In 1925 Countee Cullen posed the question “What Is Africa to Me?” in a poem entitled “Heritage.” His question unveils Africa’s persistent presence in the African-American imagination, which is tightly embedded in the overwhelming reality of the Middle Passage. Whether as an idyllic homeland, a future seat for a great black empire, a site of evangelization, a field of opportunities, or a “Dark Continent,” Africa is there in the imagination of African-Americans. Could we affirm that Afro-America is also engraved in the African imagination? In other words, how is the Middle Passage apprehended, experienced and assessed from an African perspective?
In “Little Senegal,” film director Rachid Bouchareb offers the story of a Middle Passage, circumscribed by the journey of Alloune Yiré, a Senegalese who is determined to fill in the gap of his family tree by recovering the lost traces of an ancient relative who was taken as slave. Thus, Alloune embarks on a quest which will take him to “Little Senegal,” a neighbourhood in Harlem, where he does find his lost cousin, an African-American woman by the name of Ida, but he also encounters this “Little Senegal,” this African presence in the heart of the black American neighbourhood. How are the complexities of the relationship between Africa and Afro-America envisioned when the Middle Passage is enacted by an African within an African perspective? Any hopes for the Pan-African ideal to be realized, or, as Hassan painfully puts it, “we,” Africans, “are too black for them,” meaning African-Americans?