Day four

Everybody's selling something. Even history.

Today we went to Gorée Island. It's a touristy destination because it is an island a mere half hour boat ride from Dakar and it has nice views and seaside restaurants and theoretically some historic import. The theoretical historic import does not come solely from the fact that I went there as a child though as it turns out the actual historic import is only slightly more significant.

My childhood memories of Gorée are that it is an island and there is a building on it where slaves were held shortly before they were shipped to the West. I remember that in this building you could go into the wretched little rooms the slaves lived in. I remember the guide explaining how many slaves lived there at once and how many passed through this building, these rooms. I have a very clear recollection of thinking even then, "Wow, that's a lot of people in a small space."

My absolute clearest memory is of a door. It's next to one of the rooms that leads to outside the building, to the beach. The story is that this door represented the true end for any slave who passed through it, for passing through it meant the slave was heading for the slave ship, heading for certain death or hell.

This image was burned into my brain. It's a simple one, really. Imagine a rectangular hole in a dark wall. Sunlight sears through the hole. Once your eyes adjust to the brightness you can see the ocean and the horizon. That's it. If you are close to the door and look through it and down you can see the rocks that make the beach. That's really it. The door is right on the water. Nowhere else to go.

That image and that idea revisited me occasionally over the years like a timely ghost. When we learned about the slave trade in school I thought about that door and its role. When I took comparative religion I thought about the door and the prayers that were said when people crossed its threshold and whether they cared which god heard them. When I took a class on voodoo and hutu I thought about the door and wondered what prayers and desperate hopes of the ones who passed through the door remained in the beliefs of their Caribbean descendants and which were abandoned because they hadn't saved anyone. When I hear about people finding or losing religion I think about that door and whether it made its victims or enforcers find or lose religion. When someone describes their worst nightmare or sheer terror or feeling utterly hopeless to this day I think of the door.

We left Dakar for Abidjan when I was seven and a half. I don't have all too many memories of Dakar, most of my memories of Africa are in Abidjan. But that door was one of the few things from Senegal that I never forgot. So I was very interested in going back to visit it again.

This morning before breakfast I looked up Gorée on Wikipedia to see if there were any particulars in its history that would be good to know before we went. Now, you might think that a place that had had such an impression on me would have been a natural target for previous, random Wikipedia searches. Sounds reasonable to me, too. For some reason it never crossed my mind. I'd been there; what did I have to learn?

It turns out that the history of Gorée is in some dispute. The dispute is between the tour guides on the island (the basis for my memory) and just about everyone else, including renowned scholars and historians. The tour guides, whose wages no doubt rely upon admission tickets and tips, insist something like 6 million slaves passed through Gorée and that Gorée was the last stop for every group of slaves to the West from West Africa, thus Gorée's significance is hefty. The renowned scholars and historians say that maybe a few hundred slaves passed through Gorée each year and the family that essentially ran the island was more interested in trading inanimate goods than trading people.

Well.

The building's name is Maison des Esclaves ("House of the Slaves). When we arrived a tour was already in progress. We got there just in time to hear the guide pumping the importance of Gorée's history and, wait for it, yup -- there's that magical six million figure. He mentioned the cramped rooms and the door. Right, right, I remember this. My mind drifted to the renowned scholars.

As I waited for him to finish (which would release the gathered crowd to explore) I wondered how these new facts were going to change the experience for me. I looked around and noticed the whole place is much smaller than it is in my memory, and that it is not just an effect of me being much larger in proportion to the building than I was then; there are fewer rooms and much less overall square footage. This place can't hold thousands of people at once; at the very most a couple hundred. It's not the castle I remember, nor is it a fort nor a camp nor a plantation; it's a house with a courtyard and several large cells on the ground floor. It's a house, just like the name says.

Listening to the guide finishing his spiel I could feel myself becoming both skeptical and worried.

I was skeptical because I felt like the guide was trying to sell me a lie the same way the keychain guys and the masks guys and the tablecloth guys were trying to sell me their wares in the market. Was this yet another sales pitch?

I was worried because I felt I had some personal stake in this memory of mine. It has revisited me so many times, what would happen if it turned out to be based on something untrue? What if my (more) impressionable self of youth had a tainted memory? Would it change anything for me? What would it say about me if it did and what would it say about me if it didn't?

At the end of his speech the guide mentions that in the late 90s (I think - in fact, this was all in French so this is just my understanding) the Pope came to Gorée and, at the door, on the behalf of the rest of the world, asked the continent of Africa for its forgiveness. Since the guide's final punch was about the door, most of the crowd raced over in that direction when the speech was officially over. I headed upstairs to the little museum there, deciding to see the door last.

I don't remember the museum part of it at all. In fact, aside from being smaller, the whole place didn't really look the same. It's been renovated and painted since the last time we were there. It looked good, I guess, if you can say that about a place called House of the Slaves.

I walked around up there for a few minutes then went back down to the cells. I walked in and out of them, seeing if they matched my memory. For the most part they did except that (as I mentioned) I remember there being more of them. Different cells for men, women, children, young girls, and "recalcitrants
 -- I remembered all that. Dark, all-concrete rooms with tiny slits in the wall for light, if any. Check, check, check.

I kept walking by the hallway with the door to see how the crowd was doing. The first thing I noticed was that the door is actually bigger than I remember, countering that standard that everything looks smaller when you return, larger. Part of my memory was that the door was so small, particularly so low, that the people going through the door in my imagination had to stoop over to get through it, that they weren't even offered the dignity of walking to their fate while standing straight up. This was a key part of the image for me and I could see immediately that it wasn't true. My skepticism and worry were not going anywhere.

I walked in circles until the crowd finally left. I took a picture from afar while I had the chance and walked over.

It turns out that the door changing size between my memory and reality really didn't matter. The Wikipedia article and its renowned scholars didn't matter, the guides and their marketing didn't matter, whatever the real numbers are didn't matter. What mattered was that all the emotions and questions and fears I have ever associated with the door were real. Are real. They were there. Standing there you can't help but feel it. When you look out that door, you are likely taking in the view of a person already in the throes of unimaginable horror, at the moment they felt slipping away what was the absolute last shred of hope they had. Not a picture of the view or a drawing or a written description like this one, but the actual thing. You are standing in their footsteps.

That's just one person's take, anyway. Individual results may vary.

The boat that brought us from the port held upwards of two hundred people or so. One of the groups on the boat appeared to be from a school, as all the boys were dressed alike and all the girls were dressed alike and they all stuck together. They were dressed in traditional West African garb but I'm not sure whether or not they were Senegalese; they were definitely African. They were in their mid to late teens, perhaps a few were even older than that. They were touring the Maison des Esclaves at the same time we were there.

While I was walking around the cells and waiting for the crowd to clear from the door, I wandered by this group several times. They were passing the time by posing inside the cells for pictures. Fun pictures, like the kind you would take at Disney World; the peace sign, big smiles, laughing, carrying on.

To be completely candid, I've been staring at the screen for ten minutes figuring out what to write about this. I haven't come up with a hypothesis or even a comment. My point isn't to rag on teenagers or compare cultures or wonder where their chaperones or parents were or anything like that. I'm still trying to process what I think of it. I just mention it because I think it was notable. Interpretations welcome.

That was actually the second trip to the Maison that we made today. The first time we happened to arrive right as the Maison was closing for its midday break, to reopen at 2:30. So we saw other parts of the island and went to lunch instead.

There are a bunch of restaurants right on the beach in front of the dock where the boat from Dakar parks. When we first arrived this morning the proprietor of one of them walked out and invited us in. Mom told her that we weren't looking for food just yet but we could use some drinks. Somehow that quickly turned into Mom and the restauranteur discovering that they both knew a couple of Americans who had lived on Gorée years and years ago. Yet another best friend!

We sat down and had some soda and juice. Our drinks came with coasters; not to save the tablecloth from sweaty glasses but to put on top of the glasses to protect the contents from the flies. Big, juicy flies. Flies so big I half-expected one to turn to me and say "Hey buddy, go ahead and leave the cap off that bottle, eh?" Luckily we were distracted from the flies by a very affectionate cat who attacked each of us in turn. See more on Flickr.

Despite the flies we returned to the same place for lunch. We all got fish dishes because, well, we were on an island and it seemed right. Mom got tieb ou dienne (just one of a multitude of spellings), the Senegalese national dish and a Robinson family favorite. Jennifer had fish brochettes, and I had yassa poisson (fish). Mine ended up being an entire grilled fish sitting on top of a glorious mound of rice. The fish was perfectly cooked. Photos on Twitter.

Other attractions on Gorée are the views of the ocean and Dakar, some remnants of a military installation, an oddly-shaped monument to something or other, and a couple museums no one goes to (such as, and I am not kidding, the Museum of the Sea). So we walked around a bunch until it was time to catch our boat back to the city. Photos will be on Flickr.

We've hired a taxi to take us around the city tomorrow to our old haunts: our house, the school, stuff like that. It probably won't happen but my goal is to find a chameleon. Cross your fingers.