Wake Up!
“For hundreds of years, our ancestors were brutally silenced, I wasn’t supposed to find their voices.” In Wake, Black lawyer and historian, Rebecca Hall explores and resists the legacy of slavery as she uncovers the hidden history of enslaved women's resistance in the 18th century. Accompanied by visual Artist, Hugo Martínez's illustrations we see Black women’s history enlivened and discover the hidden truths behind revolts in American colonial history. As a native New Yorker, Hall begins her journey in the New York archives because it allows her to combine her scholarly pursuits with her personal family history. While engaging in archival research, she encounters systemic institutions, that have contributed to the lack of research and erasure of Black history within slavery. Stopped by institutional negligence Hall takes her studies to Europe, illustrating the importance of international resistance when uncovering the histories of Black diasporic people. Hall spends the remainder of the chapters depicting the resistance of the enslaved while on ships and their homelands to holistically explore the legacy of slavery. In Rebecca Hall’s Wake, she explores living in “the wake” and investigates the ways that Black women have resisted oppression, despite the erasure and limited resources perpetrated by a patriarchal and white supremacists system.
Wake makes use of the several definitions of wake, the service remembering Black life, and illustrates the path created by ships. Christiana Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness in being, incorporates and expands the definition stating that “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfold” (13). Wake captures this as Hall constantly toils with the resistance of white supremacy and is haunted by the reality of her studies. The graphics within chapter one depict the coffle, a group of enslaved chained, as a reflection in the puddle of the modern state that is New York City today creating a juxtaposition that allows us to see the ways that the United States was built on the foundation and economy of slave labor. In chapter two the same picture of the coffle within an enslaved woman's footsteps reinforces Sharpe’s notion that we as Blacks live in the afterlife of slavery in our daily walks of life.2Wake offers visual representations of the legacy and history of slavery centralizing enslaved Black women as a crucial point of theory and theorizing.
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Even during times of constant Black death, the enslaved find a way to honor and motivate themselves while in the wake of those who challenged the white power structure. In 1712, Amba, an enslaved woman fed up with the constant social and literal Black death was raped and also watched as a result, fueling the insurrection of her community. This violation of human and women's rights is part of the reality of slavery that transcends the past and becomes a present reality for many Black women globally. The domination and sexual politics that existed within slavery motivated resistance and bolstered the fight for body and social autonomy. After the rebellion, many of the enslaved are lynched and murdered by the state except for a pregnant woman. This preservation of Black life illustrates the profitability of Black bodies because the slavers only preserved a Black life in hopes of enslaving another Black body. These ideas work together to paint an accurate picture of the monetization and exploitation within a slavocracy. Sharpe and Hall use science to paint the ways that Black life haunts the presence of the waters. While analyzing salts decomposition Sharpe states, “the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today” (40). When paired with Hall’s conjecture that, “sound waves travel so slowly in water and the ocean is so vast, the sound can last centuries underwater,” we can see the ways that slavery haunts presence and remains present in the world’s waters, as well as institutions. Slavery perpetuates and bolsters notions of patriarchy and misogyny to reify the social norms of the American state.
Through misrepresenting, erasing, and ignoring Black history and slaveholders were able to assure that notion of patriarchy remains intact in today’s modern society. When attempting to research the history and legacy of enslaved women Hall is confronted with resistance from security officials at the New York court office and then after calling the clerk’s office she was ridiculed and insulted by a clerk and told they could not help. These interactions with bureaucratic staff and lack of information from the clerk highlight the way America mistreats, disrespects, and ignores the lives of women, more specifically Black women. Researching Black History remains a difficult task because many histories regarding the slaves were discarded and neglected. By omitting these women's names these revolts will be seen as products of men's resistance further promoting the patriarchal notion of strength and fighting within men. Through systematically ignoring slave women the slavocracy, slavers further propertizes Black life, and prioritizes the lives of men over those of women. Hall finds out that one major reason for so many slave revolts is because they freed many Black women to do work or for their pleasure, misunderstanding the organization and resistance within Black women. By ignoring women and using controlling stereotypes of feminine inferiority the slave state was able to perpetuate white supremacists systems embedded with misogyny. Wake brings forward those who revolted and resisted and illustrates the ways that the history of Black women's resistance is crucial for us navigating the future of the slavocracy.
Hall believes that embracing the trauma and pain of our past will allow us to imagine a survivable future. Hall states, “ The past is not a ghost we want to banish or exorcise. It is something we want to internalize.” Understanding and embracing the history of revolt and resistance allows us to gather knowledge about the white power structure and create possibilities for new Black resistance in the future. Living in the wake means exploring, preserving, and defending the histories and memories of the dead. This book allows us to visualize how theorizing about the wake allows us to navigate and deconstruct the afterlife of slavery.
Works Cited
Hall, Rebecca. Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. S.l.: SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2022.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake on Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
