Sister Goose’s sisters: African-Caribbean women’s nineteenth-century testimony

Abstract

Anim-Addo’s article, extracted from a chapter of her thesis concerned with the ‘silence’ or pre-twentieth century absence of literary publication by African-Caribbean women, focuses on critical, fragmented testimonies of slave women’s lives documented in the 1820s. In treating this material as crucial ‘speech acts’ giving textual voice to nineteenth-century African-Caribbean women, she attempts to ground within specific realities of African-Caribbean women’s lives the creolized ‘counter-hegemonic’ discourse that emerges in writing of a later period. The question she addresses concerns the ‘bodily roots of subjectivity’ for African-Caribbean women, and its relation to meanings that impact on literary cultural production. Anim-Addo is interested in exploring the giving of voice as the marking of ‘ontological desire’, and investigating the role played by maternity in the testimonies. She argues that the testimonies of enslaved women on English plantations in Berbice and Demerara are a key source of meaning prefiguring anglophone African-Caribbean women’s literature. Significant to this is the nature of the ‘gift of speech’ that the testimonies allowed and that implicated voice and body in particularly reductive ways. The ‘Sister Goose’ narrative signifies the complexity of the women’s situation while offering an analogy between past and present conditions of reception of the testimonies and the later literature. If the word–body connections of the testimonies are important, so too are the issues of survival they raise in life and literature. Anim-Addo argues that the nature of the testimonial discourse and its framing of the African-Caribbean woman’s voice are significant to an understanding of Caribbean literary history.

Keywords:

• African-Caribbean women
• black women
• literary silence
• nineteenth-century plantation women
• slave women
• women’s testimony