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Solitude
circa 1771 — 1802

 

Statue erected in memory of Solitude, Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.

Statue erected in memory of Solitude, Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.

A revolution of enslaved plantation laborers in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) begun in August 1791 forced France to legally abolish slavery in its colonies less than three years later. By 1802, however, Napoléon’s forces sought to resurrect the sugar-based economies of Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and other French holdings in the Caribbean by re-enslaving freedpeople who had been living as French citizens for eight years. Africans and their descendants fiercely resisted French forces—successfully in Saint-Domingue, unsuccessfully in Guadeloupe. Though little is known of her early life, Solitude is celebrated as a heroine in Guadeloupe for her role in that struggle for lasting freedom in 1802.

Solitude had joined the maroon settlement of La Goyave in the mid-1790s, and during an attack by French General Desfouneaux, she became the leader of a small group that escaped to the hills of Guadeloupe, eluding capture. On May 5, 1802, French ships arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre carrying troops ready to enforce Napoléon’s decree to reinstate slavery on the islands. Battles erupted as Africans and their descendants fought to preserve their freedom.

Solitude, now pregnant, mobilized her followers to join the forces of Louis Delgrès against the French military. They struggled until they were surrounded and outnumbered by the French troops at Danglemont Plantation. Delgrès and approximately five hundred troops allowed the French soldiers to advance into their territory before igniting stores of gunpowder. The strategic suicide plan resulted in the death of approximately four hundred French soldiers. Though most of the maroons died, Solitude survived and was captured and detained in Basse-Terre prison.

The French military brought Solitude and the other survivors before a military tribunal, which sentenced them all to death. Solitude was temporarily pardoned until she gave birth to her child, who became the legal property of her owner. One day after delivering her baby, on November 28, 1802, Solitude was executed. She was thirty years old.

After her death, Solitude disappeared from the annuals of history until the 1960s, though by that time her contemporaries, such as Delgrès, were recognized. Today, Solitude’s name adorns squares, avenues, a library, and a museum room in Guadeloupe. Solitude’s bravery and courage is remembered in songs, poems, and the musical Solitude la Marronne.

 

>via: http://slaveryandremembrance.org/people/person/?id=PP015

 

 

MAY 25, 2017

MAY 25, 2017

 

 

Heroes of Toronto’s

Black liberation

movement

Six champions who defined
the last 50 years of
anti-racism activism in our city

 

>via: https://nowtoronto.com/news/black-heroes-of-toronto-anti-racism/?utm_content=buffer15411&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

22 May 2017

22 May 2017

 

 

 

 

An Afro-Colombian

Model on

“Social Bleaching”

Juliette Minolta, as photographed by Paloma Fuentes.

Juliette Minolta, as photographed by Paloma Fuentes.

The following is a testimony written by the Colombian model, Juliette Minolta, originally published by the site Afroféminas, based on her reflections on the Afro-descendant experiences and racism in Colombia and in other parts of Latin America. More than 10% of Colombian citizens are Afro-descendant, and they make up more than 90% of the population in regions like the Pacific/Chocó region. Today, they are one of the most empowered and dynamic Spanish-speaking Afrodescendent communities.

I was barely eight years old when I realized that I was different. When you’re young and enter into a school full of kids, that’s all you see—kids. I didn’t perceive any differences, until one day someone screamed “Black girl!” at me, and everyone laughed.

I didn’t get it at all, but that experience caused me to see a psychologist for the first time. Afterwards I understood that I was different. I didn’t like that.

Later, when I was in high school, I remember all my classmates having straight hair. I thought their hair was pretty. Meanwhile, teachers talked about black ancestors as slaves. I figured I had come from slaves, and nothing more.

I was never told about Garvey, Mandela or King. No one ever told me about la Negra Casilda—a former slave and leader in the 19th century—and her stories about helping her people reach the palenque, a secret location where black people who had escaped enslavement could hide. There were never discussions about Rosa Parks, or that everyone came from Africa.

I was taught about Columbus and Washington and had to write many papers about people that. Honestly, I no longer remember. No one talked about the histories of black women in my classroom.

And I continued on to high school, straightening my hair and trying to appear as white as possible to gain social acceptance.

I remember a teacher who, every time he’d call on me, would use “black mannerisms”. I would tell myself that it was nothing, that it was only a joke, and that I should move on. And so I started trying to erase my way of speaking, my own black words.

I’m from Bogotá, Colombia, a city of white people. Back then, there weren’t as many black people as there are today. I started using chemicals to straighten my hair and I abandoned my traditions. One day I even bought bleaching cream.

It didn’t work.

I was desperate—I had to whiten my skin. I hated that I was always the darkest one in the family.

My views hadn’t changed upon entering the university. Whenever people called me “black girl” I’d say I didn’t like it.

I grew up in a socially white environment, where being black is a bad thing, having kinky hair isn’t considered pretty and where people think that being black means having a big butt and tits.

And well, you now know I have neither.

We didn’t come from slaves, we came from human beings.

One day I was listening to music and the Barrington Levy song “Mandela Free” came on. That song encouraged me to investigate my ancestry. I realized that society had forced me to bleach myself. Taking “black girl” as an insult is something that so many Afro-descendant women deal with daily. Changing one’s hair color just to be socially accepted is bad.

I wonder how many children “whiten” themselves socially without even realizing it. They are discriminated against, and ignorant of their ancestors and of the people who fought so history wouldn’t repeat itself. What repercussions might those children have to deal with if we don’t condemn this?

We don’t come from slaves, we come from human beings who were enslaved. That’s a fact school doesn’t teach. For instance, a Chilean friend told me that he was never told about slavery or historic black leaders. How is that if Chile, where I’m living now, has always had black Chileans?

Why does education have to be so “white”, and why does the need to eliminate the image of blackness exist?

 

>via: https://globalvoices.org/2017/05/22/an-afro-colombian-model-on-social-bleaching/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 22, 2017

May 22, 2017

 

 

 

 

Black Marriage

Unshackled:

An Interview

with Historian

Tera W. Hunter

 

 

 

Image courtesy of Tera W. Hunter

Image courtesy of Tera W. Hunter

I recently spoke with historian Tera W. Hunter about her groundbreaking new book Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). Hunter is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Princeton University. Her first book, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997), received several awards. She co-edited with Sandra Gunning and Michele Mitchell, Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas (Blackwell Publishing, 2004) and with Joe W. Trotter and Earl Lewis, African American Urban Studies: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Hunter’s public work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington PostEbony, and NPR. Follow her on Twitter ‪@inllhrprhntr.

 

 

bound in wedlock
Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Uncovering the experiences of African American spouses in plantation records, legal and court documents, and pension files, Tera W. Hunter reveals the myriad ways couples adopted, adapted, revised, and rejected white Christian ideas of marriage. Setting their own standards for conjugal relationships, enslaved husbands and wives were creative and, of necessity, practical in starting and supporting families under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.

 

TCF: I love that you open Bound in Wedlock with your paternal great-great grandparents’ marriage certificate. So few historians center the personal even though our research is, in fact, deeply personal. How did you find this document and why did you decide to include it?

TWH: Most of the research of my paternal family lineage has been done by our family historian, my dad’s cousin Bruce Hunter, who is a retired engineer. He shared the marriage certificate with me many years ago, which I kept posted on my bulletin board for inspiration. He has been working on the family tree for decades, but his discoveries of the earlier ancestors before my great-great grandparents, Ellen and Moses Hunter, began to accelerate in more recent years, thanks to more records being digitized and available online, as well as DNA evidence.

As the tree began to fill in for the earlier generations, I was struck by the preponderance of interracial pairings before Ellen and Moses broke the trend as the first intraracial couple among my direct ancestors who were legally married. It started to dawn on me how much my own family history is evocative of the larger history I had been researching for my book. I have been awed by how these threads began to mesh. It only reinforces the value of the stories of so many other ordinary and little-known individuals in the book. My family history made my work more personal and tangible.

TCF: Your passion for the subject definitely shines through in the writing. You make a compelling argument about the relationship between race and marriage. Why do the two become so closely linked as slavery is codified?

TWH: There is a long legacy of racial discrimination that originated during slavery, which hardened as slavery was codified in the law. The rigidity began during in the colonial era as it became increasingly imperative to define slavery as a permanent, inheritable condition, to lock in a self-reproducing workforce. Laws were passed that restricted the intimate relationships of free blacks and defined slaves’ status based on their mothers’ status (partus sequitur ventrem) to ensure that slave owners maintained control over the reproduction of the enslaved. Marriage rights normally granted free couples control over women’s sexuality and labor and parental rights over children. But in order to perpetuate the status of slaves as laboring bodies and further the expansion of capital fueling the global market, those rights had to be denied to slaves. The property rights of enslavers were given the greatest priority. But race, and not just slavery, established the basis for denigrating intimate bonds. African Americans, regardless of status—Northern or Southern, free or slave—faced harsh reprisals from racist ideas and practices that impinged on their intimate relationships. This was because of the growing bifurcation of freedom being associated with whiteness and blackness with servitude, especially during the antebellum decades.

TCF: The Civil War is such a critical turning point in the book, and you chronicle this history in important new ways. 

TWH: Yes, the war provided the first context in which fugitive slaves could start to formalize their relationships and gain legal standing. Missionaries and Army officials began to marry slaves “under the flag”—under U.S. authority, to stabilize the growing fugitive population and to prepare them for citizenship. Hence, it was in the context of the war that African Americans were encouraged, and sometimes coerced, to create formal, monogamous, marriages with legal standing. African Americans always reinforced the importance of their families in their encounters with the outside agents. This became especially pronounced after black men were allowed to enlist in the Army. African Americans from the beginning of the war perceived the war to be, and treated it as, a war for their liberation. The federal government came to understand that in order to encourage more men to enlist, they had to offer them protection for their wives and children and the only way to do that was to free them, to give legal recognition to their marriages and all the privileges that accompanied those new rights.

TCF: Willie Anne Grey’s and Chery Williams’s moving stories explain so much about the complexities of black intimacy after the war. How did you find these two women in the archive? 

TWH: Both stories come from letters in the Freedmen’s Bureau records. These are remarkable documents, especially given that African Americans were just out of slavery and largely illiterate. Both women dictated letters addressed to husbands, which were then passed on through the networks of bureau agencies in hopes that they would ultimately reach the men. Many ex-slaves used this strategy to reunite their families postwar. Complex families were created out of the disruptions that enslaved people could not avert. And yet they went to great lengths to reconstitute their old ties, making themselves emotionally vulnerable in the hopes that their feelings would be reciprocated.

In Willie Anne Grey’s case, her marriage had been breached by the sale of her husband during slavery.  She eventually remarried and had additional children. Her second husband died. After the war ended, she searched for her first love. Chery Williams had a different story. Her husband was a Civil War soldier. Before he left for service they shared a tender parting and he promised that, God willing, he would return to her after the fighting stopped. He survived, but he did not come home. She heard rumors that he was living nearby, which left her devastated and puzzled. Williams wrote a love letter, pouring out her soul, pleading for his return. But she also expressed a not so veiled threat, informing him that she had new legal rights as his rightful wife, which gave her the power to command his return.

TCF: You work with an impressive range of primary sources, and you treat your subjects with such care. It’s what I admire most about your scholarship. How do you approach archival research, knowing that black folks’ lived experiences are often distorted or omitted altogether? 

TWH: Thank you! My first approach was to think expansively about all the various kinds of sources that dealt with family and marriage issues. There is quite a bit of published material, such as slave narratives and interviews. There are the Freedmen’s Bureau records, many of which have been selectively published in bound volumes by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. There are tons of other Civil War era material, such as the pension files of widows of soldiers. There are laws and legal treatises, newspapers, and memoirs. There are lots of manuscript documents like plantation and organizational records. I tried to visit as many archives with prominent collections of African American material as I could, mostly up and down the east coast. I made excursions to the Mid-West and to California, although with less success. As I worked on the book, the source base grew as more documents and collections were digitized and made available through online databases. This was a blessing and a curse. It increased the quantity of material I had to consider, use, or rule out. But it also put a lot of archival material at my fingertips. The open-ended approach to exploring a diversity of sources was important to me because I was genuinely interested in discovering who, what, and how the people of the past would speak to me. I wanted the records to be my guide for the stories to tell.

TCF: Bound in Wedlock is the product of exhaustive research and beautiful storytelling. I know it will be widely read. What contributions do you hope your work makes to broader conversations on black life, love, and freedom? 

TWH: I hope that my work contributes to deepening the knowledge of the history of slavery and its consequences for American society and for African-American lives. We cannot fully appreciate how the nation has come to be what it is without this knowledge of how slavery and freedom were intertwined. We cannot fully understand the harms done to African Americans without accounting for how they impacted marriages and family. And we cannot fully appreciate how African Americans survived centuries of duress without knowing the roles that family played in countering the devastation. We were always creative, resourceful, and practical in building meaningful relationships that were the balms in Gilead. And yet, despite the distinct disabilities that black families suffered under, there is a long legacy of stigmatizing the bonds they created, of using the failure to meet dominant norms as a barometer to judge black fitness for civilization and citizenship negatively. We need to understand those patterns and the legacies that are continually replicated with each iteration of the seemingly forward movement toward greater freedom and justice.

 

>via: http://www.thefeministwire.com/2017/05/black-intimacy-nineteenth-century-conversation-historian-tera-w-hunter/

 

vu short story contest

VU Short Story Prize for

New and Emerging Writers

Now open

2017 Judges: author Frank Moorhouse, UQP editor Ian See
and Overland’s Rachael McGuirk.

 

 

The prize

This annual competition encourages excellent and original short fiction by new writers of up to 3000 words in length. At a grand first prize of $6000, it is a coveted annual fiction award for new writers in Australia. There are also two runner-up prizes of $1000. All three winners will be published in the spring issue of Overland.

For the purposes of this competition, ‘new or emerging’ describes a writer who has published no more than one book with commercial distribution. (That is, writers who have no books, or who have published one book are eligible; writers with two books or more are ineligible. If you are the author of several chapbooks or books with small print runs, you can contact us to confirm eligibility: overland@vu.edu.au.)

victoria univ

Details

Competition closes 11.59 pm, Wednesday 31 May 2017. Please read the entry guidelines to confirm eligibility.

You may also be interested to read the 2016 judges’ report and the winning stories. Or the 2015 judges’ report and the winning stories.

The judges

During his writing career Frank Moorhouse has won major national prizes for the short story, the novel, and his essay writing, including a Walkley for ‘The Writer in a Time of Terror’. He is best known for his Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which have as their background the rise of international diplomacy and follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s. His book Australia under Surveillance examines the impact on freedom of expression and civil liberties arising from the changes to national security legislation in recent years.

Ian See is an editor at the University of Queensland Press. He has worked in trade publishing since 2009, having previously been an editor at Scribe Publications. He is a graduate of RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing program and a former intern at MeanjinOverland and Sleepers Publishing.

Rachael McGuirk is Overland’s publicity officer. She spent a year working in media in Papua New Guinea, and did the same at the 2013 and 2014 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. She is also a writer of fiction and nonfiction, and has read her work at a variety of literary events.

 

>via: https://overland.org.au/prizes/vu-short-story-prize-for-new-and-emerging-writers/

 

 

 

 

 

mothers logo

Writers’ Submission Guidelines

Mother’s Always Write is both a literary and ideas magazine for mothers (and fathers too). Published monthly online, our mission is twofold: 1) to offer parents beautiful and insightful reading that will elevate and deepen the parenting experience, and 2) to offer mother/father readers and writers a place to congregate during the sometimes isolating years (both early and late) of parenthood.

We offer essays and poetry that are intended to honor parenting as one of life’s greatest callings. We hope to rid the world of that– I wish I had understood that when my children were youngfeeling. We love writing that portrays motherhood as it is, not as someone says it should be.

Our pieces fall into three categories:  (1) Early Years:  mothering the younger years (from birth to age 12), (2) Middle Years:  mothering the middle school and teenage years, and (3) Adult Children:  mothers facing the empty nest.

Please send your submissions through Submittable. Please mark your submission by category in the subject line (i.e. Early Years). Please also tell us in your cover letter where you heard of us.

Personal Essays:  Submit entire essay (up to 2,000 words). Please cover topics of parenting children of any age (don’t forget adult children) consistent with our mission statement. We are not looking for “how to” articles but for essays about parenting issues written with literary merit and offering moving insight.

Micro Nonfiction: Submit entire essay (up to 300 words). Please cover a poignant topic or insight of parenting. Again, we are looking for literary merit and moving insight.

Poetry: Submit up to three poems about the parenting experience. We prefer non-rhyming, free verse poetry that uses unique imagery, that offers thoughtful insight into the parenting experience, and that tugs a bit at the heartstrings.

For our Blog:  Submit (unpublished) post about parenting (up to 1,000 words). Posts should be essays about a particular parenting experience or insight about parenting or about being a mother writer. Posts are published more than once per month. Share your wisdom.

Please note what we don’t want:  We consider parenting a calling with a built-in duty to raise children in a safe, moral and loving environment. To that end, we will not publish any piece that is violent or vulgar. We are not looking for “How-to” articles.

We pay only for essays that are published in our once per month big issue on the third Monday of the month. Essays published on any other time during the month are not paid. Please know that we are working towards the important goal of being able to pay all of our writers.

Thank you for sharing your writing with us. (Revised effective 3/10/17)

 

>via: https://mothersalwayswrite.submittable.com/submit?utm_content=54552236&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

 

 

 

 

 

bard

Bard Fiction Prize 

Deadline: 
June 15, 2017
Cash Prize: 
$30,000

E-mail address: 

A prize of $30,000 and a one-semester appointment as writer-in-residence at Bard College is given annually to a U.S. fiction writer under the age of 40. The recipient must give at least one public lecture and meet informally with students but is not expected to teach traditional courses. Submit three copies of a published book of fiction, a cover letter, and a curriculum vitae by June 15. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Bard College, Bard Fiction Prize, P.O. Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504. (845) 758-7087.


 

>via: https://www.pw.org/writing_contests/bard_fiction_prize

 

 

 

February 23rd, 2014

February 23rd, 2014

 

 

crime jazz

When we think of film noir, we tend to think of a mood best set by a look: shadow and light (mostly shadow), grim but visually rich weather, near-depopulated urban streets. You’ll see plenty of that pulled off at the height of the craft in the movies that make up “noirchaeologist” Eddie Muller’s list of 25 noir pictures that will endure, which we featured last week. But what will you hear? Though no one compositional style dominated the soundtracks of films noirs, you’ll certainly hear more than a few solid pieces of crime jazz. Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, writing about Rhino’s eponymous compilation album, defines this musical genre as “jazzy theme music from 1950s TV shows and movies in which very bad people do very bad things.” She links to PopCult’s collection of classic crime jazz soundtrack album covers, from The Third Man to Charade (the best Hitchcock film, of course, that Hitchcock never made), to The Man With the Golden Arm, all as evocative as the music itself.

“Previously, movie music meant sweeping orchestral themes or traditional Broadway-style musicals,” says PopCult. “But with the growing popularity of bebop and hard bop as the sound of urban cool, studios began latching onto the now beat as a way to make their movies seem gritty or ‘street.'” At Jazz.com, Alan Kurtz writes about the spread of crime jazz from straight-up film noir to all sorts of productions having to do with life outside the law: “In movies and TV, jazz accompanied the entire sordid range of police-blotter behavior, from gambling, prostitution and drug addiction to theft, assault, murder and capital punishment.” Get yourself in the spirit of all those midcentury degeneracies and more with the tracks featured here, all of which will take you straight to an earlier kind of mean street: the theme from The M Squad, “two minutes of mayhem by Count Basie and his mob of heavies”; Miles Davis’ “Au Bar du Petit Bac,” improvised by Davis and his Parisian band against Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows; and Ray Anthony’s “Peter Gunn Theme,” a “quickie cover” that “beat Henry Mancini’s original to the punch.”

And finally we have Duke Ellington’s score for Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger in 1959.

 

>via: http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/crime-jazz.html