"If anything is to be learnt from this shared history of ours, it is that our capacity to challenge its legacies remains largely untapped."

A Kick in the Belly is a powerful historical examination of the lives of enslaved West Indian women. However it's far more than that, Dadzie uses her intro and afterwards to highlights how modern slavery, human trafficking, exploitation of African resources are all problems that plague us today and make this history and the legacy of the history so important.

This book almost certainly has some heavy passages and traumatic content and therefore is not one I recommend lightly.

However it's an area of history not commonly touched on in mainstream texts, as part of my history degree, we had a couple of clssses on slavery which predominantly focused on the American South and whilst this did examine slave resistance, culture, community etc, this wasn't a gendered history and largely excluded slavery in the Caribbean.

The reason this book is so important is because Stella Dadzie makes the history of academics accessible, and applies a gendered focus which is generally less widespread in accessible media.

Until reading this book I had never though about the impact of women menstruating in the middle passage, the specific impacts on women's gynaecological health and fertility caused by the hardships they faced. Whilst I had some knowledge of women's roles, the punishments they faced, living in fear of rape and the brutalities of slavery. There were many aspects of women's experiences specifically that this book focused on that I had not necessarily considered in the way Dadzie discussed.

One of the most interesting elements for me was Stella Dadzie's discussions surrounding women's subversion of their white owners through taking control of their fertility. This was not something I'd read about in the context of slavery, but was something I'd focused my masters thesis on in context of Apartheid South Africa. It brought to light how women throughout history have resisted and subverted power in ways in which are not always clearly documented, but points to the agency and the resilience of women throughout history. By having abortions and preventing pregnancy these enslaved women consciously stopped slave owners from gaining more slaves. These were powerful acts of resistance from enslaved women that have not necessarily been recorded, not to mention the psychological effects and trauma this had on these women.

Stella Dadzie's work is an excellently researched and well put together exploration of enslaved women's position in the Caribbean. It's an important area of our history that gets too little focus and she provides a light into the past to help remember these women and their rebellious acts.