“The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.” TraumaDehumanizationCommodificationMiddle Passage Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Source: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
“Mortality on the Atlantic produced a crisis of enormous proportions, as Africans labored under the cumulative weight of these deaths that remained unresolved. . . . Entrapped, Africans confronted a dual crisis: the trauma of death, and the inability to respond appropriately to death. This indirect violence, arguably, was the most abject experience of the captives’ Atlantic crossing.” DeathSlaveryTraumaMiddle PassageResponse To Death Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Source: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora