The Back That Speaks: BLACK, from the Imposed Shadow to the Chosen Light

Peter (1863) also known as Gordon, "Whipped Peter", or "Poor Peter"

There are things the world takes four hundred years to say, and then says them on a Tuesday afternoon.

On March 25, 2026, in a hall in New York decorated with the flags of one hundred and ninety-three countries, each one with its own history of what it prefers not to remember, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans the gravest crime against humanity. Applause. Some delegates rose to their feet. Outside, on First Avenue, a delivery truck handed out bottled water.

One hundred and twenty-three countries voted yes. Three voted no. Fifty-two, among them all members of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan, chose abstention, that diplomatic gesture which precisely translates the moral position of those who believe that acknowledging a historical crime is, at bottom, a question of timing.

The resolution, it should be noted, is not legally binding. Nobody will pay anything. Nobody will return anything. No London museum will receive a certified letter demanding that it start packing. It is, in the language of international bodies, a declaration of principles, which is the polite way of saying that the world agrees something was very wrong, provided that agreement carries no concrete consequences for anyone in particular.

And yet. Words do things. Even words without teeth.

There is a photograph from 1863 worth looking at before continuing.

A man from behind, seated in a chair, with that ambiguous posture of someone posing for history even though nobody asked if he wanted to. It circulated across the United States during the Civil War. It was reproduced in newspapers, in abolitionist pamphlets, in the hands of those who needed an image that could say what words could not. It was, in the language of its time, viral.

They called him Peter. Also Gordon. Also, with that condescending tenderness Victorian English reserved for victims it found useful, Poor Peter.

But Peter was not his name.

Peter was the name given to him by his enslavers on the plantation of John & Bridget Lyons in Louisiana, a working name, a record name, an inventory name. His true name, the one his mother gave him, the one that corresponded to his lineage, his people, the language in which he learned to name the world before the world decided to rename him, that name did not survive. The system took care of that too, with the same efficiency with which it took care of everything else.

We know he escaped in 1863. We know he walked for ten days to reach a Union camp. We know he was photographed three times that same day: from the front, in profile, from behind. We know the images traveled the world. What we do not know, what we will never know, is from which region of Africa his ancestors came, what language they spoke, to which people they belonged, what name they carried before being converted into Atlantic cargo.

It is a loss that has no juridical dimension. No UN resolution can legislate over it.

What crosses the back of Peter, his working name, his archival name, could be mistaken, at first glance, for scarification. And that confusion is not trivial, because scarification in the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa from which his ancestors were taken is a profoundly sacred act: the skin as text, as genealogical memory, as a declaration of belonging in the world. To mark oneself is to say I come from here with a permanence that no document can guarantee and no master can confiscate.

But those marks were not chosen.

They are keloids. They are the result of a whip applied with sufficient force and sufficient frequency for scar tissue to accumulate, to rise, to branch like rivers on a map. They are the signature of Thomas Turner, the overseer who inflicted them. Colonialism, in its sinister efficiency, did not merely enslave bodies: it desecrated the languages in which those bodies named themselves. It took the very territory, the skin, where a culture inscribed its dignity, and converted it into the medium of its humiliation. This was not accidental. It was a violence with criteria. A violence that knew exactly what it was desecrating.

Peter knew this too. That is why his back is straight.

The countries that abstained on March 25 issued statements explaining their legal reservations. The European Union noted that the use of the superlative 'gravest' introduces a hierarchy among crimes against humanity that has no basis in current international law. It is a technically interesting argument. It is also the kind of argument that can only be formulated comfortably from a certain geographical and temporal distance from the events in question.

The United States declared that it does not recognize a legal right to reparations for acts that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred. Which is true, in the sense that it is also true that the norms were written, for centuries, by exactly the same parties who benefited from what those norms did not prohibit. The logic is impeccable. The subtext, eloquent.

Meanwhile, somewhere in what is today Nigeria, or Ghana, or Senegal, or the Congo, nobody knows exactly where, because nobody bothered to record it, a lineage lost one of its own more than two hundred years ago and never knew where he went.

In Quibdó, a city on the Colombian Pacific coast with almost no commercial cinemas, in the department with the highest proportion of Afro-descendant population in the country, a film festival has spent eight editions asking what it means to look. Not as metaphor. As an operational, political, urgent question. Who produces the images? Who has access to them? And who decides, ultimately, which stories deserve to become light on a screen?

BLACK, the theme guiding this eighth edition of the Quibdó Africa Film Festival, is not a color palette or a declaration of melancholy. It is an epistemological stance: from the imposed shadow to the chosen light. Because there was a darkness that was assigned, hat of erasure, stereotype, the gaze that reduced a continent and its diaspora to an object of pity or exoticism, and there is a light that is chosen, that does not wait for resolutions, that does not need one hundred and twenty-three countries to raise their hands to know it has the right to exist.

Peter or whatever his name actually was, was photographed three times in a single day in 1863. His images traveled farther than he ever could. His back became argument, symbol, evidence. His body was used for a cause that was just, but that also never asked his real name.

Today, more than one hundred and sixty years later, we still do not know what he was called.

That is the wound that no resolution, however historic, has yet found a way to name.

Quibdó Africa Film Festival, 8th Edition

September 14–18, 2026 · Quibdó and Bogotá