We Have Been Here Before – Fiction by Ghanaian Writer, Adwoah Nyarkoa

It is a sharp, metallic bite that swallows the wrist whole, a mechanical teeth-sink that knows the exact diameter of a Black man’s spirit. When the officer’s handcuffs ratcheted shut, I didn’t feel the cold of twenty-first-century steel; I felt the rusted, salt-crusted ache of 1619. My skin recognised the iron before my mind did. It is a biological memory, a phantom limb that only screams when the state decides to touch it.

The cuffs are heavy. They do not merely restrain; they announce. They hum with an old authority, the confidence of something that has never truly been questioned. My pulse flutters beneath them, frantic, like a trapped bird learning too late that flight is a luxury, not a right.

“Watch your head,” the officer grunts.

His voice is a low rumble, the sound of a coffin lid being dragged across stone. There is no malice in it, just routine. That is what terrifies me most. Violence, when practised long enough, learns how to sound bored. I am shoved into the belly of the van. The metal floor kisses my knees, unforgiving and stained with stories no one bothers to scrub away. The door slams, a heavy, final thud that echoes back through four hundred years of timber and brine. The sound ricochets inside my chest, settling somewhere between my lungs and my heart.

As the vehicle pulls away, the swaying motion isn’t the smooth glide of asphalt; it is the nauseating heave of the Atlantic. My stomach lurches. The walls breathe inward. The air inside curdles, growing thick with the scent of unwashed grief, stale sweat, cheap disinfectant, and the unmistakable copper tang of old blood. It is the smell of containment, of bodies reduced to problems that must be transported elsewhere. Someone coughs. Someone mutters a prayer. Someone laughs too loudly, the kind of laughter that dares the universe to prove it wrong.

I look at the man sitting across from me in the dimness. His face is a map of shadows, sharp angles and soft fear, but his eyes are wide, white-rimmed, and leaking that ancient, liquid terror. They flick toward the door, then back to me, searching for reassurance I do not have to give. In this light or this deliberate absence of it, he isn’t a student protester picked up for “disturbing the peace.” He is a body waiting to become a ledger entry. He is cargo.

His wrists bear the same silver circles as mine. His hands tremble, not from guilt, but from recognition. Déjà vu. I have been in this dark before. I have tasted this salt on my lips when the waves broke against the hull. I have felt the way the floor, be it oak planks soaked in seawater or reinforced steel welded in a factory, vibrates with the indifference of those who steer the vessel. I know this darkness the way a scar knows the blade that made it.

Back then, there was no siren. Only the groan of wood under pressure, the groan of men discovering that the ocean does not care if you pray. There were no windows then either, just air holes, grudging and mean, rationing breath like mercy. Time dissolved into ache. Names dissolved into numbers. Futures dissolved into a single command: survive, if you can.

History is not a book we closed. It is a skin we haven’t finished shedding. The van speeds up. Tires hiss against the road like snakes startled awake. We pass under streetlights, and the rhythmic flickering across the cage bars creates a strobe effect. Flash. A whip rising against a bruised sky. Flash. A baton descending like a falling star. Flash. The silhouette of a lynching tree standing sentry, leaves whispering secrets to the dead. Flash. A burning cross, smiling. Flash. The neon blue glare of a police precinct.

The images do not ask permission. They arrive fully formed, inherited, preloaded into the marrow of my bones. Trauma, I have learned, does not need an invitation. It only needs a trigger. History isn’t a straight line. It is a circle drawn in charcoal on a wet floor. We keep walking until we reach the beginning, only to find our own footprints already there, deep and filled with stagnant water. The past doesn’t chase us; it waits patiently, knowing we will come back on our own.

The man across from me whispers his mother’s name. He presses his forehead to his knees, rocking slightly. I want to tell him that he is not alone, that this moment does not define him, that the world has more colours than just blue and red lights. But my mouth feels full of cotton and ghosts. Comfort feels like a lie I am too tired to tell. The van slows. A turn. Another. Each corner feels like a ritual, rehearsed and precise. When it stops, silence floods in so suddenly it rings.

Hands grab my arms. They are efficient hands, gloved and practised, hands that have learned how to move bodies without touching souls. I am dragged out, the cuffs biting deeper as my muscles tense. Gravel crunches beneath my shoes.

The sun hits my eyes, sharp and intrusive, but I don’t see the modern skyline or the cameras perched like mechanical insects. I see the auction block, high and lonely. I see the crowd gathered, wearing those same hungry smiles, the ones that don’t want to eat food, but want to consume the very dignity of your marrow. They appraise with their eyes, measuring worth in silence, deciding what parts of you are useful and which can be discarded.

I blink, and the auctioneer’s gavel becomes a judge’s hammer. The chant becomes a charge. The crowd becomes a jury already bored of pretending to listen. Inside, the building is cold in a way that pretends to be neutral. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, an electric hum that drills into my skull. The walls are painted a colour meant to calm, but it only reminds me of hospitals and holding cells, places where pain is processed rather than healed. They sit me at a desk.

“Name?” the desk sergeant asks.

He doesn’t look up. His pen hovers over a sheet of paper like a vulture over a carcass. The paper is clean, but it will not stay that way. It never does. It is hungry for ink, for justification, for proof that this moment has been made official. I open my mouth, but my tongue is a heavy weight, scarred by a thousand names I wasn’t allowed to keep. Names stolen, renamed, misspelt, shortened, laughed at, erased. Names turned into property. Names buried with men who never got to pass them on. I want to tell him that he already knows me.

He has written this name in every century, in every ledger, under every cold sky. He has written it on shipping manifests and plantation rolls, on arrest records and death certificates. He has whispered it into microphones and shouted it through megaphones. He has used it as a warning, a justification, a statistic.

“You’ve done this before,” I whisper.

My voice cracks like sun-dried bone under pressure. It surprises me how small it sounds; young. It is the voice of a child asking a parent why the punishment never ends. He doesn’t flinch. He just clicks his pen. The sound is exactly the same as the shackles. And somewhere deep in my body, older than language, something remembers how to endure.