This impressive study examines the Gold Coast slave trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and traces the experience of Africans from their sale into slavery through the Middle Passage to their arrival in the Americas. The book is a notable contribution to our understanding of the American slave experience. Smallwood's ambitiously realized narrative examines the process by which Africans were comodified by the operators of slavery and the struggle of slaves to understand their experience and construct a meaningful social identity in this environment. Throughout their involuntary journey through captivity, commodification and diaspora, Smallwood evokes the terror, dislocation and loss of self that she contends would have accompanied each individual, and which prevented them from integrating fully with the American slave community.
The most satisfying section of the book considers the psychological impact of the Middle Passage. Smallwood argues convincingly that the market forces of enslavement and commodification defined a straightforward temporal narrative of slavery for Europeans (as implied by the term “Middle Passage”), a narrative that was denied to slaves. The very alienness of the ocean, which for land-based West African cultures was a place of supernatural power, caused slaves spatial and temporal disorientation, and contributed to their commodification, and to “the complete disintegration of personhood” (125).
Smallwood suggests that a linear narrative did not exist for slaves because the trauma of enslavement did not end – it remained unresolved for each individual until he or she was reunited with their kin, physically or spiritually after death. Yet spiritual return was unlikely because the deaths of so many Africans during the Middle Passage were not attended by the rituals which allowed the soul to pass to the next realm and rejoin the community of the living, the not-yet-born and the ancestors.
In the Americas, a diasporic Africa emerged among those who were bound together by the shared Atlantic experience, formed from the “plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them” (189). As American-born generations became established, the one-way migration from Africa to America led to creole culture valuing the African diaspora in America more highly than that of Africa itself. For saltwater slaves, however, Smallwood argues that the memory of enslavement and the Atlantic journey remained unresolved, an experience too traumatic to be understood as part of one's own life, and an event which prevented such individuals assimilating fully into the creole slave community.
