“Not only humans made the Crossing, traveling only in one direction through Ocean given the name Atlantic. Grief traveled as well.
The dead do not like to be forgotten, especially those whose lives had come to a violent end and had been stacked sometimes ten high in a set of mass graves, the head of one thrown in with the body of another, male becoming female, female becoming male, their payment for building the best stone fortress that hugged a steep hill, reputed to be the most well-secured in the Caribbean. Secure for the British, that is who buried their antipathy for the French for one brief moment and killed off three hundred Indians in one day in hope of proving ownership of the country….The dead do not like to be forgotten.
Sentience soaks all things. Caresses all things. Enlivens all things. Water overflows with memory. Emotional Memory. Bodily Memory. Sacred Memory.
Crossings are never undertaken all at once, and never once and for all.”
— M. Jacqui Alexander, “Pedagogies of the Sacred: Making the Invisible Tangible” in her book, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (pg. 289-290)
