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What of Collective or Group Karma?
“Racial Healing” follows your personal return to Benin as you confront the fractured self shaped by race, religion, memory, and diaspora in search of spiritual and psychological restoration. What made you realize that your healing had to be pursued not only psychologically or politically, but spiritually?
The more I studied dharma and Buddhist psychology and philosophy, I realized that true happiness and peace are unattainable when we attached ourselves to the past; when we romanticize victims of every ‘holocaust’ if only to eternally damn the perpetrators. This is the surest way to imprison our mind and embed ourselves in resentment, distrust and even hate. We never look in the mirror, we never ask the toughest of questions. And if we do, we omit underlying spiritual causes of phenomena. Karma we say is incontrovertible. That’s individual karma, sure, but what of collective or group karma? Benin was a slave society with stark colonial pursuits long before the European set foot there. I saw many unsettling things and learned so much through the many interviews I conducted. The Beninise people are also traumatized, not only by the Slave Trade but by their pre-colonial history. There’s much behind every genocide. After my third visit I did a lot of soul searching. Healing was slow, a process that was only complete with contemplative studies in Nepal and the integration of Buddhism and Vedanta into my work.
How did standing in places like Ouidah and the Door of No Return change your understanding of ancestry and inherited trauma?
We have a saying in Trinidad that our navel string (umbilical cord) is buried there, meaning that whatever part of the world you are, there is an indissoluble, palpable connection to your birthplace. Well, the Benin experience goes deeper; it was more atavistic, more weighty; it stirred the subconscious. The Door of No Return is transcendental, otherworldly. I stood there with the seemingly infinite expanse of the sea before me. It triggered so many thoughts, much of them ineffable. But surely, there were feelings of empathy, sorrow, and disbelief of man’s utter, naked cruelty.
In writing about Vodun initiation, how did you balance personal revelation with respect for sacred practices and traditions?
Every initiatory experience is unique. The outcome is determined by the purity of one’s intention. The pursuit of knowledge, for its sake, guards against difficulties; and indeed, there have been many. A discussion on such unfortunate outcomes is best served on another platform.
The Vodun tradition, not unlike other indigenous practices is enriching. There’s much to glean from its emphasis on cosmology and nature. It requires deliberation, discernment on the part of the initiate. Short of this, there’s the risk of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. The onus is also on babalawos (priests) and Iyalorishas (priestesses) to respect the craft and demand the highest ethical standards of aspirants and initiates.
What do you hope readers who carry their own fractured histories will recognize in your journey?
Tough questions must be asked. Spiritual insight reveals that perpetrators and victims share a karmic connection. An impartial and in-depth study of genocides throughout history raises many provocative questions. We accept individual karma; that there are consequences for our every decision and action. But why don’t we dismiss collective karma? Admittedly, this line of study can be controversial, but it is needed. Resentment, hatred and vendetta imprison and poison the mind and soul. Reconciliation through knowledge is the key to happiness. Attachment in every form is the source of all sorrows. Inner peace is not attainable through political agitation; neither is it possible through social justice movements. Inner peace frees us from every form of mental and physical enslavement, and is only realizable through the conscientious study and practice of dharma.
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Through candid reflection and spiritual exploration, Ashby introduces transformative ideas such as the “fractured self,” the “false self,” and “Womb Therapy” to address the generational trauma carried by Africans and the Diaspora. This book is both memoir and manifesto—a courageous call for reconciliation between Africa and her scattered descendants, and a roadmap toward inner freedom. Racial Healing invites readers to move beyond anger and guilt, toward responsibility, restoration, and lasting peace.
Racial Healing: One Man’s Journey to Benin Republic, Africa
Racial Healing: One Man’s Journey to Benin Republic, Africa is part memoir, part cultural meditation, part spiritual argument, and it moves through all three modes with real urgency. Glenville C. Ashby begins with personal fracture, tracing the racial, religious, and psychological tensions that shaped him in Trinidad and later in the United States, then follows that inner unrest back to Benin, where ancestry, history, ritual, and grief converge. The book returns again and again to vivid sites and scenes, the slave route in Ouidah, the Door of No Return, the Temple of Pythons, the author’s initiations into Vodun, and his attempt to make sense of identity not just as biography but as inheritance. Along the way, Ashby builds a larger framework around trauma, diaspora, religion, colorism, memory, and what he calls healing, with concepts like the “fractured self,” Womb Therapy, and the 4 R-Model carrying much of the book’s intellectual weight.
Ashby writes like someone trying to survive his own questions. I felt that especially in the passages where he stands at Ouidah imagining the clanking of chains, then shifts almost instinctively into prayer for his parents and ancestors, and later in the sections where a DNA result becomes less a novelty than a wound reopening with purpose. That movement, from history to body, from abstraction to ache, gives the book its pulse. I also admired the fact that he doesn’t present healing as neat or enlightened. It’s messy, charged, sometimes unsettling, sometimes defiant. Even when I wasn’t fully persuaded by every conclusion, I never doubted the sincerity of the search, and that matters. It gives the book its gravity.
At its best, Ashby has a grave, almost incantatory cadence, and some images are genuinely haunting. His descriptions of Ouidah, his reflections on colorism in Trinidad, and the tension between Catholic inheritance and African spiritual reclamation have real force. The prose can become declarative. Still, I found the ideas interesting because they are clearly lived ideas, not borrowed postures. Ashby’s central insistence that historical trauma must be addressed psychologically and spiritually rather than only politically is provocative and often compelling. I appreciated that the book is willing to trouble easy moral scripts, particularly in its treatment of reparations, forgiveness, African complicity, and the silence surrounding shame. It wants something harder than outrage. It wants transformation, and that gives it a distinctive moral temperature.
Racial Healing is earnest, often moving, and never emotionally vacant. It isn’t a tidy academic study, and it isn’t a conventional travel memoir either. It’s a searching book written by someone trying to stitch together a self under the pressure of history. I came away respecting it most for its vulnerability and for the seriousness with which it treats the psychic afterlife of slavery, colonialism, and estrangement. I’d recommend it to readers interested in diaspora, Black identity, spirituality, postcolonial psychology, and memoirs that are willing to be intellectually ambitious without losing the heat of lived experience. For the right reader, this book could feel less like an argument and more like a reckoning.
Pages: 250 | ASIN: B0GSGP7CYH
