Highlighting slave
trade horrors

By Diane Prokop
Times Staff Writer

About 100 people packed into a narrow hallway at Holy Family University last week to see a national traveling art exhibit — Haiku Middle Passage.
The close quarters only magnified the power of the art — by 17 contributing artists — and the words — haiku poetry by professor Mursalata Muhammad, of Grand Rapids Community College in Michigan, along with two recorded compositions that played over and over like a solemn ode, commemorating 200 years since Great Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade.

The trade route began in European ports, stopped in Africa to pick up slaves and sailed to the Americas to unload the human cargo, at which time the vessels sailed back to where the journey started.

The Middle Passage refers to the leg of the journey where, for 400 years, tens of millions of African-American men, women and children were packed like sardines aboard cargo ships in Africa for the trip to the Americas.
Holy Family associate professor Pamela Flynn, one of the 17 artists featured in the exhibit, calls her work Passage of Sorts.

“It was a passage of sorts — death is a passage of sorts,” she said.
Flynn used mixed media, such as photography, colored pencils and tissue sails, and stitched figures on her canvas to convey the horror of the slaves’ very lives being altered beyond their control.

they push them off one by one
only mourning the
profit margin loss

“It was an interesting process. Professor Mursalata Muhammad put out a call to artists and her e-mail was forwarded to me and I sent her images,” Flynn said.
While the artist/professor’s work usually has some social context, it took her quite a while to decide which way to go with the project.

“It had to sink in. I was thinking about it for quite a while,” Flynn said.
Muhammad was thinking about it for quite a while as well.
Although she missed her flight and was unable to attend last week’s reception, she did speak with the attendees via an Internet hookup.

She wrote the poems about 10 years ago as a grad student at Penn State — taking two years to write 13 haikus. Her form is a little different, however.
Traditionally, the Japanese poem or verse form consists of 17 syllables divided among three lines of five, seven and five syllables.

Muhammad modified the form of her haikus for Middle Passage. Other than the first haiku, when she wrote from the perspective of a slave, she used a seven-five-seven sequence of syllables. When writing from the perspective of someone else aboard the ship, she relied on the five-seven-five sequence — the ordered haiku verse.
She wanted to create the feel of what it was like being on the water:

I don’t get seasick but waves
jumble my mind thought
I speak foreign tongues
Free waters cannot give up
free people calmly
without making waves

It is illustrated by a painted slave ship tossed in rough water, the phrase “We shall overcome” written on the sea, while brown hands reach from the sky over a border resembling a colorful African kente cloth. The scene is intended to portray the helplessness — but also the dignity — of those held captive along the Middle Passage.

“The story is not complete until we get the other perspective. It becomes part of the collective story. Each holds something unique,” Muhammad said.
Professor Mary Caroll Johansen, who teaches history at Holy Family University, gave participants at the opening reception a sense of just how horrible the Middle Passage was for the millions of slaves.

She recounted the experience of a 6-1/2-year-old boy, Broteer, who in 1736 was put on a ship with about 260 others for the voyage from Africa to the enslavement of the Americas.

According to Johansen, the ships were packed tight like bookshelves. The slaves could not even sit up, let alone stand, and had to lie on their sides. Men were allotted a space about 6 feet by 16 inches wide, with smaller spaces for women and children.

Diseases spread quickly, with dysentery and smallpox the most deadly.
One ship’s captain was afraid he’d run out of drinking water, so he selected 133 slaves and ordered them thrown overboard in groups, Johansen said. The captain called them “parcels.” Before the last parcel was tossed, rain came and replenished the water supply. The captain still threw the last group overboard and subsequently asked insurers to pay for his loss of “cargo.” The request was refused.
The artistic exhibit moved Margaret S. Kelly, vice president of institutional advancement at Holy Family.

“I knew about it but I didn’t realize how bad it was,” she told Muhammad. “You are an anointed person to do this — the music, the visuals, your guided haiku. God wants this to be shared.”

Holy Family is the second stop for the exhibit. Muhammad’s dream is to have 200 exhibits of the Middle Passage, ending with an auction of the works so that they’ll be scattered as the slaves were so many years ago.

“We’re going to use the oral tradition and tell everybody to come out,” Muhammad said. ••

The Holy Family University art gallery is on the lower level of the John Perzel Education Technology Center, 9801 Frankford Ave. The exhibit continues through Feb. 27. To arrange group visits, call Pamela Flynn at 267-341-3418.
To learn more about the life of Broteer/Venture Smith, visit www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h5.html

Reporter Diane Prokop can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dprokop@phillynews.com