The Breaking Down of Solace and Repression Of Today's World

 

Elaine’ Armstead

ENGL 2016

Harris

17 November 2022

The Breaking Down of Solace and Repression of Today’s World

       During this course, we have read many short stories to better understand the topics. While being in this course and breaking down every reading, all of them had many similarities. Our class theme was “The Sea is Haunted” this meaning to understand the true definition of Black Gothic, which correlates with home, hauntings, as well as the healing process. To remember these bold topics, two readings stood out the most, and they were “In the Wake” and Homegoing.  These short stories strongly connected with how Black Gothic and repression reflect slavery today.

            In reading Homegoing, it talked about going back to the solace. An example of solace when Yaa explains how her family passes through unnecessary deaths and sacrifices that our ancestors made can now bring us peace with a little light. The article states, “The realization only made it more jarring to descend into the fort’s still-rank dungeons, the suffocating, near lightless last stop for millions of captives before they passed through the “door of no return” and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage”. (Scott). The author mentions how she talks and follows the family tree throughout the chapter. The story begins with the presence of a matriarchy, meaning a system or organization being run by a woman. Maame is the matriarch who stands at the head of her family with her two daughters, Effi and Esi.

As slave traders, Effi half of her family and Esi half of her family was destined to enter the slave trade. "Homegoing" mentioned how the slave ships would light the branches and fire would separate them. It states, “The night that Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. It lived off air; it slept in caves and hid in trees; it burned up and through, unconcerned with the wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night”. (Gyasi). Home no longer a reality for them; it had become a wanted dream of before and after slavery. The Author Yaa Gyasi mentions something very powerful in her interview, “The research wasn't crazy extensive. I say that my research was wide but shallow”. Gyasi used her resources but also used her background history to help others an understanding. Yaa, being raised by a migrant family, correlates with our class theme because she used others' past trauma in addition to hers to ensure readers know that these issues still exist not only back in time but during her years of aging.

      “In the Wake”, was truly understandable; throughout the reading of pages 13-22, it grabbed my attention with the wording and explanation she provided about repression. Repression means “the use of force or violence to control a group of people.” (Cambridge Dictionary). Sharpe points out thoroughly how anti-Blackness and white supremacy is the major reason behind the climate that causes premature Black death. This article says, “Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora.” (Duke University).

Another thing she mentions throughout “The Wake” is that slavery and trauma has been in our faces for years, but trauma has gotten worse, which made the healing process longer than expected. Christina states, “To be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding’. This unresolved unfolding alongside metaphoric hallucinations about race continues to be neglected in our field and our practice as a whole”. (The Relational School). 

     Throughout this class, I have learned so much about the Black Gothic and our theme, “The Sea is Haunted.” What I have learned thus far about Black Gothic will be attached to my lifestyle. Overall, I have learned so much information about my own history while taking this class. All of the research that was gathered throughout the semester has given me a better understanding of my history and my ability to understand the true connection between “ The Sea is Haunted” and Black Gothic

 



 

Works Cited

     Magazine, STANFORD. “The Story behind 'Homegoing'.” STANFORD Magazine, stanfordmag.org/contents/the-story-behind-homegoing. 

      “Repression.” REPRESSION | Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary, dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/repression.

     Sharpe, Christina. “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.” Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake.

     “White Psychosis and the Wake.” The Relational School, 4 June 2021, therelationalschool.com/white-psychosis-and-the-wake/.

     Wolfe, Eli. “How Yaa Gyasi Found Her Story in Slavers' Outpost.” SFGATE, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 June 2016, www.sfgate.com/books/article/How-Yaa-Gyasi-found-her-story-in-slavers-8329849.php.

             

 

 

 

 

 

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