A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance

By Stella Dadzie

Book Overview

The story of the enslaved West Indian women in the struggle for freedom

Aside from the autobiography of Mary Prince, enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the many small clues they left behind, there's no question they earned their place in history. From Jamaica to Barbados, Haiti to Trinidad, the evidence is compelling. Pick any Caribbean island and you'll find race, skin colour and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. Indeed, the evidence points to a female role in the development of a culture of slave resistance that was not only central, but downright dynamic.

Enslaved women found ways of fighting back that beggar belief. Whether responding to their horrendous material conditions or the 'peculiar burdens of their sex', their collective sanity relied on a highly subversive adaptation of the values and cultures they smuggled with them naked from different parts of Africa. In time, their conscious acts of rebellion and subtle acts of insubordination came to undermine the very fabric of slavery in the West Indies. Moreover, by sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices - be it music, story-telling, preparing food, administering medicines, fixing hair, birthing and naming rites or rituals for burying the dead - they ensured that the lives of chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose.

A Kick in the Belly sets the record straight: Quashee and Caliban's anonymous sisters made a distinctly female contribution to the advancement of the slaves' struggle for freedom - a contribution that deserves to be remembered and honoured.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1788738845
• ISBN13: 9781788738842
• Release Date: October 2020
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.7"