some doors
I saw this door on a walk the other day and it felt like magic. After reading about the presence of West African Adinkra symbols in the ironwork of New Orleans and other U.S. cities where enslaved blacksmiths once worked, metal has been drawing my eye. I’ve been looking at the intricate designs of wrought iron gates and doors in my neighborhood, sometimes recognizing Adinkra symbols and sometimes just admiring a pretty thing. I’ve been thinking about ironwork as a form of urban public prayer and messaging that has been used by Black artisans for centuries. On some buildings, the symbol for hye won hye: “that which does not burn.” On others: asase ye duru, “the Earth has weight.” Sankofa, a relationship to tending the past.
Public exhortations to the universe, symbols which went overlooked by those who did not know what to look for. Codes hiding in plain sight. A visual language which calls back to the spoken, the written, the sonic.
The placement of these symbols on windows, doors, and gates marks spaces of threshold, moments of transition and interchange between domestic and public, inner and outer worlds.
In a 2019 speech, the writer Teju Cole talks about the word “door” as being one of the oldest words spoken by humans. As old as words for elemental necessities like bread, hand, home. Cole shares the story of a door his father brought home from a trip to Brazil and held onto for years, despite having nowhere to install it, owning no land to build a house. A commitment notable “as a kind of instinct for understanding the symbolic power of portals.” Musing on the fluid and mobile possibilities held within doorways, Cole remembers a recent visit to Senegal’s Door of No Return, where African slaves were held captive before crossing the Atlantic. “A door of no return is a contradiction in terms, dousing the generosity of portals, making of them a one-way horror.” Hearing this, I was reminded of Dionne Brand’s words in A Map to the Door of No Return:
“The door out of which Africans were captured, loaded onto ships headed for the New World…was the door of a million exits multiplied. It is a door which makes the word door impossible and dangerous, cunning and disagreeable…Imagining our ancestors stepping through these portals one senses people stepping out into nothing; one senses a surreal space, an inexplicable space.”
Door: an ancient spatial practice of leaving and returning, its meaning fractured by the violence of the unspeakable.
Doorway: what ushers you into the outside, or vice versa. Presided over by Eleggua, guardian of the crossroads.
Doorway: a place you move through. The going before the gone. The lingering before the home safe.
Living in the wake of doors with no returns, African blacksmiths in the New World created portals ornate with messages for abundance, protection, and the sacredness of the Earth. These entrances, windows, boundaries, and welcome-spaces shimmer with meaning and possibility, unfurling themselves in the horrific afterlives of slavery, gracing our cities even now, beckoning us through doorways to the divine.
Further resources:
“The Storytelling Ironwork of New Orleans”
“Slavery and the Disciplining of Free Labor in the Colonial Mid-Atlantic Iron Industry”
“West African Adinkra Symbols”
Negro Ironworkers of Louisiana: 1718-1900
Excerpts from a visual essay by Justin Batiste
The Gatekeeper Archive (c/o my friend Lu)
Teju Cole on doors, portals, design
A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand
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