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Gender, Language, Violence and Slavery: Insult in Jamaica, 1800–1838

Discussions of the coercion and abuse experienced by enslaved people in New World slave societies have tended to focus on violence. In many ways, this is how it should be: for enslaved people, experiencing or witnessing violence was indeed an everyday part of life. Nevertheless, violence inflicted by slaveholders on enslaved people did not take place in a vacuum: it was accompanied by, mediated through, and often preceded by abusive words. Yet while debates around negotiation, slave resistance and paternalism focus in detail on the cultural and discursive context of these relationships, discussions of violence tend to home in on their purely physical aspects.1 This article examines the context of violence in a society undergoing the transition from slavery to a postslave society, by investigating the insulting words employed by plantation owners and managers in Jamaica, and the means by which enslaved people responded to them. It suggests that such words, in themselves and through their relationship to violent acts, played a central role in asserting and attempting to perpetuate the dominance of slave-owners and plantation managers over enslaved people. For some contemporary observers, insulting language served as a substitute for personal violence in situations where the latter had been de-legitimated. Benjamin McMahon, writing of the apprenticeship period in Jamaica (1834–38) when slaveholders lost the legal right to directly ‘punish’ their unfree workers, argued that, ‘the overseers, as they could not flog and tear the flesh of their victims, constantly vented their spite in the most dreadfully abusive and obscene language, which always hurts the feelings of the negroes even more than corporal punishment’.2 While McMahon was probably correct in his assessment of the frustration of overseers deprived of the use of the lash, I suggest that rather than ‘hurt the feelings’ of apprentices in a manner that contrasts with the hurt of corporal punishment, the ‘hurt’ of such abusive language lay precisely in the threat of violence that always implicitly accompanied it, and thus in the fear that it produced. McMahon’s claim is not gendered. The evidence I present in this article, however, suggests that the kind of language he refers to was primarily directed at women, and that its ability to insult consisted of sexualised and animalistic language. Through this language of insult, planters discursively fragmented women’s bodies, denied them the status of ‘real’ women, and metaphorically reduced them to their genitalia or to animals. The misogyny of insulting language directed against enslaved and apprenticed