‘Black Atlantic’ a term given to us by Paul Gilroy [1].
A distinctively modern cultural-political space that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British but is rather a hybrid mix of all of these at once.
Many writers/researchers have engaged with and extended this idea, including Kehinde Andrews, Christina Sharpe and Katherine McKittrick. (‘Demonic grounds: Black women and cartographies of struggle’). She opens with a question - “How do geography and blackness work together to advance a different way of knowing and imagining the world?” McKittrick (2006) [2]
“...questions of progress are underwritten by the terrors of slavery...Further, the idea of ‘belonging’ in and to place – whether it be a particular nation, a specific community, real/ imagined Africa, homelands, is incomplete, premised on a struggle toward some kind of sociospatial liberation.”
(any recognition of this? “if you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?”)
“Black Atlantic populations, then, inhabit place in a unique way, which is, in part, upheld by geographic yearnings and movements that demonstrate various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship.” McKittrick (2006)
How are you inhabiting place in a unique way?
Where else are you home?
Or making a home?
Or imagining a home elsewhere?
Or yearning to be home?
I am 5, 13, 21, 50 years old, and I am still told that I do not belong here, or that you were here first. Can I, can we, shake ourselves loose from these ideas of belonging? We are the Black Atlantic, and we inhabit place in our own ways. We move and struggle and we are not grateful. We will not, ‘if we don’t like it’, go back to where we ‘came’ from. We all – you, we, us – are here. Here is where we came from.
McKittrick writes about how black women are written out of geography, stripped of territory, erased from the landscape but are still always there, in the ‘crevices of power’. So I think about Cece, when Cece turns away – when I banish her, where actually does she go? and from this unknown (unseen?) vantage point – this crevice of power – what does she see? Cece disregards the maps laid out before her – has her own geography. She lives in the crevices she finds, and when she can’t find them, she creates them. She knows that belonging is nowhere and that belonging is everywhere, and that, in her unbelonging, is the ultimate, unassailable belonging. She’s a better therapist than me.
[1] Paul Gilroy (1993 ) The Black Atlantic.
[2] Katherine McKittrick (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle