The Obama Serenades XI

Cape Coast, Gold Coast, 1779

On this date, the British sailor, Capt. John Newton, a recently self-proclaimed “born-again Christian,” wrote the following immortalized words for the now-famous and classic hymn “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds” while awaiting his consignment of slaves bound for the New World:

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear!
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds
And drives away his fear.

- See also reference to John Newton in Black Cargoes by Malcolm Cowley with Daniel P. Mannix

We stand
on the brink
of history
wondering how
such bestial
and bloody
deeds were allowed
to unfold
for so long;
so long ago
and yet
so dangerously
near…

a church
atop
a dungeon,
a dungeon
directly below
a church;
a god
with broken
wings,
a sea
that furiously
boils
the blood
of the shackled
and disowned…

really,
one man's meat
is another man's
death meal;
a death meal
it was,
this callous
and summary
consignment
into oblivion…

beyond memory
lies the land
of the enslaved;
beyond memory
is dignity
raped;
beyond memory
are all these
heinous acts
that never
really
occurred,
for the loss
of memory
marks
the beginning
of lies
and
half-truths;
the loss
of memory
marks
the birth of
the non-human
and
nonexistent…

and so
we came
in search
of memory
and our
souls
and found
the church
atop
the dungeon;
we never left
the church,
and so
we never left
the past…

not being
serpents,
we never
sloughed off
the past
whose memory
and tongue
we have been
dispossessed;
we never left
the past,
for the past
has always been
with the present,
we are the present
of our past,
even as
our forebears
are the past
of our present…

captives
of a bleak
ignoble past
we are struggling
to escape,
a past
we can never
escape,
a past
whose untold
indignities
and
ignobility
belong
with the captor
whose captives
we remain,
veritable
scapegoats
to such
ignoble
deeds
against which
we fight…

we came
to collect
the broken pieces
of our past,
we came to
Auschwitz,
we came to
Treblinka,
we came to
Birkenau,
we came to
Bergen-Belsen,
we came to
Buchenwald,
and now
we have come
to Elmina,
to Cape Coast,
to Fort James
and Ussher
and Christiansborg…

we heard screams
of torture from
the aggrieved spirits
of the dungeon
underneath
the white-washed
church
testify against
the bestiality
of their captors
and were not
amused;

we came
to collect
the broken pieces
of our past,
so we could
begin
the healing
voyage
back home;
we saw
the morbid
and blood-spattered
portals
of our Diasporan
birth and
realized
how far
we have been
forced
to stray
from home;
then we asked
to be shown
the path
to our old
homestead
and decided
we could never
come home
again to
stay…

7/13/09

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.