无码视频

鈥淚f I didn鈥檛 define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people鈥檚 fantasies for me and eaten alive.鈥� 鈥擜udre Lorde

As a person of trans experience, I think frequently about what it has meant to name myself. As a child, pink-frilled dresses, shiny patent-leather Mary Janes, and itchy white stockings signaled to the world that I was a girl. I was gendered female, and, as a result, my surrounding community followed a host of spoken and unspoken cues about how to raise me, how to punish me, and how to limit my access to joy. 

Even now, as an agender androgynous person, I feel the lingering effects of those lessons. They鈥檙e so familiar to me, caressing my cheeks like a mother鈥檚 touch. But I am not a girl. I鈥檝e never been a girl. And, now, pronouns like 鈥渟he鈥� and 鈥渉er鈥� clank against my body, a ringing reminder that the world will always have a role for me. While reading 鈥檚 2024 book, this experience鈥攂eing violently and permanently cast in a role, renamed and remade, assaulted, beaten, and forced into conditions not made for human souls鈥攌ept coming up for me. Even after the conditions of that casting have fallen away, we still feel the tremors.

Durkin鈥檚 book offers a small look into what that experience may have been like for the Yoruba-speaking people who were kidnapped from villages鈥攊n what would be present-day southwest Nigeria, extending into Benin and Togo鈥攁nd sold into enslavement. These people, who mostly worked as farmers and foragers, were kidnapped in the mid-19th century as the transatlantic slave trade became heavily reliant on Indigenous captors, in this case , to supply enslavers with prisoners from African tribes in neighboring communities. Many of those taken were children or young adults, considered too young to undergo the rites of passage that would signal adulthood in their communities. This meant they were essentially nameless and without the belonging of older villagers.

While the 2022 hit film chronicled the Dahomey tribe鈥檚 role in the slave trade, Survivors of the Clotilda tells another side of the story. The Dahomey, who were also vulnerable to captivity and enslavement, aligned with white captors out of self-preservation and scarcity, hallmarks of global racial capitalism. 鈥淒ahomey鈥檚 imperial growth and engagement in this trade was probably precipitated by a desire to protect its own citizens against the threat of transatlantic enslavement,鈥� Durkin writes. 

As Durkin notes, enslaved people rarely kept their original names. Instead, they were met with terror from the moment they encountered Dahomey fighters, who often ripped them from their communities under the cloak of night. They were made to watch their fellow townspeople decapitated and maimed. Then, they were forced to march alongside the heads of the slain as a reminder to never rebel. The Dahomey kept them in putrid conditions until white slavers came to collect their human goods. The Dahomey knew that to be a part of one鈥檚 own tribe鈥攐ne鈥檚 own people鈥攚as to act as if one was human. And, in the eyes of white captors, the Yoruba-speaking captives certainly were not.

The stolen souls hidden in the cargo hold of the Clotilda were suspended across space and time in what Durkin calls 鈥渢ransatlantic dislocation.鈥� During the transition from their homes to a foreign land, they became unnamed and unpossessed vessels, available for a white patriarchal culture to pour into and assign meaning. As scholar Hortense Spillers wrote in her 1987 Diacritics article 鈥�,鈥� 鈥淭hese captive persons, without names their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all.鈥�

It鈥檚 an unimaginable sensation鈥攂eing ripped away from everything and everyone one knows and sent along an unknown journey. Cast in darkness, veiled by the intentions of the ship鈥檚 masters, this voyage was dually defined by the power and privilege of wealthy slavers and the refashioning of the African townspeople and children into tradable commodities. These humans were rendered invisible by a system meant to wash away the African continent and its various traditions, ceremonies, and practices. 

That鈥檚 the reason the Clotilda, the ship at the center of Durkin鈥檚 book, is so important. Its final voyage in March 1860 was not only unsanctioned but also one of many expeditions meant to steal humans from the continent of Africa, forcing souls into slavery even as anti-slavery sentiment was growing across the globe. 

It is no wonder that the Yoruba-speaking people on the Clotilda鈥檚 last expedition鈥攁 liminal tribe formed along the waves of the Middle Passage鈥攖hought their captors were going to eat them. 鈥淔ears of white cannibalism were widespread throughout West Africa during the era of the transatlantic slave trade,鈥� Durkin writes, before mentioning abolitionist Olaudah Equiano鈥檚 1789 memoir, in which he wrote about 鈥渉is abject terror of being eaten.鈥� At the time, rumors were circulating along slave ports in southwest Africa that these white-skinned, gibberish-speaking people were not only slavers but in the business of consuming human flesh. As a result, though many of the captives on the Clotilda were starved to within inches of their lives, some still chose not to eat for fear it would make them more enticing prey for cannibalistic white captors.聽

Young girls and women who survived the bowels of the Clotilda were met with another flesh-eating monster: the plantation鈥檚 systematic sexual, physical, and child abuse. Captives were transported along the Alabama River to southern Alabama and eastern Mississippi, an area called 鈥溾�� due to its rich, dark soil. This region, known for its sweltering temperatures, was fueled by barbaric slavers who cracked their whips, forced sexual relations between enslaved people, and maimed their slaves to keep them from escaping along the Underground Railroad.

Durkin tells the story of one Clotilda survivor, Dinah, who was so small when she arrived in the Black Belt at age 13, that she was sold for a dime to a vicious slave owner named Timothy Meaher. When she was taken to Meaher鈥檚 plantation, Dinah was housed with two Indigenous men and two white Americans for the sole purpose of subjecting Dinah to repeated rapes with the hope of her becoming pregnant. Meaher鈥檚 goals weren鈥檛 unique; he and other slavers wanted to take advantage of the legal ordinance established by the state of Virginia, which mandated that children born to enslaved women took on the condition of their mother. This meant that, no matter the freedom status of their biological father, children born to enslaved Black women were already in bondage. 

This lack of legal protection for enslaved Black women and girls was often exploited by white slave owners who would, themselves, repeatedly rape their captives. These women could neither consent nor deny the advances of any man, especially not their master. Their flesh was not theirs. One slaver named Charles Tait used this loophole to abuse young girls he enslaved, leading to 58 enslaved children being born on Tait鈥檚 property between 1819 and 1834.

When Dinah became pregnant, another pubescent enslaved child was sent into the slave quarters to take her place. In this way, enslavement became a way to make and remake gender. It labeled young girls鈥� and women鈥檚 bodies as not only property of their slave owners but also of the enslaved men with whom they shared quarters. The visceral and vulnerable nature of captivity made the ecosystem of slavery not only racialized but deeply gendered.

Even after the abolishment of slavery, the surviving members of the Clotilda tribe longed to return to their homeland. Rather than settle on a land where they鈥檇 experienced so much brutality, they searched for a way back to the lush trees and the smell of fruit in the air鈥攖he smell of home. But the road home never came for them. Instead, they remained in exile for the rest of their lives, struggling to define freedom in a place they called in modern-day Mobile, Alabama, where they were surrounded by other previously enslaved Black people. 

Perhaps this history resonates so deeply for me because there are parts of me that always feel exiled, even when I鈥檓 at home. There are parts of me that long to return to a place that I neither concretely remember nor possess evidence of ever having been. It鈥檚 a strange and peculiar feeling to be permanently displaced鈥攁nd to have to accept that displacement because it鈥檚 the only way forward. 

But then there are the tremors, the memories, the aftershocks. The trauma never leaves the body, and the specter always looms over the flesh. Freedom, though tangible, is always textured by this tension, of being eaten alive and spit back out. The flesh is never the same.