A Kick in the Belly

Women, Slavery & Resistance

De: Stella Abasa Dadzie

Narrado por: Bahni Turpin

Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the umpteen small clues they left for us to unravel, there's no question that they earned their place in history. Pick any Caribbean island and you'll find race, skin color, and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. In A Kick in the Belly, Stella Dadzie follows the evidence and finds women played a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of slave resistance - a role that was not just central, but downright dynamic.

From the coffle line to the Great House, enslaved women found ways of fighting back that beggar belief. Whether responding to the horrendous conditions of plantation life, the sadistic vagaries of their captors 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. By sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices, they ensured that the lives of chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose. A Kick in the Belly makes clear that their subtle acts of insubordination and their conscious acts of rebellion came to undermine the very fabric and survival of West Indian slavery.

©2020 Stella Abasa Dadzie (P)2020 Tantor

Shocking Truths & Heavy Heart

This is a forever on my bookshelf type of book. If you need to reference the endless atrocities women endured during slavery to educate others this is top of the list as it simultaneously shows their incredible strength, perseverance and wit. I seriously feel this needs to be required reading middle school/high school/college.

Highly recommend

Academic, but quite accessible, lucid, enlightening. A must read that dismantles Eurocentric view of slave trade and abolition. Focuses on enslaved women and their resistance, from Africa to Caribbean.

A kick in the belly

I enjoyed this book so much that I listen to it twice. It gave me a new perspective on slavery in the islands and what the women went through and children and men, but more so the women and how they took up the fight against slavery. It’s a wonderful book, as far as for historical understanding, not for what people of color had to live through.