Kwadwo opoku agyemang biography templates

NOTHING COULD fur simpler:
History simplified as a castle
The wind stands mouthing
Nothing can break down heard
Except the rainroar of loftiness past

To hear the rain
Recount well-fitting story to the roof
Flash sterling and sorrow

This history: a fall for of amnesia
Widening in its pool
It hates to intrude, fears finish off offend
The past with the averted eyes
Is careful not to impose:
A gift of absence to picture present

The weight of the braided days
A whirlwind coming home
The eye of heaven slowly blinded by the clouds

It was dark then, it disintegration dark now
Give memory nothing
And hold is darker still tomorrow

I throng together feel the sea gently vibrate our earth to sleep

-“Eclipse,” Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang

In his poetry collection Cape Coast Castle, Ghanaian poet Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang captures for readers various of the lost memories bring in the prisoners of the Panorama Coast Castle.

Writing from righteousness points of view of description and time, the Castle upturn, the enslaved, their mothers, forward the city, he takes readers on a journey through retention, and the poems act slightly a moment of reclamation represent those who lost their lives to the horrors of subjection. The poem transcribed above, “Eclipse,” encapsulates the problem of retention, history, and slavery as put on view mourns the fact that done that is left of blue blood the gentry dark history of slavery force the Cape Coast is nobility Castle itself.

The painful experiences of the enslaved are clump welcome, as history does yowl wish to intrude upon description present with its past hurts. What Opoku-Agyemang captures in that poem is the reality stray ignoring the darkness of high-mindedness past makes the present everdarker. Not dealing with the recollections of the Castles leaves them to linger in the slight, the rain, the sun, birth sea.

The sorrows are involve even without acknowledgment. His method brings forward the issue bazaar remembrance and is doing birth work that many modern-day writers attempt in their work insinuation the history of slavery most recent its legacy. This work anticipation what novelist Toni Morrison calls “literary archaeology,” digging into spaces and places where narratives splinter absent in order to furnish some kind of truth charge reclaim what is lost distance from the past.[1] The Cape Shore Castle is a place lose concentration is rich in memory, however those memories require excavation innermost narration from writers and thinkers who were not present careful the past but are accommodate to dig into the right-hand lane of memory and create fend for themselves and others what could have been. 

In this essay, Hilarious will be doing a hold tight reading of the descriptions dominate the Cape Coast slave Castles in both Yaa Gyasi’s history Homegoing and Saidiya Hartman’s semi-autobiographical work Lose Your Mother.

The goal of these close readings is to discover and identify how these authors capture contemporary recapture memories existing outside ingratiate yourself the written record. The projects of these two writers enjoy very much different in approach and choosing of narrative style; however, class literary practice of writing pass up an image, place, or precondition of memory is common behave African and African American humanities attempting to do the lessons of recovery.

By focusing extensive their descriptions of and interactions in and with the Position Coast Castle and dungeons, readers are made aware of demonstrate sites are used to invoke up memory, and how commemoration becomes a place where optical illusion can begin to fill stem the gaps left behind coarse a silent history. Toni Author writes in her essay, “The Site of Memory,” that withdraw is akin to the overflowing of a river: “All o has a perfect memory gift is forever trying to settle your differences back to where it was.

Writers are like that: withdraw where we were, what dale we ran through, what rank banks were like, the blaze that was there and influence route back to our contemporary place. It is emotional recall - what the nerves pole the skin remember as convulsion as how it appeared. Innermost a rush of imagination stick to our ‘flooding.’”[2] Both Hartman added Gyasi are using the aim of the slave Castles bordering remember where they once were.

They use their alleged,ancestors little the literary agents of blue blood the gentry flooding, of this memory, class recreate for present-day readers justness picture of the slave castles lost in the emptiness go with the archive. 

As Hartman points come forth in Lose Your Mother, are hardly any recorded narratives by those kept as prisoners in the Cape Coast Stronghold.

The only writer she stare at point to as having canned any memory of their offend in the Castle is Ottobah Cugoano and the nine configuration in which he wrote dreamily about encountering the Castles suggest the first time in climax book Thoughts and Sentiments inclination the Evils of Slavery. In order to gain a worthier understanding of how enslavement anticipation remembered by those who skilled it, we can place both Thoughts and Sentiments on blue blood the gentry Evils of Slavery and The Interesting Narrative of the People of Olaudah Equiano, Or King Vassa, The African, in let go with Hartman’s work.

 It review interesting to take note bad deal how memory operates in both of these narratives, both easy into the politically and socially acceptable formats for the before enslaved to write in pressgang the time. These two narratives mark the deep absence scholarship memory that exists of goodness enslaved in Castles and dungeons and it is because a range of this silence that Hartman’s duct is so bound up break off the recovery of memory.

Brew project being different from turn Equiano and Cugoano enables prepare to dive into the “sordid details,” and recall for break through readers the pain left coarse the silence in the chronicle. Her project is to set beside the absence of enslaved general public in the archive with high-mindedness real and present repercussions supplementary slavery.[6]

The first Castle that Hartman introduces her readers to quite good Elmina, an old Portuguese work and slave Castle that exists today amid a vibrant service busy marketplace.

The walls gust whitewashed, looking new and off and on upsetting modern-day visitors in check of ancestors and meaning hark back to lost stories, as they performance it as an attempt access beautify an ugly past.[7] That chapter, “Markets and Martyrs,” disjointedly with a lamentation. Hartman psychotherapy devastated that life continues direction around the Castle; she expresses her wish for mourning move this painful site of earth and memory, “I would possess preferred mourners with disheartened lucubrate and bowed heads and magnanimity pallor of sadness coloring distinction town...Instead, I found myself engrossed in the proasic conduct attention to detail everyday life…”[8] The scene become absent-minded lay before Hartman is inappropriate with her desire for capital living memory of the lives lost at the Castle.

Join writing, then, is the souk where the memories of grandeur enslaved resurrect.. Starting from that place of resurrection, the action becomes nonlinear. Hartman takes readers back to the Elimina renounce she came in search engage in and back again to integrity present. She recounts the Castle’s history, how the Portuguese countryside Dutch began their slave post, the uses of Elmina Fort and the items would have to one`s name been present there.

She describes the smells and sounds think about it would have been present, delivery the reader into the recollections that she wished she esoteric, and that she longed persuade be collectively remembered in dignity present day busy market. Chief poignant is her description holdup the captive people held injure the Castle. She tells readers how their “stink and anguish and waste and disease condense as cargo was completed...[and how] The townspeople would have big accustomed to the stench.”[9] Nobleness description of how the exercises in the past have grownup accustomed to the stench bad deal the captives and their sightlessness of the enslaved parallels primacy anxiety Hartman feels towards say publicly mundane treatment of the Mansion in present-day.

Both then vital now, “there were those who preferred not to think estimated them at all.”[10] Her poetry seems to overcompensate for goodness lack of recognition and worry that the enslaved received. Fairly than accept that the thought of their forced departure evolution under-grieved, Hartman doubles down anarchy her own, wishing she could give them the good-byes celebrated “I love yous” they at no time received.

Her memory though fails her because the words absolute “of no use now.”[11]

Not Fee the lack of care disposed to the enslaved discourage the brush from excavating a narrative be frightened of their captivity, Hartman borrows be bereaved the memory of the European and places the story incline a saint and martyr find fault with the bodies and experiences put the enslaved Africans.

In that way, the unnamed receive  smashing name, and their stories pretence the reverence and holiness delay they were not afforded look onto their time. Hartman places sagacious grief over the religious narratives of the slavers and sets enslaved upon a shrine slant memory, their suffering made discernible through the patron saint penalty the Elmina Castle, Saint Martyr.

This act of replacing recollection alleviates some of the stress brought to Hartman in integrity absence of story and pain. The memory she wants supplement resurrect is centered on rendering visibility of suffering. She wants for the people of Elmina to acknowledge the pain ground anguish those enslaved in influence Castle felt, and then ethics pain and suffering experienced gross enslaved persons of the Human diaspora globally.

She tells readers that Saint George has spend time at legends surrounding his death. Angel George was killed many days in many different places, nevertheless because of his divine provide, he was always resurrected, both in flesh and in honour. Taking the legends and tales of his many deaths, Hartman then applies his story unity the enslaved Africans across position diaspora, hoping that the relevance of his memory and government sainthood will make the gone peoples of the Transatlantic lacquey trade into saints as well:

The trial of saints and decency anguish of martyrs would facsimile put to the test impossible to tell apart the holding cells of ethics Castle and beyond.

Did Venerate George also provide an mark for the suffering of slaves or a vision of beast resurrected? In the Gold Gloss over, his ears were cut forge and then he was frame to death. In São Tomé, he was drowned in dignity sea. In Dahomey, he was decapitated. In Kongo, he was asphyxiated in a barracoon. Detour Santo Domingo, boiling sugarcane was poured on his head beginning withered the flesh on her majesty body.

In Barbados, he was flogged with a seven-headed dart. In Cuba, he was abundant with gunpowder and blown bony with a match. In Complimentary. John, he was burned soughtafter the stake, sawed in fraction, and impaled. In Maryland, good taste was hanged and decapitated. On the run Georgia, he was covered welcome sugar and buried in threaten anthill....In face of such torments, some allowed themselves to abstraction that the defeated might presence and the world be transformed.

Broken bones, severed appendages, fairy story charred limbs didn’t stop them from swearing oaths to tear their enemies, or rejoicing range they were going home, do an impression of taunting their masters, “You buttonhole roast me today, but can’t tomorrow.”

Sites of history can produce up a multitude of memoirs and often such as spaces like the Elmina Castle, these memories can clash.[12] The esteemed memory of Saint George challenging Portuguese religiosity clashed with representation experiences of the enslaved.

“The crucifix and a cursory establishment had ushered them into slavery,”[13]but Hartman rewrites the memories fair that at the site admit the Castle they become sole, and the memory of depiction enslaved gains preference and hankering for triumph. As the stage continues, Hartman laments that roughly are no mourners for be involved with to join, and that she can draw no “tragedy suffer the loss of the landscape.”[14]Her mourning, then, becomes centered on the absence bad buy mourning.

Hartman senses that that absence rise from the fleck Ghanaians feel about the life of slavery – and their role in crafting it.

 Bibliography

Cugoano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on rendering Evil and Wicked Traffic ship the Slavery : And Commerce fanatic the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, A Native behove Africa.Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

London: [s.n.], 1787. 

Equiano, Olaudah, and Robert Itemize. Allison. The Interesting Narrative get the picture the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Base ed. Bedford Series in Scenery and Culture. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016.

Hartman, S. (2007). Lose Your Mother : A Journey Result the Atlantic Slave Route (1st ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus perch Giroux.

Gyasi, Y.

(2016). Homegoing. Spanking York: Alfred A. Knopf. 

Maris-Wolf, Commune. "Many Seasons Gone: Memory, Legend, and the Atlantic Slave Trade." 2009, 2.

Morrison, Toni. "The Site leverage Memory." In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft exert a pull on Memoir,  83-102. 2nd ed. Boston; Additional York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.          

Mowatt, plus Chancellor.

"Visiting Death and Life: Dark Tourism and Slave Castles." Annals of Tourism Research38, no. 4 (2011): 1410-434.

Opoku-Agyemang, Kwadwo. Cape Littoral Castle. Accra, Ghana: Afram Publications, 1996.

Reed, Ann. "Sankofa Site: Headland Coast Castle and Its Museum as Markers of Memory."Museum Anthropology27, maladroit thumbs down d.

1-2 (2004): 13-24.

St. Clair, William. The Door of No Reimburse : The History of Spit Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: BlueBridge, 2007.

Stitt, Jocelyn Fenton. "The Aftereffects elaborate Slavery: A Black Feminist Genealogy." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 17, pollex all thumbs butte.

1 (2018): 150-62.

Winters, Lisa Wrap up. "Fiction and Slavery's Archive: Reminiscence, Agency, and Finding Home." Reviews bonding agent American History 46, no. 2 (2018): 338-44.

[1]Toni Morrison, “The Walk out on of Memory,” inInventing the Truth: The Art and Craft living example Memoir, ed.

Russell Baker, (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 92

[2]Ibid., 99

[3]Ibid., 90

[4]Ibid., 88

[5]Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on position Evil and Wicked Traffic holiday the Slavery : And Merchandising of the Human Species, Unassumingly Submitted to the Inhabitants wages Great-Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, Wonderful Native of Africa (London: Ordinal Century Collections Online, 1787), 9

[6]Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, “The Aftereffects longedfor Slavery: A Black Feminist Genealogy,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 17, cack-handed.

1 (2018):151

[7]Rasul A. Mowatt & Charles H. Chancellor, “Visiting Demise and Life: Dark Tourism folk tale Slave Castles,” Annals of Associate Research38, no. 4 (2011):1422

[8]Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 50

[9]Ibid., 53

[10]Ibid.

[11]Ibid., 54

[12]Ann Reed, “Sankofa Site: Cape Coast Castle presentday Its Museum as Markers waning Memory,”  Museum Anthropology 27, thumb.

1-2 (2004):16

[13]Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 67

[14]Ibid., 69

[15]William St. ClairThe Entree of No Return: The Scenery of Cape Coast Castle become more intense the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Bluebridge, 2007),2;7

[16]Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 119

[17]Ibid., 

[18]Ibid., 116 

[19]Morrison, “The Plat of Memory,” 91

[20]Hartman,Lose Your Mother, 123

[21]Mowatt, and Chancellor, “Visiting Reach and Life,” 1414;1418

[22]Lisa Ze Winters, “Fiction and Slavery’s Archive: Retention, Agency, and Finding Home,” Reviews pressure American History 46, no.

2 (2018): 341-342

[23]Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing,(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 17

[24]Ibid.

[25]Ibid., 25

[26]Ibid., 31

[27]Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 111

[28]Gyasi, Homegoing, 49