How I Finally Learned That Trauma Does Not Define Me [themarshallproject.org]

By Marlon Peterson, The Marshall Project, January 23, 2020.

I celebrated the 10th anniversary of my release from a New York prison in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. I was there to participate in The Year of Return, a countrywide commemoration of the 400 years since the first Africans were trafficked to the British colony now known as Virginia.

Yes, I went to Afrochella. But on December 23—10 years to the day that I left prison—I was compelled to visit the Cape Coast Castle, a trading post and fort where Europeans brutally warehoused thousands of Africans and exported them to unknown lands. I walked through this door of no returnbecause I needed to feel the spirit of resistance and be in community with the beauty of my ancestors who found ways to survive the ugliness of white people and their growing system of anti-black racism.

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