Women Who Cry

Lament is risky speech. It is risky because it calls into question structures of power, it calls for justice, it pushes the boundaries of our relationships with one another and with God beyond the limits of acceptability. It is a refusal to settle for the way things are.

- Denise Ackermann

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.

- Psalm 137:1

At the Clifton Heritage National Park on Nassau, we are standing on a cliff. Just yards away from us, stone steps built into the land lead down to the coast. Some call them the slave steps, our tour guide tells us, and others call them the pirates’ steps. Recent hurricane damage has made them inaccessible, but our guide waves in their direction. We stand on dusty ground covered more by pebbles than by grass or sand. Off the cliffs, the water glints sapphire, and oil tankers anchored not far from shore bob like rusty tin cans cut in half. In a little while we’ll go snorkeling a half mile from here. We’ll see a dozen kinds of fish, rays, a coral reef, and we’ll come out spotted with crude oil, wondering how much of it we may have ingested, and if the stains will come out of our swimsuits, horrified by what is happening to the natural beauty.

At the Clifton Heritage National Park on Nassau, we are standing on a cliff. It’s January, but hot. We are sturdy American tourists in baseball caps and backpacks, shading our eyes and gazing off in a dozen different directions. I watch the undergraduate students I’m chaperoning. They gaze at the screens of their iPhones, snapping photos. The cliff is edged with wispy Australian pines, non-native invasive plants that cause soil erosion, and a green chain-link fence, no longer upright.

We are not the only ones standing on this cliff, looking out to sea.

There are women here who have been watching the coast for decades. Carved from the trunks of cedar trees planted by Ponce de León, they lean toward the water. Their faces are black, and their bodies dry gray wood. Faded blue scarves wrap their heads. One’s hip juts to the south. One’s shoulders hunch with grief. One wraps her arms around her chest, as if to hold her heart in place. Each is scarred with rough parallel lines sawn slanting down her sides, marks of the slave captain’s whip.

“They are looking toward Africa,” our tour guide tells us, “their homeland.” Our tour guide is a stocky black Bahamian grandmother in a beret and khaki pants. “But they are not sure which direction Africa is in, so you see they are all looking different ways. Or maybe they are looking for their children. Families of slaves were often separated, taken to different islands.”

The cedar woman closest to me seems, more than anything else, to be looking toward the sky, as if she knows that both her homeland and her children are gone and will not return, and she will not stop asking God why.

Women have a lot of painful questions for God, perhaps more than men have. At least that’s what I see in the art. These cedar trees remind me of a sculpture I saw outside the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall two years ago. When the Japanese occupied Nanjing in 1937, they slaughtered more than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians, raping twenty thousand women. They raped children, the elderly, and nuns. Often, soldiers would go door to door, searching for a girl to gang rape. When they were finished, they would pierce her through the vagina with a bayonet or a stick of bamboo. Outside the memorial hall, a giant bronze woman holds her dead child loosely, her hands falling to the ground. Her legs are heavy, weighted, her back beginning to arch, her eyes blank toward the sky, her mouth a silent o.

Or what I saw in Italy, Mary after Mary after Mary cradling the baby who would die.

A voice is heard in Rahah, mourning and...