I Have the Privilege to Stay Quiet
It is disgustingly inappropriate that "c'est pas grave" is the one French phrase I've had stuck in my head this weekend. Its intended meaning "it's not serious" (used in an equivalent way to "don't worry about it") could not be any more inappropriate as a response to the place we visited on Saturday.
On Saturday, the class caught a ferry and traveled a few short kilometers to the infamous Île de Gorée. Île de Gorée is a small island off of Dakar, which was occupied by colonial forces for centuries, beginning with the Portuguese in 1450 and ending with the French in the 1700s. Relatedly, the architecture on the island reflects the different eras of colonial occupation. However, what is most striking about Île de Gorée is not the legacy of streets lined with pastel-colored homes. Instead, the dark colonial history haunts this tiny island -- because this small place played a central role in the Atlantic Slave Trade. For centuries, the colonial forces of Portugal, Great Britain, and France enslaved millions of Africans and Île de Gorée was established as the largest slave trading center off the African coast.
Our class visited the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves), in all of its darkness. We hunched into the cramped holding cellars, imagining hundreds of suffering children stacked on top of each other on the mud floors. We struggled to capture any breeze from the slits in the thick stone structure, suffocating ourselves on the fears that our tour guide narrated to us. I pushed toward the windows, toward the vast gray-blue Atlantic Ocean and let my tears fall into the sea, in memory of something I never experienced.
I recognize that I do not have the position to truly write about this island. I have no direct connection to the Atlantic Slave Trade, nor the greater African diaspora. I know that I will not appropriately encapsulate the monstrosities of humanity, nor preserve the histories of silenced people in one blog post. I acknowledge that even though the island now subsists off of tourist traffic, I have no right to simply "visit" such a historically haunted place, purely for the sake of my tourist consumption. I know that this is not my history to tell. So, I choose today, to not write about this place, nor attempt to record the atrocities of this place.
It felt wrong to march off a ferry in a sundress and to tour a place I could not possibly process in a few hours. It feels wrong to cry into the Atlantic Ocean one day and then choose to not write about it the next. However, I must let this sensitive subject and experience marinate in my mind. I must continue to read, learn, think about this island before properly communicating about it because in fact, C'est Très Grave.
The Different Atlantic
Shoshana and I climb into the elevated, luxurious leather backseat of our host family’s black Hummer as we profusely thank our host father for driving us to the beach. He smiles and reverses the car out of the sun-stricken driveway. Our 9-year-old host brother Maha holds the gate open and excitedly waves us “bonne journée!”
We plough through the dusty streets of Dakar, passing pedestrians who gape at our monstrous vehicle. I feel excessive; I feel insecure about our luxury. However, I suppress those thoughts and continue to enjoy the air conditioning, accept the comfort of the plush seats, and physically look down upon the people we pass….
We drive past multiple military bases with forted yellow concrete walls and armed guards at the gates. We spot a beautiful, towering Mosque near the sea. Papa takes a sharp turn off of a roundabout and drives right onto the sandy path leading to the beach. Passer-byers swerve out the way and stare when my foreign body descends from my heightened seat in the Hummer.
I am constantly in contemplation of my place here – as a tourist, as a student, as an English-speaker, and as a dark-skinned Asian by appearance, but an American by nationality.
I note these parts of my external identity as we wander onto the locally-popular Plage du Ouakam. The beach is crowded with Wolof-yelling young men, who dig their heels into the sand and pivot at the spin of a sand-coated soccer ball. We struggle across the shoreline, walking parallel with the aisle of colorful fishing boats and avoiding the tide, which washes up scattered fish parts. Ousmanne (Will's host brother) shakes his head when he and Will find us sprawled out on our beach towels at the end of the beach. He informs us that Plage du Ouakam is not a swimming beach, as it has a strong under-tow and is primarily a fishing beach. He suggests that we taxi to Plage des Mamelles, which is around the coastal cliff nearby. We accept his local advice, shake out the sand from our out-of-place towels (as no locals on the beach have their own), and trek toward and past the mosque.
On our brief hike toward Plage des Mamelles, we scurry down a rutted path to the sea and aside to allow other tourists to climb past us. I nudge Shoshana when we pass tourists who appear to be Chinese. I’m strangely excited to see people from the same racial group as me. I wonder why – or if – this situation is any different than seeing the rare Asian or Asian American in Colorado Springs, when we are surrounded by a white American population, rather than a black African population.
These feelings are amplified when we arrive at the beach, ridden with countless burnt and bikinied tourists. They flaunt their oily skin on rented woven mats under umbrellas. Some drunkenly flirt with Senegalese locals. Some clutch their European tanning products to their beach bags, others hide in the shade of the beach shacks. As guilty tourists, we attempt to escape the infested section of the beach and push North. We shuffle past men running laps in the sand and local families resting on shoreline rocks. We find a section of the beach that is guarded by aggressive pick-up soccer games and hide ourselves under the same umbrellas that all other tourists fall under. We watch the sun disappear behind the Atlantic horizon, and I hardly recognize it as the sea I cried into the day before.
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