What do I mean today by “everyday revolutionaries”? I am speaking to individuals whose actions have made positive changes; who have bucked against traditions and practices that support inequality. Actions that have not always made them popular but actions that were purposeful and change oriented. In essence, their activities, behaviours and practices have pushed against dominant discourses, paving the way for revolutions and new discourses.  

Our three stories demonstrate some important ways in which women have been everyday revolutionaries and I want to untangle some of these. 

Women as Cultural Curators

I cannot help but to start here – I am a historian by training and this training has influenced my work in cultural studies. Women, through their roles play an important role in connecting us to our past. The first story highlights the significance of cultural retentions in birthing practices and of course the militancy of women standing up to the vulnerable. Sasha Turner (2017, p. 118-119) writes that “Retaining control over childbirth…gave enslaved women access to informal power.” In their roles as midwives, women maintained traditions that connected the distance between Africa and the Caribbean. However, this would change as hospital births became more pronounced and undermined traditional birthing practices.  

Food Preparation

In other ways, women acted as everyday heroes. We all have to eat to survive. I do not know anyone who is able to live without food or water. I am part of a research group – Caribbean Foods for Climate Justice – that seeks to use traditional foods to restore the balance that has been toppled by climate change, climate disaster and neoliberal food policies that see the younger generation favouring fast food over traditional foods. I wrote and now teach a course called Food and Culture in the Caribbean. One of the themes we discuss is food and memory. Students are invited to talk about their experiences with food. For most, the memories involved celebrations with families and being taught to make Christmas cake by mothers, aunts and grandmothers. They remembered food cooked by the women of the family during holidays and family gatherings. They recalled the joy and the love that food brought them. Curry goat, oxtail and beans, roast chicken, escoveitched fish, rice and peas, gungo peas and rice, baked macaroni and cheese, sorrel, sweet potato pudding, and so forth. However, food was not only something that was consumed for celebrations, many remembered mothers, grandmothers or aunts cooking their favourite dishes when they were sick or sad. Food was a vehicle of love, but food connects us across continents and is also a story of triumph.  

On the plantations, the enslaved were relegated to eating foods that were not fit for the master’s table – the tail, head, feet and intestines of slaughtered animals for protein. Saltfish and flour were imported for their consumption – both often spoiled on arrival. This was supplemented by what the enslaved could glean from their provision grounds – marginal estate land not used to plant sugar. Plantains, ground provisions such as yam and eddoes, peas and beans were planted and supplemented the enslaved diet. Enslaved women took these humble provisions and made with them some of our favourite dishes today – roast yam and corn, ackee and saltfish, rice and peas, oxtail, cow skin or foot and beans, chicken foot soup, fried dumplings, and I could go on. They passed on this knowledge of herbs and spices through the generations to us. Food is an important signifier of self and cultural identity. Candice Goucher (2014, p. 159) therefore argues “food sustained the cultural identities of those enslaved and exploited. Food was an important theatre for social relations.” While the slave master meant to treat us as less than human by what they served to use, our ancestors took the planters refuse and made it palatable to human beings. They preserved their humanity against the atrocity of the plantation and the colonial system and food, that basic element, was one of the ways in which they did so.  

Heritage Preservation Through Food

Women not only played a significant role in cooking but in food preservation, production and distribution. In these roles they asserted the humanity of the individual of colour against colonial practices to the contrary. In the story of rice, for example, Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff (2009, p. 77) establish the centrality of women in rice dispersal in the Americas: 

In attributing rice beginnings to their ancestors, Maroon legends reveal the ways in which the enslaved gave meaning to the traumatic experiences of their own past while remembering the role of rice in helping them resist bondage and survive as fugitives from plantation societies. These oral histories offer a counternarrative to the way transoceanic seed transfers are discussed in Columbian Exchange accounts. They substitute the usual agents of global seed dispersal— European navigators, colonists, and men of science—with enslaved women whose deliberate efforts to sequester rice grains helped reestablish an African foodstaple in plantation societies. The stories link plant transfers to the transatlantic slave trade, African initiative, and the dietary preferences of the enslaved. Each narrative sharply contrasts with written accounts that credit European mariners with bringing rice seed from Asia and the initiative and ingenuity of slaveholders in “discovering” the suitability of rice as a plantation commodity in the New World.  

How did these women preserve their rice heritage that connected them to their African roots? In Suriname, as they escaped the brutal plantations, several black women hid rice grains in their hair. They planned to grow their rice for subsistence once they arrived at their destination. A number of rice species were saved in this way – some are resilient to droughts; others to water and so are now sought after for their climate resilient qualities.  

While men were largely responsible for the provision grounds further away from the plantation and their homes, women were the ones largely responsible for the kitchen gardens and animals such as chicken and pigs around the yard space. Items from the provision grounds and even the kitchen gardens were sold in markets. Today, markets such as Charles Gordon Market in Montego Bay and Coronation Market in Kingston and the various markets across the island remain major distributors of food. Food is sold by informal traders we have come to call ‘higglers’. These traders are found throughout the African diaspora and in places such as Haiti, where they are known as the Madan Sara, they wield not inconsequential power. My Grandmother’s Grandmother and mother both sold at Charles Gordon Market. From her income, my Great-grandmother was able to support her daughter’s dream to become a teacher. There are many stories like that at The UWI, Mona of informal traders supporting their children’s dreams for higher education; doing so without formal loans but instead through informal, community based survival practices such as throwing ‘partner’. These are the stories that bucked expectations, that have their genesis in the dreams, ambitions and hopes of the black working classes. By supporting the dreams of their children, these informal traders pushed against dominant discourses that relegated people of African descent to poverty and instability.  

Victoria Durante-Gonzalez (1983, p. 11) in her article “The Occupation of Higglering” closes on this poignant note: “higglering…provides [women] with a sense of independence. This notion of a sense of independence was revealed through many conversations with higglers. My hostess and I had many discussions about higglering, and during these discussions, she repeatedly gave this as one explanation for her continuing in this occupation: “You are a woman, and I am a woman. You have a hubby and I have a hubby, but we must always remember that if your hubby gives you a ten cents, you find a way to making a ten cents of your own.”” I grew up with the women in my family always finding a way to making that ten cents. I am certain that many of us can relate to this sentiment. 

Healing

How many of us have heard or seen memes that have Caribbean mothers and grandmothers providing mint tea or ginger tea to cure every ailment? Well, for my Great-grandma Roetta Perkins, that tea was cerasee tea. She swore by it; drank it every single day of her life and that was a very long life. She lived until she was 99 years old, right before her 100th birthday. Cause of death – old age. But knowledge and use of herbs was important to mothering practices in the Caribbean. I remember when I had my daughter and struggled to produce enough milk. I had women telling me about fevergrass tea and fenugreek seeds. Caribbean people have always looked at Western medicine with some amount of scepticism – feeling perhaps that that kind of medicine was not created with them in mind. Rastas say, let food be your medicine and medicine be your food and it is not far from the truth. What we use to season our food also has healing practices. Shadobeni as it is known in the Eastern Caribbean and spirit weed in Jamaica are known for a wide number of health benefits. But Shadobeni is an important seasoning in the Eastern Caribbean. Garlic and thyme also have benefits. I use leaf of life on multiple occasions to dry up my daughter’s mucosal production during colds. Knowledge of how many leaves is critical as well as how to activate the anti-mucosal properties. Candice Goucher underscores this crucial point when she writes: “Women controlled the critical knowledge about what was safe and what was unsafe, what could cure or kill…The most basic food preparation became symbolic code for the separation of realms.” In this way, women, through their knowledge of herbs and spices and cultural transmission of knowledge forge important bulwarks against ill-health. They keep alive crucial knowledge that connects the past and the present and remind us that indigenous medicines have merit – especially in these financially perilous times. Today, there are several women who are using holistic medicines to help women suffering from fibroids and endometriosis. This knowledge, they received not only through study but also through their ancestors. Women are important functionaries in Caribbean traditional healing practices – and even as Mothers and Spiritualists of the Revival Church. 

Stories and Proverbs

We are everyday revolutionaries through the stories and proverbs we choose to tell. Clifford Geertz states that culture is simply the stories we tell ourselves of ourselves. Thistlewood tells of Vine, an enslaved woman who told Anansi stories to pass the time.  

• Sunday 17th: Mr Say’s Vine told many diverting Nancy stories this evening at my house. She tells them very cleverly. 
• Wednesday 21st: At night Vine and Abba told Nancy stories. 

Anansi stories, as you know, are subversive tales that see the small quick-witted Anansi often outwitting his often larger foes. Anansi tales provided enslaved Africans – old and young – with the blueprint to survive enslavement. One advantage of Anansi tales was that they could be told right in front of the planter class without them having any idea that these tales taught their ‘property’ how to resist enslavement. Proverbs such as “One one coco full basket”, illustrate ways that those with humble resources have to survive. Stories and proverbs maintain class and cultural identity and provide us with the skills necessary to survive in circumstances not always conducive to that.  

Dress

Dress has always provided us with an avenue to express our individuality and affirm our humanity. In my story of my Great-grandma Zillah, I told you how she was a snazzy dresser and how that has passed down to my child. Dress is not innocuous, particularly in contexts where some cultures are promoted over others. Steeve Buckridge (2004, p. 78) therefore writes, “Dress was a visually accessed language of the body, in that the way one dressed was constantly scrutinized and itself provided a narrative, especially in the absence of a shared spoken language, culture or religion.” If distinctly Eurocentric dress tacitly supported the planter-class, then Afrocentric dress that reaffirmed connections to Africa formed a silent and effective mode of resistance. During celebrations women of African descent were known to wear a profusion of beads and gold ornaments. Hairstyles consisted of plaits or cane rows. Elaborate and simple head-ties connected women across the Atlantic diaspora. Buckridge (2004, p. 86) thus states that the headwrap or the tie-head, “represented the continuity of African heritage in dress and served as a symbol of resistance.” Headwraps also served to pass on key messages.  

Headwraps are important pieces of fashion in Afrocentric religions such as Revival, Santeria, Orisha. Religious headwraps were different from those worn daily. 

Armed Resistance

Finally, I want to highlight the non-titular role women played in armed confrontations. I end on this note because while our everyday heroes keep alive the flame of revolution through ordinary acts, the fact is that the cup eventually overflows. In the context of rebellions and revolutions that had figureheads, women played very important roles. Verene Shepherd in her work has demonstrated the role that women played in the 1831-32 Sam Sharpe War. Women provided fighters with water, guided them towards provisions, acted as lookouts, watched captives and acted as messengers between different factions. 

In discussing the Morant Bay Rebellion, the work of Swithin Wilmot, Clinton Hutton and Gad Heuman on the role of women in protests indicate that they had a more central though not titular role to play. According to Wilmot, “Although there is no evidence that women occupied any of the formal positions as ‘Captain’ in Bogle’s ‘regiment’ or indeed participated in the drilling that preceded the march to Morant Bay, women were part of Paul Bogle’s organisational network in the Blue Mountain Valley area of St. Thomas in the East.” Wilmot goes on to show that women occupied informal networks such as using their homes as bases for Baptist meeting, boosting the morale of the men and they also used the Morant Bay rebellion as a way to get even with some of their antagonisers. Moreover, to Wilmot, they were not just nameless faces but include persons such as Sarah Johnson, Caroline Grant and Elizabeth Taylor. Hutton also had a similar stance when he argued, “Although women played a leading role in the upheaval in St. Thomas-in-the East and might be credited for casting the first missile in the war at the Bay, the politics of the black masses in post slavery society in general and in Paul Bogle’s movement in particular was dominated by men. Women…were not allowed to drill, take oath of allegiance to the movement…They had to walk on the side…There is no known female captain or secretary of the movement, although on several occasions during the conflict women demonstrated that they had a final say as to whether a perceived enemy lived or died. Women showed deep resolve to fight at Morant Bay…” Heuman’s analysis is also related.