By Celeste Kazani, PhD candidate in English.
This post is part of Exploring Legacies of Enslavement: a research series, highlighting ongoing research on the legacies of enslavement.
Content note: This post includes quotations from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources that reflect the harmful attitudes and perspectives of their time. Quotations are reproduced as they appear in the original sources.
Niccolò Gualtieri, Strombus gigas, from Index Testarum Conchyliorum (1742). Public domain.
The archive is a phonograph. If I pressed my ear against the pages of the past, what would I hear? The voices and silences of the colonial Caribbean were always loud, always underpinned by violence. We read for language, for what is said and left unsaid, but what if we attended also to the voices of ‘things’, of the non-human entities that populate the soundscape? Even one of its components, that of a conch shell, might speak.
Shells are ubiquitous in accounts of the eighteenth-century Caribbean. The exoskeleton of the marine gastropod, Strombus gigas, or the queen conch, was used as a trumpet by both enslaved people and their enslavers to marshall Black collectivities, whether in the context of insurrection or daily enforced labor.
After the 1791 uprising in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), the Consolidated Slave Act of Jamaica was passed to forestall conditions that might lead to a similar revolt. The 1792 Act specifically prohibited the sounding of mollusk shells in assemblies of enslaved people, as they were considered ‘military’ instruments alongside drums and horns that signaled the start of a rebellion, as in Saint-Domingue. Conch shells were politicized, but only after midnight and only in certain hands. At dawn, they were used to ‘summon’ enslaved people to labor at dawn as well as to designate pauses and resumptions of work throughout the day. ‘Shell-blow’ was like the strike of a clock, a stamp of plantation time, logistically organizing the regular flow of bodies across space and shaping the rhythms of everyday life.
William Beckford, the owner of the Roaring River Estate in Westmoreland Parish in Jamaica, frequently refers to the ‘lively’ and ‘cheerful’ cry of the morning shell-blow in his Descriptive Account of Jamaica (1790). Elaborating on the proto-industrial nature of time oriented by the shell’s blast, he writes:
“The occupations of the negro are not so unremitting; and, seven months in the year at least, before six o’clock in the morning, and after seven at night, his personal attendance is seldom required, and it is of course dispensed with. He has every Sunday throughout the year to himself, every other Saturday out of crop, two or three days at Christmas, many days in the rainy seasons, and afternoons at other times besides: and he is frequently laid-up for days by imaginary illness.” (II, 136–37)
Beckford’s catalogue demarcates the gaps in the work year, tallied in weekdays, weekends, holidays, sick days, seasons that are syntactically arranged in pairs: ‘before’ and ‘after’; ‘morning and ‘night’; ‘every Sunday’ and ‘every other Saturday’; ‘two or three days’ and ‘many days’. The suggestion of a repletion of leisure hours in the life of an enslaved person is belied by the asymmetries of parallel items that are meted out in beats of time, of which the enslaved laborer ‘has’ imaginary possession, as if it were his or her own.
In the Demerara Revolt (1823) in Guyana, a grievance voiced by enslaved insurrectionists was the loss of time. A coachman, John Aves, testifies to this in a deposition given at the trial of John Smith, the missionary who stoked the conspiracy. Aves states for the record:
‘I asked [Mr. Smith] what time [the uprising] began, he told me, “he supposed about seven o'clock in the evening; that the negroes, some of them, rung the bell, and some blowed the shell, and that was the alarm...” I asked him what the negroes wanted; [Mr. Smith] said, “they wanted their Saturday and Sunday.”’ (Trial of John Smith, 39).
The shell, used to ‘summon’ enslaved plantation workers to the field in the hands of the overseer or driver, now becomes an ‘alarm’, a call to recover stolen time. The subversive repurposing of the shell-trumpet in the evening amongst a confederation of disenfranchised people is a repudiation of the incessant violence of plantation order. The deformation of ‘shell-blow’ in its insurrectionary re-enactment is a violation of enforced rhythm and a reinstatement of the body in space and in time.
Conch shells, the calcareous matter activated by human breath, function across these examples as sound media that encode and transmit information pertaining to rhythm and its irruption. Thinking about the voices of non-biological forms in this way allows us to approach questions of what the colonial Caribbean may have sounded like, and how these sounds articulated alternative social, political, and economic realities against existing systems of power. Next when we peruse the archive, we might read with our ears.
About the author
Celeste Kazani is a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation is titled “Beyond the Eye: Hearing Polyphony in Transcolonial Ethnographies.”
Works cited
Beckford, William. A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, 2 vols. T. And J. Egerton, 1790.
Court of Guyana. An Authentic Copy of the Minutes of Evidence on the Trial of John Smith, A Missionary, in Demerara. S. Burton, 1824.