A slave’s life reimagined

Can we ever understand what life was like as a slave? What trauma the millions of men, women and children lived through and how being enslaved impacted on their physical and mental health?

A new Bristol project has brought together scientists and seven black writers from across the city to re-imagine the lives of enslaved people based on physical evidence of how they lived from their skeletons.

“Thinking about the lives of slaves is never easy, but bringing art and science together to do so can enhance the ways in which we remember and commemorate those lives,” says Dr Josie Gill from Bristol University, who is leading the Literary Archaeology project.

Members of Bristol writers group Our Stories Make Waves were invited to meet forensic archaeologists who have been studying the skeletons of slaves in Grand Canaria and Barbados.

Dr Gill says that the project is a unique way of understanding the lives of enslaved people: “The writers are engaging in a topic close to their heart because it’s the experience of their ancestors and the way they were treated.”

Poet and author Vanessa Kisuule said seeing the bones was “a stark thing to be confronted with”.

“It lends a realness and tangibility to the slave narrative that you can’t quite get from books or films,” she added.

Drawing on that experience the writers then produced art and literature re-imagining the lives of the people who were enslaved.

“Learning about the skeletal remains brought up more questions than it answered,” said Vanessa, “so when I sat down to write there was a strong sense of all the things we will never know about what it was like to be a slave”.

For Valda Jackson, the experience had an enormous impact on her work: “For me, the handling of human remains, and even the remotest possibility that I might be holding the earthly remains of an ancestor, was quite overwhelming.”

The seven writers then tried to express their experiences through art and literature, but the journey was harder than some could imagine. 

“It took many weeks… for me to return to my initial feelings that emotional connection that I experienced when the human skull was passed from the archaeologist and into my hands,” said Valda.

“And it was many weeks more before I accepted, gave welcome to the spirit of the human person who’s passing left behind in her bones certain truths and evidence of the hardship and distress endured. My objective was not only to add flesh to bone but to recall her humanity.

Poet Ralph Hoyte says his work Close to the Bone “attempts to, literally, put flesh on the bones of these seven individuals and thus, yes, make them ‘human’, rather than mere ciphers, or statistics”.

His writing is based on one scientific paper, about finds in a multi-ethnic cemetery from the 15th to 17th century on the island of Gran Canaria.

“I have quoted from the actual paper as well as ‘morphed’ the scientific language used in the paper for poetic means.

“I attempt to poetically ‘flesh out’ the archaeological finds, whilst constantly referring back to the scientific evidence. ‘Poetry’ is about what is true, so this authenticity is important.”

Valda produced a short film How I Feel where she has tried to “create a visual narrative that gives voice to the individual who was born and who loved, and was loved”.  

“I want to think that this work enables people today to identify with a living breathing human individual whose skeletal remains centuries later retains the evidence of hardship the distress, the endurance. And I want to suggest the unseen; love, grief, lost hope and also joy.

“And to remember the absented, missing with all the potential that was theirs.”

Ultimately Vanessa believes the project helps to give the enslaved people of the past a new voice: “I definitely think this humanises the slaves – seeing the pictures of the remains makes you realise that they were made up of flesh and guts and hearts and thoughts and feelings just like us.

“The slave narrative often talks of this huge, diverse group of people as a monolith and I think this project helped me and the other commissioned artists to try and think about the nuances of what that lifestyle might have been like.   

The Beyond Slavery project will be presented during Black History Month: What was it like to be enslaved? at the M Shed on October 8.

Photo credits: Valda Jackson, Shutterstock, 8th Sense Media, Ralph Hoyte

Read More: Going back to his roots; How a Bristol man traced his ancestors back to slavery