself. The mother’s sense of self originating in her awareness of the child; the child existing only in relation to the rhythms deep enough to rock its mother’s belly.

Birth is always bloody: the violence of it intended to imprint the permanence of severance, yet the trauma insures a memory deeper than blood will remain, a connection beyond memory that will forever exist. A piece of the womb, the nourishing part, the wholesome part, is destroyed at birth. It collapses in despair at the sudden departure, disintegrates into a heap of messy, viscous tears and vainly chases the child down the birth canal.

Nearly every culture in the world recognizes the restless grief of the placenta, has concocted a ritual palliative. Peoples everywhere understand, despite the fireworks and fanfare of physical birth, that nothing is truly born through that particular rupture. What emerges is a life already created, dreamed up, made flesh long ago. A story that’s been told and retold, a myth reinvented. A life destined to be submerged, cocooned, barricaded, incubated and hatched again and again. Resurrected, revealed, reinterred and reborn in a continuous cycle. We are all eternally wombed and dewombed. Wounded and unwound.

But the first womb, the first birth, the original connecting cord is special. So we canonize or cannibalize the evidence. Bury the placenta or swallow it whole. Revere the child born with a caul, then strip it from her and stir it into the cauldron. Somehow we build into all our ceremonies surrounding original birth the concept of closure. Passage through a cosmic seam that parts but once for each of us.

It is more than just the notion of gateways, bridges, doors closing firmly behind you. These are all transitional constructs which leave evidence (and the potential for [End Page 1] re-entry) behind. Gates swing both ways, doors can be taken off their hinges to reconnect rooms. But the womb, the first womb, is mystic because it is forever inaccessible. Your birth changes its very shape so it is never again the place you once inhabited, which contained and contented you so completely. A dark universe, you its lone star that departs and leaves a black hole behind.

One transcendent truth, unanimously accepted, about that first birth: once you’re out, you’re out. You can never go back. You can dig a hole and hide, hibernate in a cave, swim deep below the surface, blind yourself to restore the darkness—but nothing, not even death, can take you back whence you came.

You have passed through the door of no return.

The hole cut into the rock where African captives passed from fort to ship, from dungeon to hold, from land to sea, from homeland to exile, was known locally as the door of no return because nobody herded through that doorway was heard from again. Nobody ever made it back. It was the gateway to oblivion.

Vodoun is a New African religion developed on the island of Saint Domingue (Haiti) by African slaves. Many refer to it as a “syncretic” faith since it incorporates elements of Christianity, traditional African religious praxis, and new beliefs which evolved during the middle passage. One of these new beliefs, which became a central part of vodoun, is that Guinée (Africa) is no longer part of this world. It exists, rather, as an underwater island, resting on the ocean floor. An inverted heaven to which only the spirits had constant access. Practitioners of vodoun believe death is the sole...

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