Witnessing, Testimony, and Transformation as Genres of Black Archival Practice

Abstract

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive at Northeastern University aims to “uncover and make accessible a literary history of the Caribbean written or related by black, enslaved, Creole, indigenous, and/ or colonized people.” Among the archive’s holdings is a seventeenth-century text penned by Richard Ligon, a British royalist exile who spent three years (1647–1650) in Barbados working as a plantation manager. Ligon’s work, a folio with maps and illustrations titled A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, was published in London in 1657. A survey of the natural, social, and economic phenomena Ligon observed during his three-year stay in Barbados, A True and Exact History is exactly as its title purports: it is a history. It is not, however, the history, and it is neither “true” nor “exact.” As a documentary record, Ligon’s work is a first-person narrative; it is a testimonial record of Ligon’s personal experiences, perspectives, and observations. As an archival record, Ligon’s text is more complicated. While it is an important narrative that offers an historical contextualization of British colonial systems in the pre-emancipation Caribbean, it is, at the same time, an act of historical suppression. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes simultaneously records Ligon’s first-person testimony and obfuscates the first-person testimony of others—enslaved Bajan whose own testimonial voices are recorded only through Ligon’s audition. When writing about Bajan funerary and mourning practices, for example, Ligon remarks, “When any of them dye, they dig a grave, and at evening they bury him, clapping and wringing their hands, and making a doleful sound with their voices.” That the “doleful sound” of Bajan mourning laments and death wails —the ritual, rending sounds of keening Black women—can only be heard in the archives through the cool observational analysis of Ligon’s British tongue is indicative of why acts of witnessing and testimony have, over time, become transformative components of Black archival practice. In her monograph, Dispossessed Lives, Marissa Fuentes offers an intimate example of how acts of witnessing transformed her own encounter with the archives. Fuentes recounts seeking complete archival records that would detail the lives of enslaved women. Instead, archival research led her only to fragments of and moments in those lives. Those moments, albeit fleeting, called to her, however, and engendered a desire for recovery. Fuentes sought to listen to the testimony in front of her, bearing witness and responding, in the spirit of call and response. She writes: