These heavy stones the ocean has tossed onto the shore,
tossed here onto this island from where
handsome young men and women, their eyes fixed in a farewell gaze
on their own native Africa,
were once sent in galleys as living black slaves to foreign continents.
The ocean became both their home and their merciless fate,
as faintly in the distance an unknown land began to appear,
a land that promised them days blacker than their skin.
The unknown land would remain to them foreign and unknown,
while longing for their native wilds calcified their souls,
which tore themselves from their bodies. The dried-up bodies
lay on the foreign land like empty fish skeletons,
while the calcified souls, sharp and needle-like, rolled down to the ocean.
The merciless ocean was waiting for them like a most anxious parent;
it embraced them in its wave-arms and carried them back,
back to Gorée, from where, as handsome young men and women,
they had once been sent in galleys
to unknown and distant foreign continents,
and now they are stones tossed onto the shore,
with eyes fixed eternally on their Africa;
now they are a House of Slaves
in silent and intimate contact with their descendants,
to converse with them for a time and then rest.