middle passage

Or Middle Passage

noun

History/Historical.

1. the part of the Atlantic Ocean between the west coast of Africa and the West Indies: the longest part of the journey formerly made by slave ships.

middle passage

noun

1. history the journey across the Atlantic Ocean from the W coast of Africa to the Caribbean: the longest part of the journey of the slave ships sailing to the Caribbean or the Americas

Word History and Origins

Origin of middle passage¹

First recorded in 1780–90

Example Sentences

Over the course of several hundred years the desert equivalent of the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic trade witnessed an exodus both vast and lethal—some 1,600 slaves in a single caravan, we are told, died of thirst in 1849 somewhere between Lake Chad and Murzuq.

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To summon the strength to endure these diabolical conditions, I invoked images of my ancestors chained together in the leaky hulls of vermin-infested slave ships, saying to myself that if they could survive the transatlantic Middle Passage, then I could survive New York state’s carceral middle passage.

Read more on Slate

Nearly 10 years removed from its 2016 opening, she said she still feels the overwhelming sense of "appreciation" for her ancestors' strength and resilience when walking through the museum's "Door of No Return," meant to evoke the final stopping point on the West African coast before enslaved Africans began their forced journey across the Atlantic during the Middle Passage.

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The sparkly element symbolizes a space of both historical trauma — recalling the death and drowning of so many enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage in the Atlantic — and healing.

Read more on New York Times

Roy focuses in particular on how these Black writers responded to the experience of the Middle Passage — the traumatic journey from Africa to America made by newly enslaved people — which he describes as “cheating social death,” and on how they used “the established part of an existing system to create a new one that serves a fundamentally different form or function.”

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