Steeve Pierre-Louis -- Something Torn and New

I must admit, as soon as I heard Dr. Beatty's accent, I sighed along with many of my fellow students. I figured that this lecture on Dismemberment and Abandonment would be something drawn out and quite frankly, boring. But throughout his lecture, Dr. Beatty brought up many peculiar historical analyses that managed to keep me awake. The things that spoke to me the most were his points on fulfillment when you experience loss and/or separation, the Q&A section, specifically the part where Dr. Beatty discussed the open-mindedness of Africans and how that allowed them to assimilate the Christian religion into their own, and the 5 areas that moved from Africa to America that influence today's society.

Unlike the previous lectures, Dr. Beatty focused more on a history and analysis of the black diaspora: the dismemberment, which is the middle passage and the transport of Africans to the New World, and the abandonment, which is the loss of culture and history the descendants will experience. The dismemberment process was so big that by 1776, 5/6 people in the new world were from Africa. And these Africans had to fill themselves with the new environment to escape total loss. Now my story compared to this may be trivial, but it covers the save fundamental principle of loss and fulfillment. When my bike was stolen over a month ago, I felt violated and essentially loss. I solemnly wondered what I was now to do with my free time. After a week or so of rarely going outside, I began to take walks. Then I began to run and walk, alternatively. Finally the habit evolved to jogging. I found something to fill and replace the hole in my heart and that relates to what the Africans had to do when they reached the Americas and the Caribbean.

One of the most important things that Africans absorbed was Christianity. At the end of the lecture, a student asked, 'why or how did Africans so easily adapt to the Christian faith if it was so heavily influenced by Europe?' Dr. Beatty's reply definitely satisfied me. He mentioned that Africans don't believe that just one faith holds the truth, and that the truth is somewhere among all these different faiths. That attitude allowed them to see certain parts of Christianity that went along with their own religions and so made sense to them in some way. That point of view closely matches mine. With so many religions in the world, I seriously doubt one has it all right. It's been this attitude that has allowed me to understand people very well, especially with matters concerning religion.

Africans didn't just accept Christianity exactly the way Europeans did. They added their own spice to it. Religion, along with music, speech, food, and art, were brought from Africa with them and those exports continue to affect us today, such as how African-American churches function; how we speak to each other, what we eat, and how we interpret and perform art. Dr. Beatty mentioned that to look at the African presence, however, we can't look at it the same way that it's in the books. The books don't use methods that research the African presence like Michael Gomez, who tried to see us through our entire history rather than our history since we were discovered and popularized in the 1500s. Tracing back our history, similarly mentioned in the last lecture, or otherwise coming up with entirely new methodologies to research African presence in today's society is our best bet to figuring out our cultural meaning. For example, looking back and attempting to "re-africanizing" Christianity, we could see that the cross resembles the Kongo cosmogram. Scholars are confident that many more historical and cultural discoveries await us, if we are simply willing to begin.