There are places that leave a mark. Places that tell stories many would rather not see. Two weeks ago, I visited Gorée Island, in Senegal. As I walked through the House of Slaves and passed by the so-called Door of No Return, I was confronted with a history that does not belong only in books, a history I have always, in some way, felt. There, the transatlantic enslavement of African people ceases to be an abstraction. It becomes absence, crossing, violence, memory. The recent