I will...rejoice in your love, for you saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul. Ps. 31:7
Last Wednesday morning I arose at 3.13 am to be at my local station to catch the first of my three trains. Ten hours later and approximately two hundred miles from home, I reached my final destination - the Tate Liverpool, a gallery of international modern and contemporary art. I was there to visit the exhibition - Afro Modern; Journeys through the Black Atlantic. More specifically, I was there to witness a phenomenal piece of art; a painting that had captured my imagination. First seen in a newspaper during the media coverage of the Bicentenary of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Act in 2007, it had evoked the same feelings as when I first saw a picture of a wooden sculpture of a crucified African Christ. All I could think of was the text in Matthew of finding a pearl of great value. The painting, Bird in Hand by Ellen Gallagher, is such a pearl. As soon as I entered the exhibition it sought me out. I stood before it for several minutes holding back the tears. Rarely am I so moved by a piece of art, but its symbolic representation demands nothing less.
The large canvas depicts an amphibious black seafarer standing on the ocean floor, in a fluid symbiosis with his marine environment. With hair flowing in ribbons of locks, he has a leg of timber and the other rooted in the natural beauty of the sea's geology and life force. The artist commemorates the deaths of African men, women and children thrown overboard by the slave traders or who chose to jump to their deaths rather than submit to a life of enslavement. Her visualisation of the Middle Passage, equally evokes the brutality of the slavers and the bravery of our ancestors, who fought to regain control of their lives. This painting is a visual memorial witnessing to the legacy of our forbearers.
During that Bicentenary I attended a related black theology conference, where a colleague presented a paper titled The Middle Passage as Existential Crucifixion. On the side of hopelessness, he refers perhaps to the Atlantic, as the 'sea of meaninglessness' with the remains of Africans in the bellies of the marine life and entombed in the silt of the sea bed. However, his interpretation is liberative as he relates these events to Holy Week. As I re-read his paper, I see Good Friday, as the journey of the Middle Passage; in our innocence we were taken in a symbolic crucifixion to the barracoons, humiliated and abused, and forced into iron and wooden ships. Our cross. In the bowels of these ships, our ancestors withstood conditions of Hell and fought to maintain their dignity through a determined will to live. Like Christ they endured a burial in the tomb of a slaving vessel. A symbolic three days and three nights. Some choose the afterlife of Africa. Others to negotiate the horrors of their wooden ross. For centuries in the new worlds of the Americas and the Caribbean our forbearers prayed and fought towards their eventual resurrection to freedom and equality. Our new life. On Easter Monday, we celebrate our overcoming, and our personal and communal resurrection with Christ.
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers (and sisters) I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Phil. 3:10-14 NIV
May the Holy Spirit of God continue to breathe into you, the power of new life.
Rev. Caroline Redfearn
www.blackpeoplesministries.com
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