Interpreting from the Back/Black-Side: Exodus through the Shawl of Memory

The narrative of exodus is partially premised on a promissory—even utopian—land to which the exodus people are taken. Read in the context of a postcolony (Cameroon), the story is seen to originate in a lacuna: Pharaoh did not know Joseph. That discrepancy fuels political machinations of erasure and marginalization. In the mountain space, the epitome of governing power and shift from the oppressive regime, one of the liberated community’s leaders, Moses, is placed on the divine backside. The imagery resonates with the African mother—biological and/or cultural—carrying her baby on her back. For Africana Exodus hermeneutics, life in the colony and the postcolony is possible because the community is able to carry its weakened and fragile bodies. That is Backside or Blackside hermeneutics. Through ideological and epistemological gathering around the broken body, back/darkened-side hermeneutics constructs sovereignty by repositioning the endangered self before the arrival of oppression. Such temporal and spatial repositioning establishes sovereignty outside of and beyond the totalizing category of erasure and permanent dispersal.