I Am, We Are, Because They Are

Split the Castle open,

find me, find you.

We, two, felt sand,

wind, air.

One felt whip. Whipped

once shipped.

We, two, black.

Me, you.

One grew from

cocoa’s soil, birthed from nut,

skin uncut, still bleeding

We, two, wade.

The waters seem different

but are same

Our same. Sister skin.

Who knew? Not me. Not you.

Reading this poem from Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi stirred something in me that felt bigger than the page. I re-read it over and over again as it sunk deeper into my soul.

Even though the poem speaks to two separate experiences of African sisters, it made me think about the stolen human bodies taken from West Africa, treated like cargo, forced across the sea in shackles, and dragged into horror and bondage on land that would ironically come to call itself “free.” Bodies disconnected from their humanity. Disconnected from their land. Disconnected from their languages, lineages, traditions, and people.

Bloodlines were disrupted, but they did not disappear.

I think about the families we do not know we are related to because separation was not incidental to chattel slavery. It was a strategy and practice. It was policy. People were sold away from mothers, fathers, siblings, children, lovers, and communities. Entire family trees were split open, scattered, and renamed. And yet, somehow, the roots kept reaching.

This poem made me think deeply about the family we may never know by name, but still carry in our blood, breath, body, and being.

“I am because we are,” or ubuntu, has always been sacred to me. I have often understood it as a reminder of our shared humanity and that we are not meant to survive alone, that our lives are bound together, that we need each other.

After my trip to Ghana, ubuntu hit differently.

Standing on the land where so many were taken from, I felt something shift in my spirit. I thought about how American Black people did not come from chains. We came from beautiful people. Brilliant, rooted people. People with names, nations, languages, customs, families, futures, and dreams before bondage tried to reduce them to labor.

We did not begin in captivity. We were coerced into it.

And still, they survived the unimaginable. They found ways to love in a foreign land. They created kinship where bloodlines had been broken. They made family out of necessity, resistance, memory, and care. They remembered what they could and created what they had to. They became the bridge between what was stolen and what still lives.

Marcus Garvey said that "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." This is why history matters as more than trivia or trauma for trauma’s sake, but as truth. As recovery and discovery. As a return and resistance.

If we do not know our history, we cannot fully know ourselves or each other. We cannot fathom the depth of what was taken, or the magnitude of what survived. We cannot understand why family, for Black people in America, has always meant more than biology. Family has been survival. Family has been chosen and has been created across rupture.

This poem reminded me that the waters may seem different, but they are connected. The shores may be separated, but the story is shared. The sisters may not have known each other, but the blood still knew.

I am because they are. Without them, there is no us.

And maybe that is part of the homegoing, too. Not only returning to a place but returning to a truth that we were never just what happened to us. We are who survived and we weren’t supposed to. We are who remembered and who reached across the rupture and still found each other.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/f1b298_80d915627f0042a28c2dc5ec1f799ff4/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

My visit to the Cape Coast slave "castle" was profoundly touching and something I will NEVER forget.