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169 c h a p t e r s i x The Suffering of Survival ’Twas Mercy that brought me from my Pagan Land Taught my benighted soul to understand —Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” LeftBehind When African-born Phillis Wheatley was less than twenty years old, she wrote what came to be one of the most famous poems in the American literary canon, a reflection on her experience of the transatlantic slave trade. In this poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” she expresses her gratitude that the slave trade provided her with access to the Christian salvation and faith that she would not have had, nor indeed desired, had she remained in Africa. By utilizing the word “brought,” she exposes a positive teleology for her experience of the slave trade. It simultaneously reveals her lack of agency in the process and defines as her inevitable destination the America to which she arrived, and consequently, the salvation she is guaranteed as a Christian there. Wheatley’s poem provides us with an insight into the slave trade that many contemporary readers might think of as counterintuitive, as we are conditioned to understand the Middle Passage and slavery as necessarily traumatic experiences that are not to be desired and that are synonymous with devastating loss, overwhelming suffering , and often death. The nostalgia for Africa that is prevalent in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance and onward is not obviously embraced here by Wheatley. Instead, her poem explores another view of the transatlantic slave trade, one in which the trade is understood as divine “mercy.” Though this positioning in Wheatley’s poem can be understood in terms of the ideological structure of eighteenth-century American Chris- chapter six 170 tianity and its attendant subordination of “pagan” Africans within society, this epistemological dissonance is not completely uncommon in African thought even today. For instance, at a conference on African literatures held in Ghana in 2006, on several occasions I heard older African scholars refer to themselves as those who were “left behind” when discussing the slave trade and its effects. The poet and scholar Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang reiterates this sentiment in the introduction to his volume of poetry titled Cape Coast Castle when he asks: “What of the land and the survivors [of the slave trade who were] left behind, the places and the people so savaged? . . . [T]ragic as the fate of all these victims is, perhaps the most horrendous experience of the victim society belonged to a group hardly mentioned in the literature: the damned who survived, those deprived relatives of the captured African.”1 A curious use of language, “left behind” might seem to imply that the Middle Passage was some longed-for journey to the Americas. In fact, the West African relationship to the slave trade can seem so conflicted that Saidiya Hartman writes, “In Ghana, they joke that if a slave ship bound for America docked off the coast today so many Ghanaians would volunteer for the passage that they would stampede one another trying to get on board.”2 Instead of indicating a desire to reach America so strong that people would be willing to endure the hardships of the slave ship, however, the use of the phrase “left behind” indicates that those who were not sold into servitude somehow experienced the greatest transgenerational loss; somehow they suffered to a greater extent precisely because they survived to see the others leave and their communities devastated by the ensuing centuries of violence and corruption. Obviously not meant to undermine the devastating implications the slave trade held for those Africans who were actually taken away as a result of slave raids, warfare, trading, and betrayal, the linguistic turn of naming oneself as “left behind” reveals something of the ambivalent relationship that exists in West Africa regarding the transatlantic slave trade—the suffering of survival. Though seemingly paradoxical, survival necessarily meant suffering for those coastal African people whose communities and lives were often devastated by the trade. Though the violence and destruction of the slave trade is apparent , for Africans on the coast, it represented a kind of loss that engendered perhaps less predictable or less quantifiable forms of suffering for the families and neighbors of the victims, the people who were indeed “left behind.” As Cathy Caruth so astutely asks, “Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of surviving it?”3 Indeed, the suffering of survival seems to [3...

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