Written after visiting the Nkyinkyim installation by Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. The exhibit, which has more than 1,700 cement effigies in a field, seeks to create a total of 11,111, in remembrance and honor of Africans who were enslaved. By John W. Fountain
Within these ancestral faces
Of horror
Of shock
Of anguish
And of pain
Lie history’s shameUnforgivableAlmost unspeakableUnforgettably enshrined
upon these hallowed grounds
That paint
A clear
and searing picture
Of man’s in
humanity
to the Black body
Of hidden figuresDisfiguredby shacklesAnd by chains
by nooses
and by hateBy centuries of that bloody
and inconceivable fate
called Slavery:
A “Peculiar Institution” In which the newborn of the enslaved
could not be
born free..
And for centuries
There existed
this great tragedy
Called, “The Maafa”The memory of which some would now choose to have
forgotten And Black History whitewashed
As if someone other than usPicked their cotton
As if we did not dangle like strange fruit
From poplar trees
Or face Massa’s whip
And myriad cruelties
Created by his limitless, hateful imaginations
But here, rotten hate
And brutalityGlarefor all the world to seeFaces sculpted
In moist African clay
By inspired hands
Filled with grace
To tell the tale
Of hate
almost beyond Imagination
Of suffering
And the manifestation
Of abomination
Of degradation
That must not nowOR EVERBe erased
Or deniedUntoldOr rewritten
Or else smoothed over
by White Lies
Thou shalt not
silence these cries!
For HereUpon these hallowed grounds
I hear the sound
Of children cryingRisingThen suddenly expiringThen again rising
And rising
And rising
I hear
The jagged piercing wail
Of my ancestors dying
Of pregnant women
Nearing birth
And also death
Crying
The crashing
Of hearts capsizing
The travail
Of the Souls of Black FolkHeaving their last breath
Within this heartlessCatastropheDesigned by human hands
And bigotry
By sin-sick hate
And raging evil inhumanity
I hear the desperation
Of a people
Caught inexplicably
Between heaven
And hell-on-earth
I see their bronze faces
Set toward sunset
and the Middle PassageBut with spirits lifted
Toward the west
Toward a place
beyond the sun
Toward somewhere beyond death
And there are tears hereOn these sacred groundsRivers of tears
Beneath these clouds
Tears to be found flowing from the eyes of visitors
As they look upon this sacred representation upon this holy installation of their ancestors who found no mercy from their captors only grace from their CreatorIn this placeWhere ancestor and descendant
Come face to face
With his-story
And her story and the bittersweet reality
That unless we remember the past
We are bound inevitably to repeat it.
It is the plain truth etched upon these faces.
In this most sacred of places
That bears a story for the agesSealed eternally by blood And a sculptor’s mud instead of pages In these, my ancestor’s faces.
