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Wake by rebecca hall5/28/2023 I have mixed feelings about Hugo Martínez’s illustrations. In short, she shares and imagines the unimaginable. She imagines what life was like as an enslaved woman and what would finally drive them to revolt. She shares notes from captain’s logs about deaths, revolts, and the brutal way they treated their captives. Slave ships that contained more women than men were more likely to have insurrections. She faced discrimination over and over.īut the history she pieces together is powerful. Even public records were hard for her to access when they were stored in courthouses, behind security screening. They refused to give her access when they learned what her research topic was. Some records that she wanted to investigate are held by private companies (Lloyd’s of London used to insure slave ships against insurrection). That’s fair enough, especially since she’s very clear about what she found in the historical record and what she imagined. So she decided to make “measured use of historical imagination” and fill in the gaps. Even when she found records of revolts led by women, they rarely contained more than a first name. I honestly expected to find more hard facts in the book than I did. In this graphic memoir, she shares her struggle to find records and the history she was able to piece together. She knew they happened but the historical record is incomplete and difficult to navigate. Rebecca Hall decided to write her thesis on women-led slave revolts.
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