. . . violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which has led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women, and that violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men.
Feminist theory holds that it is impossible to sever gender from power and hegemonic masculinity; that gender is implicated in the conception and construction of power. In most places, men possess more economic, political, domestic, and overall decision-making power than women. Understanding, on a basic level, the fact that violence follows power in a social context is a building block to being able to adequately address it. Women have not traditionally had the same access to the resources associated with power. For example, inheritance law used to favour male heirs, thus denying women economic resources of power.
Within this discourse, masculinity is a social construct based on male/female power relations, also operating in the private sphere in the division of labour. But when economic and social factors are not aligned with these embraced roles, the result is conflict, at times leading to gender-based violence.
What fed this violence in the past and propelled it into our present? In general, gender-based violence has its roots firmly embedded in the history of colonialism, and more specifically the conquest of the indigenous peoples who inhabited some Caribbean countries; in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and African enslavement; in a slave society that was characterised by racism, ethnocentrism, classism and discrimination against women in both field and house; in Asian indentureship; in a post-slavery Victorian gender order played out in the exercise of male power and in patriarchal ideologies that continue to have contemporary meanings and manifestations.
Violence linked to power relations was gendered from as far back as the development of civilizations. Colonialism in the region did not begin the global practice, though it provides a useful starting point for its introduction in the Caribbean. Gender discrimination operated in indigenous societies. In the islands called the Greater Antilles, the Taino people believed that men should be the rulers; the power holders and the warriors. Europeans perfected this system, but added racism and ethnocentrism to it, exploiting indigenous women in gender-specific ways, including trafficking, and rape.
Under African enslavement, women’s bodies became the site of power contestation. Any esteem attached to being an enslaver derived from the power that he or she could exercise over the bodies of his/her enslaved chattel; and this was sanctioned by laws that allowed white men and women to exercise intimate power through punishment, torture and control. In drawing up and enforcing such laws the enslavers in the Caribbean, like those in the rest of the Americas, created their own version of slavery. They invented from scratch all the ideological and legal underpinnings of a totally new slave system.
This violence was manifested in the invasion and capture (of lands and peoples) in the Caribbean, the forced kidnapping and trafficking of Native Caribbean peoples and Africans, the chaining and shipment of Africans in inhumane conditions, the throwing of live African male and female captives overboard (as happened in the case of the 132 jettisoned from the British ship Zong during its voyage to Jamaica in 1781), the sale and branding of Africans on the plantations, the sexual harassment of women, rape and other forms of violence on the Middle Passage and later on the ships with indentured Indians, flogging and degrading punishment of field slaves and enslaved domestics and murder (including during and after armed conflicts).
Once in the Americas, women were enslaved in large numbers and subjected to various forms of exploitation and control, being categorised as property and forced to work without wages. Indeed, women served an essential ideological function: enslavers appropriated their reproductive lives by claiming their children as property to eventually perform unwaged labour; and used their blackness as justification for making them reproduce the status of enslavement, unlike white women who could only reproduce free status, even if black men fathered their children. On sugar plantations, women weeded, planted, harvested, worked in the factories (where many lost fingers while feeding cane into the mill), and generally contributed to the productive processes. They laboured in enslavers’ residences as domestics and nursed the sick in the hot houses. They worked in coffee, cotton and sugar industries and supplied food, especially to the urban areas. Men had a wider range of tasks and were dominant in the supervisory and plantation management fields. So in a sense they were co-opted into the patriarchy.
As field labourers (and as domestics and concubines) women’s bodies became the site of power contestation. Plantation labour placed great physical strain on them; and any infraction of the slave codes or the law of the black slave-driver was followed by severe beating and other forms of physical abuse of the enslaved female’s body. In fact, the history of slavery demonstrates that many confrontations between female slaves and managers arose from contradictions between “women’s roles as mothers and as workers—which were intensified by growing labour exploitation after the abolition of the slave trade.” (Lucille Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica 1655–1844, 2006, p. 59)
In addition to the arduous physical field régime and severe whipping, enslaved women were open to sexploitation. Neither colonial statutes nor slave codes invested enslaved women with any rights over their own bodies, but rather, transferred and consolidated such rights within the legal person of the enslavers, who thus claimed violent access to enslaved women’s bodies, and to the sale of enslaved women’s bodies on the sex market.
Much of the evidence of violence against women resides in the documents generated by men; but a few narratives generated by women, such as the enslaved woman Mary Prince, survive. Prince recounted the violent punishment inflicted on her fellow enslaved Hetty, who while pregnant, was tied to a tree and flogged till she was streaming with blood, with the consequence that “poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child”.
Acts of violence against the black woman were facilitated by the fact that the law until 1826 gave the enslaved female no protection from sexual attack. When women resisted, they suffered severe punishment. Violence against women continued in the post-slavery period, with the ruling classes’ attempts to recreate the actions and mentalities of slavery. Colonisation cemented British and African gender systems, which became even worse after emancipation, when jobs became gendered, along with wages, rewards and positions in the workplace. The male-as-breadwinner ideology was promoted by the elite and the church, accompanied by ideas about women’s place being in the house. Women have struggled against this domestication ideology for a long time and the struggle for gender equality in all spheres of life continues.
There are no sides to this debate, only the move to halt the protracted violence that sears the souls of all those involved. This, then, is our history. It is time to leave this violence in the past, learning from it, so that we do not repeat it.
To the women who batter men and boys, I say, their bodies do not belong to you. You do not have the right! To the men who batter women and girls I say, their bodies do not belong to you. You do not have the right!
It took an earthquake and migration to end it for Mary Prince: what will it take for you?
SuAndi
Originally a performance poet, her field of work has expanded into live art, writing narratives for exhibitions, one-act plays, and keynote speaking. Her writing is embedded in her cultural heritage—she was born in Manchester, her mother from Liverpool and her father from Nigeria. She has published collections of poetry including Style (1990), Nearly Forty (1994), There Will Be No Tears (1996), and I Love the Blackness of my People (2003), and her work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She has written two librettos, The Calling, and Mary Seacole, which toured Britain in 2000. Her acclaimed production The Story of “M�
� is offered in the A-level English Literature syllabus. She says, “I am constantly pushing against the barrier of racism in my writing, but it is cloaked in humour and the celebration of humanity in all its shapes, colour and laughter.” She received an OBE for her contributions to the Black Arts Sector and an honorary doctorate from Lancaster University. She is a Creative Writing Fellow at Leicester University and the freelance Cultural Director of the National Black Arts Alliance.
Intergenerational Trauma
My father first walked the earth in Warri
his feet sinking into the hot mud of Nigeria’s Delta State
then one day, as other men launched fishing boats
he sailed far away.
Why, I don’t know
he never told me
I never asked
Africa and Manchester offered no parallels
so, we never had that conversation.
My father never talked of the past
I never asked
What did you do in the war, dad?
What was your home like?
Do I look like your people?
Can you see your mother in my eyes?
The way I walk, argue, am
I a female version of you?
The same height as your father?
Words never spoken
only silent responses.
My father never said when
the white man came:
but I know he knew.
Summers, we would visit his old master
exchanging our terrace house
for a large white detached in Surrey
where my father cleaned—
a servitude repayment for our visit—
while I was forbidden to
touch, speak, play, do anything
without first asking permission.
Strange white people, I thought.
“Snobby bastards,” said my mother
when I returned home
“Where do they think this is?
It’s not bloody Africa.”
Her temper flaming her cheeks
to match the copper of her hair
“Andi,” she’d say
“Slavery is over;
Get over it.”
What did she mean?
I never asked, she
never explained.
Schools for my father were
glorious European opportunities.
He spared nothing to buy
my uniform, my shoes
a too large briefcase
copies of the same books that teachers
gave out daily in class.
Strange, that I had to leave the classroom
to begin my education, tutored
via overheard conversations
documentaries, radical articles
orators from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X
even though neither had a penchant for white people.
But no matter how I broadened my knowledge
I still loved my mother
nothing was going to change that.
Now my mouth was full
of words my brain had memorised:
colonialism, lynchings, detention
apartheid, segregation
civil rights, Black Power
and always
slavery.
What did my father know?
That the Yoruba were favoured for their strength
but whipped long to curb their independence
that Ibos stolen in their thousands
found an inner power to walk on water.
And the Ijaw from Warri
who speaks of them?
Not, certainly my father.
except sometimes
when the silence was so loud
my ears would ache
I would turn to him
and he, looking far into the distance
seemed oblivious to the tears
washing his cheeks
flowing under his chin
flooding his heart.
In that moment, my father
was no longer the man I knew
he was in that moment,
the man I didn’t know
filled with ancestral spirit.
My family came down from my grandfathers’
grandfathers, generations who never imagined
life beyond the Forçados River:
conquered, shackled, bartered
sold, imprisoned, abused
demonised, throttled, burnt,
flogged, criminalised, castrated
executed under the law.
The trauma of the new
the wicked, the evil
filled my father
so that he could not speak
and I never asked why
why
before he died
was he called Thomas?
Under my right eye
I have an indentation
in the exact same place
as my father’s peoples’ ritual scarring.
Some days when I look at it
it seems more prominent
like it really is a scar
but I can barely make it out
through my tears.
Aroma of Memory
There are ladies
of a certain age
hair coiffured silver-grey to wig-black
or the corn-rows of back-home childhood
that I hug.
I smile, lean in
wrapping my arms across shoulders
once held straight
letting my hands travel
the spine of years.
I breathe the heavy perfume
of clean living
and a scent unnamed
that lingers in the smartness
of their clothes.
In this moment
I am like a young buck
tempting this loveliness with
guile and flirtation
words that in their speaking
wash away the years
rekindling her bloom of youth.
They giggle at my innuendo
a little naughty, never rude
for I am not church
no Miss-name falls from my lips.
To me they are sweetness
“Sisters of Joy” to my vision.
On a dull English morning
they are “Praise to heaven”
for crossing my path
and the wickedness of accusation
that I have caught them slyly
heading to a discreet liaison.
I tut-tut-tut my way through
this tête-a-tête.
I have to avoid tasting them
my lips heavy with face powder
coconut lotion.
I leave
waving away the greyness
of the day.
Charlotte Williams
From Wales, she is currently Professor of Social Work and Associate Dean of the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. Her extensive writings on issues of migration, race and ethnicity in social welfare practice include the recent books Critical Multicultural Social Work: New Perspectives and Practices (2019), Social Work and the City: Urban Themes in 21st Century Social Work (2016), Social Work in a Diverse Society (2016), and A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales (2015). Her contributions to post-colonial studies include her 2002 memoir, Sugar and Slate, exploring her Welsh-Guyanese heritage and diasporic identity, which was named Welsh Book of the Year in 2003, the co-editing of Denis Williams: A Life in Works, New and Collected Essays (2010), regular contributions to Planet and Wasafiri, and publication in Tangled Roots: Stories of Mixed Race Britain (edited by Katie Massey). She received an OBE in the Queen’s 2007 New Year’s Honours for services to ethnic minorities and equal opportunities in Wales.
Small Cargo, from Sugar and Slate
I am six years old. “We’re going on a boat to Africa,” Ma has announced. I tell Ann Morgans and Diane and Mrs Jones fach1 who lives on the corner and they nod like when I said, “I’m going to Auntie Maggie’s on Saturday.” That’s the way it was. Nobody we knew from within our small community had travelled.
We sailed there by cargo ship the first time. A paint-peeled ocean-goer called the Prome; soft white letters printed on a charcoal background. It must have been to-ing and fro-ing this ancient marine route for years by the time it carried us outwards from Liverpool dock. Ma glanced over her shoulder but kept going. Wales was behind her now and she could only move forward as she had done many times before. In the sweep of her skirts we were voyaging to a different world. Dad had already been in Africa for one lonely year when he sent for us. Just Ma and four small girls made our family then; teulu bach.2 Just a small cargo on a big ship.
There is a curious intimacy about these cargo passages that one doesn’t experience on passenger liners. A few cabins on loan to a handful of purposeful passengers for three weeks or so. Over hundreds of years small cabin-loads of explorers, missionaries, those in the service of the Colonial Office and their families have been transported in this way, their stories and their histories becoming intertwined by these sea crossings. They are the people who opened up the connecting routes; the ones who crossed the maps drawn out by Church and Empire. From 1868 Elder Dempster had a fleet of steamers following the infamous route to and from the Dark Continent. In later years we would travel to and from the coast of West Africa aboard luxurious dazzling white passenger liners; the Apapa, the Accra, the Aureoll. But at first we went cargo to the Sudan. It is surprising how you first notice difference as a child. A missionary family travelled with us on the passage I am remembering now. They were heading out to work in old Omdurman. They were noisy, and unlike us they spoke proper English. The mother had a loud challenging voice like a teacher, her mouth opening long and wide with every word. The father wore long socks with sandals, the type worn by older men today. He had too many words in his mouth as I remember and overly explained everything to their three children who all looked and dressed exactly the same, in the way English children did. Then there were some very pale nuns, white as their starched collars and some stiff foreign office people with world-service accents going to Aden. One of their group was a younger man, a fresher on his first tour to what must by then have been the vestiges of the colonial administration; part of the mopping-up job I suspect as Nkrumah brushed out the pink paint on the map of Africa. “Creative abdication” the British called it. Only pieces of these memories come to me now, pieces that shaped me. The memories don’t fall out in nice neat lines as they seemed to do when there weren’t so many of them.
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