ABSTRACT
With very few exceptions (Fanon, 1967; Gump, 2010; Pinderhughes, 2004), psychoanalysis has only tentatively considered the impact of slavery on the psyche of the African American community. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Berlin (2010) estimates that at least 11 million Africans were forcibly transported from across the Atlantic through what has come to be known as the Middle Passage. Black scholars have named this Black Diaspora Maafa, a Swahili term meaning the “Great Sorrow or Tragedy” (Ani, 1994). Africans identified themselves by tribe and ethnicity, so their treacherous voyage through the Middle Passage would thus constitute both a “death and birth canal.” For them, the voyage constituted the death of a whole way of life and the birth of a new culture and racial identity (Gomez, 1998). The American brand of slavery dehumanized the subjects of this predatory system legally, politically, economically, and socially. Sociologist Orlando Patterson (1982) characterized it as a social death, meaning that the enslaved had lost their membership in the universal family of humanity. Until this time, slaves across the world had maintained their identity as human, but the American experience would be qualitatively different. Slaveowners sought not only to enslave them physically, but also to enslave their very souls. This attempt at soul murder is reflected in the writings of Frederick Douglas (1845/2003) who describes his struggle with a slave breaker: “Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit . . . the dark night of slavery was upon me” (p. 75). Today American slavery is viewed erroneously as that part of American history that occurred solely in the southern states. What is not understood is that America was in fact a slave nation, meaning that its total economic growth was thoroughly dependent upon slavery. Patterson distinguishes nations that hold people in slavery from nations whose economic well-being is dependent upon slavery, he refers to the latter as slave nations. Slavery was such a powerful part of the American credo that most of the Presidents, from the founding of the United States until the Civil War, were large slave holders. This included
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor. In addition, during this period, a majority of members of the Supreme Court and of the U.S. Congress were also slave holders (Berlin, 2003). Thus, as it is today, those with economic wealth wielded the most political power. American slavery was therefore embedded within the historical and cultural marrow of the United States. It played a significant part in igniting the Revolutionary War, in uniting northern and southern colonies to form one union, as well as serving as a major cause of the Civil War. Despite the fact that African Americans have historically spent less time emancipated than they did in slavery, the historian Rushdy (2001) warns us that slavery is very distant in the American imagination, and it has remained so because: “slavery is the family secret of America” (p. 2). By calling it “secret,” Rushdy does not mean that slavery is concealed from the public. It is a secret because it remains on the periphery of the national imagination. It remains the national paradox, the stain on our founding ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice. The cruel, dehumanizing and violent nature of slavery can no longer be denied as earlier writers had sought to do. It was not just the institution of slavery, and its effects on those who lived through it, that has resulted in a traumatic legacy but also the collective memory of slavery by those who endured it, by their offspring, as well as the national response in its aftermath, that have contributed to the traumatic legacy of slavery (Eyerman, 2001; Morrow, 2003; Vaughans, 2014). Writing from the perspective of cultural trauma, Eyerman (2001) articulates this position: “The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as a personal experience, but as a collective memory: a pervasive remembrance that grounded the identity-formation of a people” (p. 1). This construct in no way negates the individual or group psychological trauma experienced by those who were subjected to it. It simply views the experience from a different vantage point. Nor by examining Black experience through this lens do I mean to suggest that all Africans arriving on American shores came as slaves, as Sertima (1976) has documented, they did not. Eyerman (2001) describes cultural trauma as a “dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric” (p. 2a) for a people who previously were cohesive. In addition, it is not necessary for individual members or any member of the group to directly experience or acknowledge the trauma. This view in no way is to be considered a counter assertion of the actual trauma experienced by those who were enslaved.
