Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker

Author:Marcus Rediker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780807033104
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services

Resistance: Refusing to Eat

If the common experiences of expropriation and enslavement, including the violent, densely communal regimentation of the slave ship, created the potential for community among African prisoners, and if social practices—working, communicating, and singing—helped to realize it, nothing was more important to the collective project of creating group identity than resistance. This was in itself a new language, a language of action employed every time people refused food, jumped over the side of the ship, or rose up in insurrection. It was a universal language, which everyone understood regardless of cultural background, even if they chose not to speak it actively themselves. Every act of resistance, small or large, rejected enslavement and social death as it embraced creativity and a different future. Each refusal bound people together, in ever deeper ways, in a common struggle.4

The Atlantic slave trade was, in many ways, a four-hundred-year hunger strike. From the beginning of the waterborne human commerce in the early fifteenth century to its end in the late nineteenth century, enslaved Africans routinely refused to eat the food given to them. When some of the enslaved came on board the ship, they fell into a “fixed melancholy,” a depression in which they responded to nothing their captors said or demanded, including instructions to eat. Others got sick and were unable to eat even if they had wanted to. And yet even among some of the depressed and the sick, and among a much larger group that was neither, the refusal to eat was a conscious choice, which served several important purposes among the enslaved. Because the captain’s main charge from the merchant was to deliver as many live, healthy African bodies as possible to the New World port, anyone who refused sustenance, for any reason whatsoever, endangered profits and subverted authority. Refusing to eat was therefore first and foremost an act of resistance, which in turn inspired other acts of resistance. Second, it proved to be a tactic of negotiation. Mistreatment could trigger a hunger strike. Third, it helped to create a shipboard culture of resistance, a “we” against a “they.” Among the messages of the hunger strike were: we will not be property; we will not be labor power; we will not let you eat us alive.

On John Riland’s ship the Liberty, in 1801, several of the enslaved rejected their food. The officer on watch swore he would throw them overboard if they did not eat, then he threatened them with the cat (of nine tails), which seemed to work, or so he thought: “The slaves then made a show of eating, by putting a little rice into their mouths; but whenever the officer’s back was turned they threw it into the sea.” Seaman James Morley also saw slaves pretend to eat, holding food in their mouths “till they have been almost strangled.” The officers would damn them “for being sulky Black b——.” They would try to force them to eat, using the cat, the thumbscrews, a “bolus knife” or

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