The phrase “you did not know” (Lines 2, 4, 5) appears three times in the first stanza, emphasizing the importance of self-knowledge for people of the African Diaspora. The overall movement in the poem is from what the addressee does not know to what the addressee can and should do now that they have crucial knowledge about their identity.

The first stanza represents the in-between space enslaved people occupied as they made the journey across the Atlantic and to the Americas. The presumption in that first stanza is that before the transatlantic slave trade, those ancestors had no need to think of themselves as a continent and people apart from the rest of the world. The transatlantic slave trade changed their notion of who they were and their place in the world. Enslaved people taken from the African continent now conceived of their world as a place to which they wanted to return, especially as “they did not know” (Line 2) what was on the other end of their destination. Self-knowledge in that moment was only about looking back.

In the second stanza, the speaker describes the addressee’s understanding of who they were as in process. That identity unfolds “over the road” (Lines 10, 13), a phrase Brooks repeats twice to emphasize the unsettled nature of life once enslaved people entered routes in the African Diaspora.