Film: Voices from the Water

During a period of 350 years an estimated 15 to 20 million Africans, from all over West Africa, were held on Goreé Island. More than 6 million of them died in captivity on this island, from cruel treatment and deprivation. Twice as many more were put on ships that took them to a life of chattel slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. A growing number of people are beginning to make make a connection between the psychological traumas of slavery and our behavior today.

Goree Island, Senegal
The shipping point where many slaves, brutally treated, were housed
before they took the long and horrific journey to the Americas.

The text above is taken from the Website for the film The Healing Passage: Voices From the Water, which explores the residual impact of the African Holocaust, slavery and its reverberations in the world today. View a clip from the project, directed by filmmaker and journalist S. Pearl Sharp, at www.asharpshow.com, and find out where you can purchase this moving film. The Healing Passage features such luminaries and artistic giants as Oscar Brown, Jr., Ysaye Barnwell, Tom Feelings, and Babatunde Olatunji.

From S. Pearl Sharp's Website:

How do we heal from the residuals of The Middle Passage?

Cultural artists, along with historians and healers, look at present day behavior that is connected to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For more than 300 years Africans were carried from their homeland, across the Atlantic Ocean ("The Middle Passage"), into chattel slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. The residual impact of this African Holocaust still reverberates in the world today through psychological trauma, genetic memory, personal and community consciousness. The artists use music, dolls, dance, altars, spoken word, visual art and ritual to create paths to healing.

How has the psychological trauma of centuries of slavery affected our lives, souls, and behavior today? The answers to that question have filled thousands of pages in books and hopefully will lead to the intense healing that we still, so desperately, need.

House of Slaves