I would like to buy the mother
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A white apprentice on the Codrington family estates in Antigua complains of his ill treatment, poor diet and only having four white shirts.
'I still have one particular matter to mention which is, I have been connected with a wench of yours for some time back, with whom I have had the misfortune to breed. I have had four children by her three of which I purchased of Mr Sam Redhead, and I should now be infintely oblige [sic] to you to sell me the fourth child and the mother.'
Credit: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. 15096
WENCH
Amina Atiq
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WENCH is a poetic response which explores the relationship between free people working at the plantation and the enslaved. The poem reacts to the final passage of the letter, where the apprentice James Millet asks to purchase the mother, whom he refers to as a wench (a medieval word that evolved to become a racist smear), and her 10-month old child. In Amina Atiq’s work we hear the mother’s voice, her words taking back power from these misogynistic and racist attitudes towards women
WENCH
Amina Atiq
In your warmest sense of gratitude
you ask of me and my ten-month child
everyone has forgotten us, as you remember I am here
clothed in your waistcoats or worse colony bedding.
I hope you will deem no offense, I promised
death to run while your lingua left my body
thirteen years of drunkenness. But here, you stained
your four white shirts, allow me to wipe your mouth of slavery.
No doubt of your thinking something strange
you write I am your misfortune to breed, an indulged
child-bearer, a sugar-shipped body, dancing cuffs in rituals
around the highest bidders and studying wombs in English salve codes.
I take my liberty of sweet-poetry, a moment of grief
oath to all my four children to bless this Island
under the Barbados windmills, wash in their holy water
build the Codrington Estate in their mother’s bulwarks.
I shall leave you to judge of it as you please
but I still have one particular matter to mention
there is an uprising lost between your starved forlorn eyes.