Whenever some of us speak or write of foundational violence, we are not referring to only the actual labor or the brutality, but to narrative violence--the images and words used to depict and describe black people and thus allow for the expression and practice of indifference, cruelty toward black people. "Piezas" cannot be human and, therefore, they could never be "free people." "Pieces" to be sold!
And speaking of "pieces"--Delano (and his "Christian optimism") is in the Pacific to participate in what Grandin calls that "predatory, bloody," and "profitable" industry of seal hunting. In a sense, this business is all about "pieces" too--linked to those human "piezas." At least for a time, seal hunter, Delano, is trading primarily in human beings, and, as Grandin writes, there is nothing strange about Delano having his hands in two very profitable industries.
I first took a serious look at the world, that is, Mother Earth, for which I am a part of because it is where I and all living originate when I saw footage complied by environmentalists and conscientious journalists showing images of seals clubbed to death. I remember seeing people clubbing the seals and wondering--who are these people? This was many years ago. Now I am reading The Empire of Necessity and discover the link between the enterprise of enslavement and seal-hunting industry.
Grandin begins his discussion on seal hunting with meat suppliers. The suppliers of meat, merchant of "skin," used to discard the skin of "oxen, cows, and horses" until human thought, always focused on profits, came up with a bright idea! Since slaves are fed "salted meat" and "hides and tallow" are used to purchase new enslaved blacks, why not use the hide of seals to feed slaves? The merchants turn to Argentina again.
Buenos Aires becomes a wealthy city thanks to blacks laboring to salt, smoke, or sun-dry hides. In turn, the work of enslaved blacks at the "saladero," salting plants and slaughter houses, writes Grandin, gave "birth to Argentina's modern meatpacking industry." Enslaved blacks worked on ranches where pampas leather, "valued in Europe," produced "book covers, altar mantels, mural hangings, church vestments, casket linings, and cloaks, boots, and gloves perfumed with orange and jasmine."
The slaughter of animals was cruel, brutal. Indifferent to the suffering of other living beings meant that the "merchants of death" killed with impunity. Callous and systemic. Napalm blew over land where humans, animals, and nature resided, polluting the air with the smell of death and leaving the soil covered in the carcasses of the dead.
"The hunters would give just one quick thrust to the heart, 'the blood flowing in torrents, and covering the men.'" From Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, Grandin quotes :
The method practiced to take them was, to get between them and the water, and make a lane of men, two abreast, forming three or four couples, and then drive the seal through this lane; each man furnished with a club, between five and six feet long; and they passed, he knocked down such of them as he chose, which are commonly the half-grown, or what are called young seals. This is easily done, as a very small blow on the nose effects it. When stunned, knives are taken to cut and rip them down on the breast, from the under jaw to the tail, giving a stab in the breast that will kill them.
Seal skins. Little pieces to feed the "piezas."
When it came to killing sea elephants: "'There was no difficulty in killing them, since they were incapable of either resisting or escaping.'"
If we silently wait for institutions benefiting from profiting industries to reform, and they have always "reformed" their narratives in order to continue benefiting the privileged few, we reach a point of no return. We are still held captive among the un-free.
Resistance is everything!
Black resistance struggles in the New World, originates with African people, too! On the West Coast of Africa, over the waters, in the hulls, came a loud and resounding NO! For black, brown, and Indigenous peoples, the world's majority, resistance, even if temporarily repressed, and brutally repressed, still matters. Otherwise, violence reigns. Solidarity and love drowns in blood flowing down our streets or evaporates in the mushroom clouds above our heads.
Grandin records that of all the enslaved Africans over four centuries of the slave trade, those from West Africa, particularly those from the Gulf of Guinea, the Niger Delta, and Bonny Island, "were known for their high rates of suicides." Off Georgia's coastal island, he continues, a legend developed. Descendents of the enslaved Igbo (Nigeria) spoke of their ancestors simply "flying" or "walking" away on the water. Some even danced on the waves as they walked home.
"'Negros did not' kill themselves, remembered Esteban Montejo, a former Cuban slave. 'They escaped by flying. They flew through the sky and returned to their own lands.'" Under the worst of humans' inhumanity to humans, black people could still develop a narrative that speaks to the rejection of victims of oppression and rejection of the insanity of cruelty, injustice, death. Here in the images of this narrative, is an expression of hope that is linked to the continuation of resistance. Reverently did these human beings value and honor resistance, unlike the merchants of death, dead or currently "alive" among the living.
The history of African enslavement in the New World reveals to us maps with marked routes that have lead us to accept deceptions, lies, corruption, inequality and injustice as a way of being. Those hulls of ships are now the many "holes" at penal institutions where human beings languish in solitary confinement. No one is yet free as a result. No one is yet free when we are silenced if we attempt to acknowledge humankind's inhumanity to its own species and to all living creatures. To Mother Earth. No one is yet free if those subjugated narratives of sacrifice--those in which many were willing to give up their livelihoods and lives for the many--is supplanted by those in which the oppressed are sacrificed for the few, the elite, the oligarchy of bankers and corporate CEOs.
No one is yet free when there is an empire of necessity! "Free our minds..."
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