Caribbean Literature Flashcards
The final six lines of ‘A Letter to my Love - All alone, past 12, in the Dumps’
This Hour, when Pallid Ghosts appear, / Oh! Could it bring thy Shadow here; / I every substance wou’d resign, / To clasp thy Aerial breast to mine; / Or if, my Love, that could not be, / I would turn Air to mix with thee.
Fowke’s repetition of ‘I want’
I want thy Bosom to repose / My beating heart
I want thy dear love’s Hand to press / My neck
Key phrases from ‘To My Love, Wrote in Tears’
transport my mind
freeborn thoughts
Fetishisation of the black body in The Speech of Moses Bon Sàam
[…] what wild imaginary Superiority of Dignity has their pale sickly Whiteness to boast of,
when compar’d with our Majestick Glossiness! If there is Merit in Delicacy, we have Skins soft as their Velvets: If in Manliness, Consider your Shape, your Strength, and your Movement!
Richard Ligon’s description of enslaved people in A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados
But ‘tis a lovely sight to see a hundred handsome Negroes, with every one a grasse-green bunch of these fruits on their heads, […] the black and green so well becomming one another
Fowke’s exploration of the convenient slipperiness of a writer’s persona in ‘To the Same, a Pastoral’
When tir’d with hearing my unwreary’d Flame, / I then would woo thee in some other Name
Fowke’s appropriation of the colonised subject in one of the ‘To Damon’ poems
But thy tenderness ingross’d, / None can land upon that Coast. / To some other Island bear / Common Sighs of empty Air; / Damon’s Empire in my Heart / Interest will not shock, nor art.
Janet Schaw’s romanticisation of slavery in A Journal of a Lady of Quality
We met the Negroes in joyful troops on the way to town with their Merchandize. It was one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw
Janet Schaw’s justification of the driver’s ‘short whip and a long one’
When one comes to be better acquainted with the nature of the Negroes, the horrour of it must wear off. It is the suffering of the human mind that constitutes the greatest misery of punishment, but with them it is merely corporeal. As to the brutes it inflicts no wound on their mind, whose Natures seem made to bear it, and whose sufferings are not attended with shame or pain beyond the present moment.
Janet Schaw ‘on the chapter of Negroes feelings’ on the splitting of black families to be sold
perfect unconcern
perfect indifference
