NYU Conference Spotlights..., continued

Jayne Cortez, who heads the Organization of Women Writers of Africa and helped organize the week-long symposium, said in one of the more poignant and definitive moments of the evening, "A lot of individuals supported our proposal [for the conference] and a few said why now? Why bring up this painful subject of slavery and the slave trade? Why now? And we said 'Why not now?'"Why not have a dialogue about the transatlantic slave trade and find out more about the political, social and economical effects of the trade and the psychological impact of the encounter between cultures?

"Why not talk about the past and talk about the present relationship between Africa and its diaspora?

"Why not talk about the aftermath of the slave trade and the struggle against racism?

"Why not get a better understanding of the cultural contributions which exemplify aspects of survival and create a change through modification of concepts, technology and environment; and the invention of the new in music, literature, film and the visual arts?

"Why not break the silence, break the fear, create solidarity and new links and make the next one thousand years the root of freedom and peace; and make sure that no person on earth ever goes up into space in a slave ship."

Howard Dodson, who heads Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, reminded his listeners that without the slave trade, neither the world, the Western Hemisphere, Europe or Africa as we know them would exist. "Said another way," he added, "the slave trade was central to the development of Europe in the modern era; central to the underdevelopment of Africa during the last three hundred years."

Defining the African-American experience in relation to the American experience was a common theme. Dodson, for example, pointed out that in the nearly 300 years between 1492 and 1776, only one million of the six and a half million people who crossed the Atlantic to settle in the Americas -- North, South, Central and the Caribbean - were white. The rest, he said, were African. "Virtually everything we have that seeks to shed light on the American experience does not take that civil demographic factor into consideration," Dodson said. "So we don't know much about that African-American experience and we know even less about the American experience."

In a very real sense, he said, that was the point of the conference: "trying to raise up the question of the presence of the people of African descent and the consequence of the slave trade and being central actors in the making of everything that we know to be American in this hemisphere." Along the same lines, historian Colin Palmer, who teaches at City College, said most scholars know that the slave trade was "more than a movement of peoples," even though many have been slow to accept the fact. "It was a movement of ideas, cultures and ordeals," he said. "The enslaved peoples struggled to recreate their cultures in the Americas even as they transformed their new environments, and were transformed by them as well. This proliferation of knowledge about the slave trade is a recent development."

In a group of superb orators, Rex Nettleford, deputy vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, stood out, not only for his austere voice combining the most eloquent aspects of a British accent and a Caribbean accent, but more for his smooth combination of bite and satire. It made his commentary humorous despite the gravity of the subject matter, much in the way a wake can be cheerful in that it brings friends together to share memories of the deceased.

"As I've often said to my white friends in America and Canada," Nettleford began, "'Things being what they are, until you can come to terms with the fact that you're as Negrified as I am Europeanized -- that there is the beginning of peace.'"

He continued, "The slave route has done some marvelous things. It has given the world many paradoxes." Nettleford told his listeners that the main campus of the University of the West Indies lies on what used to be an old sugar estate. "I think that's a marvelous act of retribution," he said.

More than one of the speakers touched on the idea that the slave routes conference is an archetypal vehicle aimed at bringing the truth of the slave trade to light. "This symposium, this conference," Nettleford said, "has to do with breaking the silence, the second most powerful act of oppression which the African presence in the Americas has suffered from for four or five hundred years."

In addition to the scholars, two distinguished guests took the podium. Randall Robinson is the author of a soon-to-be published book that deals with the question of paying retribution to the descendants ofslavery. He is also founder and president of the Washington-based TransAfrica Group, an organization that plays a large role in influencing U.S. foreign policy in African and Caribbean nations.

In his speech, he recalled walking The Mall with his daughter in Washington D.C., a city he points out is "sixty-five to seventy percent black."

"It was jammed with thousands of people," he said, "and we decided to count the African-Americans who had come to the Mall. We counted six. All six of them had come with white Americans, as if they bore the ticket to get us into the Mall."

Robinson went on. "I took my daughter to The Capitol. I sat down on a bench in the Rotunda, and I looked up into the eye of the Rotunda, and up there they have a painting forty-six hundred square feet. It's called the 'Apotheosis of George Washington,'" a work intended to "celebrate the virtue of George Washington and the principles on which the United States of America and this democracy are rested." "It tracks the American history from the arrival of Columbus to the dawnof aviation," he said, misstating the time frame. Constantino Brumidi painted the work in 1865, long before the advent of aviation. "No [Frederick] Douglass; no [Harriet] Tubman; no [Sojourner] Truth; no slavery -- as if it never happened."

Maya Angelou spoke last, regaling her audience with something that had happened in her kitchen that morning. She told of how her regular beautician had come to the house to fix her hair, accompanied by a new assistant.

"She has nice hair," the assistant told the hairdresser.

"It's not good," he replied.

"I didn't say it was good," she said. "I said it was nice."

"I want to talk about the slave 'root' which is with us today," Angelou said, "And was in my kitchen this morning."

After the event, George Irish, 57, a member of the audience who teaches Caribbean studies at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn reflected on the last two presenters remarks. "Maya Angelou and [Randall] Robinson, in addition to looking at the facts and the experience, they brought a personal dimension. He was looking at the external dimension, and she to the internal dimension."

Palmer, the historian and panelist, noted that Angelou addressed the continued presence of slavery, "not in terms of economic oppression, but in terms of psychological oppression. Because the (hairdresser's assistant) obviously saw good hair as straight hair," he said. "Angelou pointed out that it's a slavery of a different sort."