Goree

The first time I came to Senegal in 2010, with my Dad, we spent a day visiting UNESCO world heritage site, Ile Goree before driving north to Saint Louis to begin our work with Maison de la Gare (in my father's case to continue his work). I was stunned at the intense beauty of Goree, which contrasts so remarkably with its horrific history as a slave island - the launching point for millions of African captives being trafficked to the new world as slaves.

I have always felt that Goree is an apt metaphor for the talibes and the world in which they live. Senegal is beautiful and welcoming, as are the Senegalese. Almost a paradise. The land of taranga. But, at once the treatment of the talibes, and society's permission of it, is an abomination that one can hardly believe could exist in such a place, among such a people.

I wonder how my family will reconcile the wonderful people they meet and the lives the talibes are forced to live. Maybe visiting Goree, learning and feeling the tragic centuries of history of the African slave trade which occurred there, would help them understand. Maybe it would help me.  I remember Rowan's reaction the first time she visited the daara of her closest talibe friend. It hurt, badly. Ancestors of my own sisters, natives of Haiti, could very well have walked through Goree's door of no return, or another like it. Many millions of people did. My siblings and I learned the history as children when my parents sent us to the Black Community Centre in Montreal after my sisters were adopted. But seeing the evidence with our own eyes, standing on Goree's blood and tear soaked earth with our own feet, is far more real. It is beautiful, but it hurts, too. Francine. Odelia.

Adrian. Brianna. Alysia.
Rowan was moved to speechlessness when visiting la Maison des Esclaves. She did not want us to take any photos of us together as a family there, in the place where so many families were torn apart, never to see each other again. It was almost too much to bear, standing in a 5' x 10' cell where at least 50 men, as many as 100, were kept in bondage, awaiting transport. The cell for children aged 5 to 14 was worse, and silenced us all. Robbie still doesn't want to talk about it.Visiting the Eglise Saint Charles on Goree, built by the French while slavery was stilll ongoing, was also difficult. A place to worship. It was not easy to feel God in this place.

Maison de la Gare took some of the talibes on a field trip to visit Goree recently. That visit left an imprint on them, as it did on us, connected them to the history of their country, the darker part of it which is not so far removed from their own current realities. Maybe it helped them to understand. ...Maybe not.

"La souffrance d'un seul homme est la souffrance de l'humanité tout entier"