My Elsewheres

I’m a Black American woman who was formed in the twentieth century, amid the cold war and racial segregation that was entrenched even in the Bay Area. But how I think, the way I write, and where my imagination has taken me owe everything to places outside the United States. I call them my “elsewheres.” Beginning with France, where I studied as an undergraduate in the 1960s, my elsewheres have hoisted me over the conceptual boundaries that America imposed.

In Houston in 2018, the metaphor of the barrier became literal when I saw the chain-link fence around the Houston Negro Hospital, where I was born at 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning in August 1942.

Visiting the city while on book tour, I saw, for the first time since my infancy, the large white structure in Houston’s Third Ward. The hospital was now empty, but its enduring solidity showed how it had protected infants and mothers from the world outside, from America. And its name spoke of the country’s and the state’s intent to demean.

I was hardly the first Black American to see the need for escape. We have been peering over chain-link fences for longer than I’ve been alive, for as long as Black Americans have been Black Americans. In the revelatory anthology A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (1998), edited by the scholars Farah Jasmine Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish, the cast of characters includes adventurers, missionaries, and socialists—like my family—venturing all over the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), the literary critic Brent Hayes Edwards suggests that Black people who gathered in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created “a common ‘elsewhere’” as a protective counterweight to American and European colonial domination.

James Baldwin is the patron saint of Black American elsewheres. His essay referenced in the title of Griffin and Fish’s anthology, “Stranger in the Village,” is about the Swiss elsewhere that freed his literary voice in the early 1950s. In Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020), my Princeton colleague Eddie S. Glaude Jr. lingers—in a chapter called “Elsewhere”—over four of Baldwin’s years in Istanbul, from 1968 to 1972, where he had written parts of The Fire Next Time and Another Country. In Nicholas Boggs’s recent biography Baldwin: A Love Story, “elsewhere” too becomes a refrain.

Baldwin overcame a barrier that shapes Black writers’ understanding of publishing to this day. He wrote and set his first book, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in Harlem, but he set his second book, Giovanni’s Room, with its White, blond protagonist, in France—rare for a Black writer then, and still rare now. Perhaps living elsewhere, in Paris in the 1950s, stretched Baldwin’s imagination. Go Tell It on the Mountain had succeeded brilliantly upon its publication in 1953, but Baldwin’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, turned down Giovanni’s Room and asked for another Harlem novel. They feared, as Baldwin later remembered, that as a “Negro writer” he would “alienate” his audience with a book that was not about Black people.

From Switzerland, Baldwin could train his searchlight on White Americans to reveal essential truths about their society, debunking their claim to racial innocence and purity. “No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger,” he writes in “Stranger in the Village,” which reappears as the last essay in Notes of a Native Son. “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

I share with Baldwin—and, as it happens, with Maya Angelou—two of my three elsewheres: France and Ghana in the 1960s. And though I discovered “Stranger in the Village” back then, when I first read Notes of a Native Son, it took me decades, and more elsewheres, to truly understand the difference between Baldwin’s elsewheres and mine. His made him an eloquent and widely heeded judge of Americans; mine enlarged my concepts of history beyond the prevailing American ideology of race.

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Bordeaux, 1962. I belonged to the first class of study-abroad students from the University of California. Other American colleges had preceded mine in this regard, notably Smith, which started its program in the 1920s. In her book Dreaming in French (2012), Alice Kaplan argues that living abroad in the postwar period gave American women at various American colleges and universities—from Jacqueline Bouvier to Susan Sontag and Angela Davis—the freedom to form their “own ideas of what counted.” Such was my experience in Bordeaux.

My daily walk across the city turned me toward history. I started from the home on the cours Marc Nouaux—named for a World War II résistant, already an evocation of history that had been unfamiliar to me in California—where I was staying with Nancy, whose last name is lost in the University of California archives and who became a good friend. In the center of the city, the buildings—the hôtel de ville, the cathedral—awakened an interest in their past. So did my courses, which displaced the rubbish I had been subjected to in public school. US history was all White men and presidents and wars, evoked in the mandatory singing of “This is My Country.” This is my country, land of my birth. This is my country, grandest on earth—the sentiment that Trumpism now seeks to restore.

In Bordeaux I came to love history. I especially savored my class on the Hundred Years’ War, taught by Charles Higounet (1911–1988). Higounet specialized in Bordeaux and La Gascogne, and in social rather than political history, with the Annales school’s stress on working people and the material dimension of historical change. My most vivid memory of Higounet’s lectures, however, is my French fellow students shouting “Comment ça s’écrit?! Comment ça s’écrit?!” (How do you spell that?!) Good for me, because I didn’t know how to spell that either.

Higounet’s classes taught me about warfare. I had been taught in school that wars were conflicts of good and evil between nation-states. That kind of war isn’t what I discovered in Higounet’s Middle Ages. In his Hundred Years’ War, skirmishes occurred intermittently from 1337 to 1453, in the intervals between the pitched, large-scale battles that established kings and kingdoms. During those intervals, armies—as lightly organized as the armed parasites we recognize today as warlords—lived off the peasants without respect for human rights. Many decades later, Higounet’s images of armies as shifting gangs influenced my understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and its African suppliers. I started thinking less about race and more about the economic exchange and heartless plunder of business history.

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The Atlantic slave trade was not foremost in my mind from 1964 to 1966, when I lived in Ghana with my parents. We had moved there from our home in Oakland to support President Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist and pan-African ambitions, which seemed to us to promise a new era of African independence. The Ghana of that period gave me a very different education than the one I’d received in California and Bordeaux.

I encountered firsthand the consequences of Nkrumah’s ambitions for economic development. When our family arrived, Ghanaian cocoa farmers, who owned their own land and brought in most of the new nation’s hard currency, were resisting his plan to socialize the economy and nationalize production. I supported the ideal of socialist production in the abstract, but in daily life I was also seeing the hardships that the ideal created in the lives of our neighbors and colleagues. So many items crucial to people’s livelihoods—small motors, sewing machines, even metal plates and cups—were imported. I remember most clearly the shortage of tires, which Ghana did not yet produce. No longer could people rely on lorry, car, or bicycle to travel the twelve kilometers separating Legon, the university town where we lived, from Accra, the country’s capital and economic hub. (Today Legon is considered part of Accra.) On an exhausting daily hunt for necessities, Ghanaians could not afford to focus on the distant goal of socialism, no matter how beneficial it might ultimately prove.

And yet as punishing as these hardships were to the people around us, they were an intellectual gift to me. For the first time I could see how such economic conflicts, which had nothing to do with American racism, played out in people’s lives, in a nation’s political life. (We Black American socialists had to leave after a coup d’état in 1966 ended Nkrumah’s rule.)

I learned much later that Maya Angelou, whom I knew at the University of Ghana, had also found an elsewhere there. Where Ghana’s political economy of national development impressed me most, Angelou went further and asked herself about the relationship between Ghanaians and Black Americans, as I discovered in her memoir All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). There she returns repeatedly and sorrowfully to the Atlantic slave trade and the part Ghanaians played in it. She finds herself haunted by “the ugly suspicion that my ancestors had been weak and gullible and were sold into bondage by a stronger and more clever tribe. The idea was hideous…. I couldn’t decide what would be the most appalling, to be descended from bullies or to be a descendant of dupes.”

Like Angelou, I had visited Cape Coast Castle, a fort from which European merchants traded captive Africans for guns and luxuries, and there I also wept. But that past had not weighed on me as I went about my daily life in Ghana. I never internalized our painful history as piercingly as Angelou did.

The matter of slavery reappeared decades after the Irvins lived in Ghana. When my mother, Dona Irvin, was writing her memoir, I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old (2002), she made a realization that exposed our own ignorance of twentieth-century Ghanaian society. Dona remembered hiring a steward to clean house, make beds, and wash dishes, a Muslim man from northern Ghana whose name, she was told, was Adongo. Respecting him as an employee, she always called him by his name, rather than the common, careless alternative, “Boy.” But as she was writing, she thought to double-check the name with Ghanaian friends. Their response left her aghast. Adongo, it tuns out, means “slave.” This discovery so distressed my mother that for the memoir we made up a new name, Moussa Frafra, which we hoped carried no unfortunate connotations.

It occurred to us then, and not for the first time, that the history of slavery functions differently on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the US it’s a fundamental part of our racial identity; actual Africans can register less vividly and specifically to us than this determining fact of our history. Ta-Nehisi Coates realizes this in his recent book The Message. In an interview with The New York Times Coates admitted that his experience of visiting Dakar “was more about mourning than it was about seeing Senegal and the Senegalese people.” For Angelou, my mother, and Coates, slavery and the Atlantic slave trade reside within the chain-link fence of American race.

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My third elsewhere, Germany in 2001, carried me over that fence. That spring my husband Glenn and I lived in Berlin, he as a Fulbright Fellow at the Free University and me as an independent scholar, the American Academy in Berlin having turned down my application to work on the project that became my book The History of White People. Like all my books, that one began with a question. In 1999, on the front page of the Times, I saw a photograph of the bombed-out city of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in the Caucasus, a region that Russia has sought to control at least since the eighteenth-century reign of Catherine the Great. Grozny in 1999 looked like Berlin in 1945, prompting me to ask myself how and why the people of Chechnya, who were Caucasians, had given their identity to White Americans. I reckoned that most Americans, White Americans included, had no idea where the Caucasus lay geographically or what Caucasian people looked like. Why are White Americans called Caucasians?

This question took me to Germany. I knew that the label came from the doctoral dissertation of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a professor at the University of Göttingen in Lower Saxony. In 1795 Blumenbach published the definitive, influential edition of his De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, which laid out five skulls as examples of his five varieties of mankind. In Göttingen in 2001 the historian of science Nicolaas Rupke offered me essential research help, and nearly fifteen years later he invited me back for a conference on Blumenbach. On that visit I saw the skulls themselves, by then no longer pristine.

One of Blumenbach’s 1795 images shows an unblemished skull. Its lack of injuries and full set of teeth indicate that it came from a young person who had probably never been pregnant (during an era when pregnancy often cost women their teeth). Blumenbach had received the skull in May 1793 as a gift from Baron Georg Thomas von Asch, a Russian doctor of German heritage who collected a range of scientific specimens as an officer in Catherine the Great’s army. It belonged, Asch’s cover letter explained, to “a female Georgian” who was—in my slightly ungrammatical translation—“suddenly deceased of venereal disease.” This young woman, I discovered, was a captive of the Russian forces. She had been raped to death.

By 2015 I knew that the Caucasus and the Black Sea were the sites of a long-range slave trade so ancient that Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, could not find its origins. The Slavic people in the hinterlands of the Black Sea gave us the medieval Latin word sclava, the Old French esclave, and the English slave. Blumenbach’s unfortunate young Georgian woman had fallen victim to an ancient practice far from Africa, a practice that originated millennia before the invention of human racial classification.

This Black Sea slave trade from the Caucasus, southern Russia, and Ukraine sent its victims to the wealthy societies of the eastern Mediterranean, to Greece, Turkey, and Italy (where Venice was a slave trading center). In the early Middle Ages, Vikings—the founders of Kievan Rus’, now Ukraine—bought and sold people throughout a region stretching from Ireland to Russia, its Black Sea market centered in Crimea. These vast networks of human trafficking lasted for many centuries, completely winding down only around 1900. The literary and visual culture of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism fetishized Caucasian women as beautiful and sexually available, as odalisques.

In the region of the rivers emptying into the Sea of Azov—the northern extension of the Black Sea—the Don River Cossacks regularly rounded up defenseless peasants to sell, a slave trade that became known as “harvesting the steppe.” Harvesting the steppe: this sounds like what we know of the African segments of the Atlantic slave trade that so troubled Maya Angelou. The plight of Blumenbach’s young Georgian woman parallels that of African peasants captured and delivered to European merchants on the Atlantic coast, to places like Cape Coast Castle. In exchange for human merchandise, sellers received the luxury goods that warlords and aristocrats the world over have flaunted for millennia.

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The distinguished American painter Kerry James Marshall has been thinking along the same lines. His recent retrospective at the Royal Academy in London, “The Histories,” includes several works on the subject of the Atlantic slave trade. In large-scale paintings like Abduction of Olaudah and his sister (2023), Six for one (2024), and Haul (2025), Marshall depicts the subject without the personal, racial anxiety of Maya Angelou. Instead, his African sellers of human merchandise reside easily in the world of warlords and aristocrats willing to trade people for the luxuries the business bestows. His rendering presents, in his words, “a more realistic view of what we are willing to do to each other in order to get some stuff.”^*

I also found my elsewheres in art schools—Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2012 I painted a series of larger, imagined maps, entitled Black Sea Composite Maps, as part of my ongoing Odalisque Atlas project. These foreground the Black Sea of Blumenbach’s tragic young Georgian.

Within and around this Black Sea of mine lie the lands where women were enslaved and abused. The middle of this Black Sea is occupied not just by Crimea but by Jamaica and Puerto Rico. On the top, from left to right, are Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and Thailand. On the right the Gulf of Mexico borders Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Dominican Republic. Turkey and Bulgaria lie next to West Africa, flipped horizontally, so that the Congo River and Bight of Benin empty into this Black Sea.

For my series of lino prints called Swampy Land by the River Don, I hand-colored my maps of the region above the Sea of Azov.

Does my interest in slave trades beyond that of the Atlantic Ocean, which is so foundational to Black American identity, dilute or even refute my own racial identity? This question has come up. In 2010 I appeared on The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert jokingly asked whether writing a book on White people meant that I myself was White. No. In answer I made Self-Portrait Triptych, constructed digitally around a drawn and collaged self-portrait in half-profile.

The panel on the left in black and white is dark: Self-Portrait Black. The central panel, also in black and white, is light: Self-Portrait White. The original drawing, in color on the right, is Self-Portrait Normal, the only one unbound by the racial binary of Black or White. In its colorfulness and its combination of painterly touch and collage, Self-Portrait Normal speaks to you from a complexity that contains both Self-Portrait Black and Self-Portrait White. It speaks—I speak—as a person.