Every month is black history month when it comes to exploring new literature and poetry, however seeing as October is the official UK Black History Month I wanted to seriously honour the occasion and get factual. Black imagination and research across the diaspora — from the UK, the Caribbean archipelago, the African continent and across to the East — offers incendiary and beautiful visions of who we can be, the possibilities of what we can create. So many details of our story as human beings on this planet — details which could fill chapters and songs and canvasses — have been willfully suppressed, leaving us all half-formed in the worst of ways if we do not begin to question and fill in the blanks. The world has A LOT of work to do before the ongoing imbalance of chronicling voices is rectified, and we can properly respect the whole scope and depth of our collective potential.
However, Stella Dadzie’s A Kick in The Belly soberly takes on the mission of remedying our understanding of history and voicing the (almost) forgotten. One of the biggest annoyances in my life is the ever-present fidget that I was not taught what I needed to know: throughout my time at school, I can recall only once ever having a lesson which explicitly addressed Britain’s colonial past and our practise of slavery. We watched ‘Amazing Grace’. I don’t even think the lesson went on long enough for us to reach the end of the film. I was taught white women were the driving force behind most of Western Feminism’s accomplishments in the 20th/21st centuries, including the abolition of slavery; but never of their pernicious and ongoing exclusion of black and brown women from political activism. Dadzie’s thoroughly researched and painstakingly organized historical account of black women’s involvement in inciting anti-slavery and anti-colonial rebellions is invaluable and so, so, SO necessary.
A Kick in The Belly uses factual information and written historical accounts to orchestrate a new perspective, challenging the inherited identity of black women pressed onto them by white man’s history. Dadzie specifically focuses on the experiences of women who were enslaved or had a close proximity to the Plantation, and explodes mainstream constructions of enslaved women in the past: mere drudges, passive and pitiful victims, always brutalized by other enslaved men or their vicious owners and overseers; the fetishization of black femininity as licentiously rapacious and treasonous. Black woman as blamed, the punching bag, the excuse and the reason.
Stella Dadzie presents an invigorated and insightful take on the contributions black women have made to revolution and resistance. The book is organized into thematic sections, and I found it to be a very, very educational read regarding history. Dadzie offers alternative views of well-known events (like how abolition in the UK came to pass, for example) and introduces you to lesser known aspects of history like the mutinies which occurred on ships and plantations. All the while painting accounts of numerous, seriously courageous and clever women which would otherwise have gone un-honoured.
It would be highly insensitive to say I ‘enjoyed’ this book in the usual sense of the word. It’s a difficult read, emotionally and intellectually. After a life time of encouraged ignorance (other than the education I have worked to give myself), reading page after page of horrendous torture conducted by the British government and our collective ancestors made me reach for a box of tissues more than once. But this work is necessary. And just the beginning. Tears do not last, but death does; and Dadzie undoes the final death of forgetting with her tribute to black women revolutionaries. She offers us the opportunity to learn from the past and no longer ignore the glaring sin of our society: what we do to each other for money.
A Kick in The Belly is provocative in two directions. Yes, Dadzie conjures irrefutable realization of grief and the aftershocks of state sanctioned violence. But the book also offers tremendous hope and motivation. Things are not as they seem. Enslaved women were at the core of resistance fighting and healing, singing and spying, loving and remembering. From the unnamed girl who deliberately refused to open the shutters the way she was told, to Queen Ana Nzinga of Angola who persisted to undermine Portugese forces when so many other leaders gave into the lure of trade. Resistance was manifold, invisible to the distant eye of whiteness pompously entombing lives in false words. Dadzie honours the humanity and grit of black women throughout history, and I believe this is truly essential reading for anyone who is looking for an anti-racist, decolonial education. For anyone who proclaims to be a feminist: you need to read this book! For anyone interested in history and humanity: get this book!