I know Mandela used to do that—embrace African Americans. In a simple gesture he extended his arms and said, “Welcome home,” and that embrace could make men weep. I do believe contrary to all intellectual beliefs, there is something spiritual in returning. There is something that happened to my soul, making that zig zag trek across the ocean. There is something about being a survivor. There is something in my D.N.A. There is something monumental at least there was for me, standing in Cape Coast Castle, looking from The Door of No Return onto the Atlantic Ocean. There is something about seeing the first leg of our real journey and the enormous ocean we crossed.
Like Alex Haley in the film Roots and finding his people, I resisted every urge to throw myself down on the ground and shout, “I found you,” with all the tears and snot and the holy spirit jerking my body all around like the way it did to church folks. There is something about passing through these huge, newly constructed gateways, memorial arches on a beach in Ouidah that symbolize The Door of No Return, and next to it, The Door of Return, like arms extended to all of those descendants of slaves dispersed into the diaspora. It was part of Kwame Nkrumah’s dream, to unite a fractured and broken Black people. There is something, too, that made me feel victorious, that despite all odds we have triumphed. As Audre Lorde once said of women, of lesbians, of POC, “We were never meant to survive,” but we have and thrived. Like many, I never expected to feel anything at Cape Coast, some don’t. Some think it’s a tourist trap, but it changed me. In fact if my life were divided into halves, I would label them pre- and post-Ghana.
I had stayed in Ghana for one month. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans happened while I was away. I watched horrified from a hotel room on television how a tidal wave of water rushed through a building and trapped a young Black woman in the basement. Her head bobbed up and down, she gasped for air. I also saw while staying in the hotel a film about organ harvesting and poor people who are tricked into selling their organs for profit. The film starred a young British actor of African descent Chiwetel Ejiofor who would go on to become the star of the American film made by a British director, Steve McQueen, Twelve Years a Slave. The hotel played the mini-series Roots on rotation, about Kunta Kinte captured from his African homeland and sold into bondage as an American slave. In this way, the hotel was peddling to tourists an identity, or a nostalgia for the past, creating connections where there may be none. Many Black Africans do not consider African Americans to be their family or long lost tribe and actually resent this type of thinking.
After meeting and traveling with Joshua, I returned home. My worldview had changed considerably. The first film I saw upon returning was the remake of King Kong. It was offensive to me, the fact that Hollywood would adapt and release a film with very racist origins. Though couched in science fiction, it was about a Black man (a monster) who was infatuated with a white woman, Naomi Watts as Faye Wray. In 2005, this film was regressive. I was appalled as were several Black men in my neighborhood who saw it. I decided to write a satire as a protest of that film titled Kong. What I saw after returning from Ghana was Kong’s voyage, stolen from Africa, lured, drugged with chloroform, chained, made a slave, loaded unto a ship, a journey from his homeland through the middle passage to America. “This Kong,” I wrote, “you want to be free.” What became evident to me was not only the racist caricature and configuration of white men’s fear, but Africa’s displaced and missing son.
The only saving grace for Peter Jackson’s King Kong was that Kong was not just a racist fantasy or byproduct. He was resurrected in a post 9/11 world. In Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Kong is an American soldier, handling business in the jungle. He works on behalf of justice. In the famous scene where he is shot down from on top of the Empire State Building by ironically tiny planes, we are meant to see America’s vulnerability. He is the American people, a Great Goliath being slain by the young David. Kong is America’s innocence.
When I left Africa for the first time and returned four months later, Joshua had become a man. When we first reunited I teased him and asked, “Where’s my little
