Zombie Testimony: Creole Religious Discourse in West Indian Slave Narratives

Abstract

This fascinating perspective on the discourse of spirituality, taken from the brief slave narrative of a Barbadian slave woman named Ashy, was discovered in a box of miscellaneous papers in a room in the Bodleian Library (Handler 1998: 132). Indeed, Ashy’s narrative offers compelling testimony of the imbrication of Judeo-Christian and West African spiritual discourses common in the wider Caribbean in which a “cacophony of practices and traditions […] came forcibly together” in the context of the British West Indian slave society (Olmos and Paravisini 1997: 2).

Ah! Massa dis country here dat you call Barbadus—um no good country—um no good Massah—When we want rain in my country we all take de Black Caps and put on our head—den we go and buy one big Negur Man and one Big Blackee sheep—den we go out and take long bench and we all sit down and put de Blackee sheep and Negur man behind we and ‘gin to pray—den we see one Big Blackee man de same dat you call God come down and take de Man and de Sheep ‘way. (Handler 1998, 132; italics in original)