Choking on a Cry

Choking on a Cry

 

Children’s Lives and Conditions in the Imposition of Criminality

On an austere slave ship from Africa to the Americas, a child cries, comes to life, and immediately after faces their death for such a noise. Across the Atlantic Ocean, boats facilitated not only the slave trade but were filled with pirates, European explorers and colonizers, fugitives, and many others from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Some set out to create a system of law and property through war-making techniques of theft and exploitation, and further did so through constructing the identity of the “criminal.” The “criminal” existed, and still exists, as a figure understood as contrary to the state, cast into the exclusionary margins of society so that the state can assume more power. Still, communities such as maroons sought innovative ways to sustain themselves even as capitalism and colonialism were fortified. Often invisibilized, but at the center of these early modern movements, was the child. Across the insurrectionary slave ship, pirate and maroon communities, and the living quarters of enslaved people, what role did the child assume in the ongoing livelihood of so many people despite the conditions of colonial racial capitalism? This paper examines how despite the historical construction of the criminal by the state, to develop an economy based on racial capitalism and a legal system that sought to secure and encode it, children operated in a unique space of invisibility and hyperagency that allows us to question what “resistance,” “agency,” and “criminality” are. I will examine children who participated in and led the emancipation of their conditions outwardly against the state and the conditions of children in their most natural forms of life and love. In this paper, the child’s embodiment of “naturalness” refers to the fragility of not being fully socialized and their practical conditions of continuance, for example, the cry. Therefore, both the choices made and the choices not made in their lives are critical to this inquiry. Drawing from the patchwork of the historical and scholarly accounts we have read this semester, this is an attempt to flesh out the figure of the child, and notably their conditions in a kind of disorganized, unattached “resistance,” not as one understood by the state but rather understood through their practices of survival that unfold naturally and in the continuance of life. 

The wide ranging responses to children committing “crimes” go beyond the early modern context. It is possible to practically respond that a child is a product of their circumstances and therefore distant from the character of the criminal and also to respond that a child’s actions are extreme; the sentiment “It is terrible you could do such a thing at such a young age” may underlie harsh criminalization. By looking at and behind the historical archive of pirate, maroon, and enslaved communities with a focus on children, how might the child’s existence be defined through the paradoxes of the concept of criminality? In what ways are their lives distanced from or reunited with the already fleeting idea of family? The role and conditions of the child continue to be ambivalent, and result in tangible effects to this day. 

The figure of the child in the historical archive is a vast topic, though broader demographics of young people in the Atlantic communities have been outlined by various authors. The young pirate and the bandit, for example, both personified figures working in contradiction to the state and its economic development of racial capitalism. In Outlaws of the Atlantic, Marcus Rediker describes the average age of the pirate, specifically referred to as a man (though other sources point to the prominent role of women and piracy) to be between twenty and twenty-nine years old. He writes “ages are known for 169 pirates active between 1716 and 1726… the 20-24 and 25-29 age categories had the highest concentrations, with 57 and 39 men, respectively. Almost three in five pirates were in their twenties…”1 Hobsbawn’s “Primitive Rebels” also characterizes the bandit, regarded as criminal by the state, as young, single, and a part of smaller units that can last for months to ten or twenty years.2 Notably, both authors describe how the young male is detached from traditional family ties as a part of these socially dynamic and often criminalized communities. The formation of the early modern state through capitalism and colonialism existed in tandem with these innovative community structures such as that of the pirate ship in which egalitarian culture was embraced in the mentality of not being laborers but “risk-sharing partners”.3 It can easily be forgotten though, that the participants were generally very young. And as the idea among communities spread that resistance to oppression was a legitimate form of agency, it seems that they were more heavily criminalized. Distinct physical spaces such as the pirate ship or plantation illuminate the production of political subjects over economic ones and the vulnerability of the child in the destruction of the family, respectively. In each, however, there seems to be a sort of invisible agency asserted by young people categorized as both innocent and dangerous. 

Understanding the role and characteristics of the child in the early modern Atlantic first requires a reading of women’s positionality in capitalist production through to the early modern period. Silvia Federici, beginning with the grassroots movements of women coming out of the anti-feudal struggle, writes about how lords had strong control over women’s reproduction, though in the practice of heresy the “radical democratization of social life”4 included avoiding marriage and having children. The heretic movement gave women in particular a high agential status in which they “did try to control their reproductive function” Federici notes, “as references to abortion and the use of contraceptives by women are numerous.”5 In the formation of early capitalism, “things changed drastically, however, as soon as women’s control over reproduction seemed to pose a threat to economic and social stability.”6 The transition from communal lands of peasant solidarity to the development of a capitalist labor-power system made the sexual control of women critical, and was manifested in the witch-hunt. Women who refused to use their bodies as means of economic production, were unmarried, and disobedient in this time of starvation and mass poverty were sought after as witches, and publicly burned and tortured for their magical powers. Federici details how the social positioning of women was fortified in the development of capitalism and the increasing control of women’s reproduction, without contraceptives or abortion, “degraded maternity to the status of forced labor.”7 As the transition to capitalism induced a period of starvation and dispossession, “the main initiative that the state took to restore the desired population ratio was the launching of true war against women clearly aimed at breaking the control they had exercised over their bodies and reproduction… it also relied on the redefinition of what constitutes a reproductive crime.”8 Surveillance, new medical practices, and more executions for infanticide than any other crime except for witchcraft were results of women’s reproduction being “directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation.”9 The absolute fear towards the witch who as a result suffered such extreme violence could be said to characterize the gender of the early modern criminal first as female. Jennifer Morgan’s writing on African women’s lives as enslaved people being exposed to birth and death similarly describes how childbirth was a process termed by property and not kin. For the enslaved women to carry the market inside their body, it can be understood that “slavery developed in tandem with family formation.”10 There is an interesting ambiguity to the female, child-carrying body here though. While one form of resistance was an economic refusal to work and therefore a refusal to let the child live in conditions of oppression, women also deliberately chose to have children in maroon communities as an act of physical creation and freedom in the light of “reproduction of communities based on ties of kinship and ethnicity”11 The diverse assertions of agency towards the conception of family importantly demonstrate how violence can be a tool of resistance distinct from the war-making state. Perhaps the paradoxes of criminality emerge from this perception of violence in which the state can pursue it to its end but the agency of anyone not protected by the state to use it is immediately criminal. 

The counterintuitive conception of “resistance” deconstructs the idea that one is already in a position to intentionally take a stance against authority and a power leveraged from above. There are immediate limitations to what is portrayed as and can be “resistance” with this assumption. Instead, the reconsideration of “resistance” in this paper can be read as something that unfolds naturally in everyday life and does not assume a statist framework. By interrogating the “production” of children more specifically, the divide between economic and political production and life-bearing production is one from which we can better see the intentionality of violence and redefinition of “resistance.” Describing the relationship between enslaved mother and child, Morgan writes:

Who tells us more about the way that slavery distorted the relationship between mothers and infants: the woman who has held many an infant in the death throes of tetanus and who refuses to stop nursing the one who survives, or the woman driven to smother her newborn before lockjaw, yellow fever, or the financial perversions of the man who counts her birth only on a balance sheet did the job for her?12 

Is the choice for a mother to kill her child to protect them from enslavement an act of care and protection of life also? Scholars like Sadiya Hartman emphasize the destruction of the family unit in childbirth through the practice of slavery, but also suggest that the physical killing of a child by their mother can be percieved as resistance. Joy James’s concept of the “captive maternal” examines the identity of female or feminized bodies whose invisibilized existence is foundational to the Western state. Their reproductive labor and care work expose them to extreme violence, rape, and poverty, though this productivity and existence “enables the possessive empire that claims and dispossess them.”13 Therefore, the enslaved family unit is destroyed as a result of reaping women’s bodies for their production but the revolutionary choice for an enslaved mother to kill her child is one that topples the legitimacy of state-making itself because she is foundational to its creation. Notably, James writes how the often protective categories of “child,” “mother,” or “pregnant female” do not stand against the prowess of Western theory/practice and the captive maternal remains in “structures that form a womb-like captivity”:14 “A slave child is a slave. A slave mother is a slave.15 The re-imagination of the family unit as asserted by survival instead of the state then probes our understanding of criminality as it relates to labor power as well. Angela Davis writes about the enslaved woman, “She was, therefore, essential to the survival of the community. Not all people have survived enslavement; hence her survival-oriented activities were themselves a form of resistance. Survival, moreover, was the prerequisite of all higher levels of struggle.” 16 The survival of the mother and her child while grappling with these various considerations can perhaps be most clearly understood as deliberate. Survival is something active, whether violent or nonviolent, of oneself or others, criminal, or agential; it is not an accident but a choice in itself. 

Looking at children themselves reveals less agency by “resistance” but actually a distinct condition as it relates to their emotional and physical surroundings. In the first person account of former enslaver John Newton, he tells the following story: “A mate of a ship in a long-boat, purchased a young woman, with a fine child, of about a year old, in her arms. In the night, the child cried much, and disturbed his sleep. He rose up in great anger, and swore, that if the child did not cease making such a noise, he would presently silence it. The child continued to cry. At length he rose up a second time, tore the child from the mother, and threw it into the sea.”17 This mention of the child is a clear example of how disposable children were even as much as young people took up space to transform their conditions. As already vulnerable and abused, both through the praxis of labor but evidently also in their existence alone and relationship to the enslaved family, does the categorization of the child as such render them most vulnerable? In relation to criminality, what role does the “hierarchy of innocence” have in victimizing and isolating the actions of the child? To account for the child in the archive on enslavement is difficult, but scholars point to the cry, an act that is wordless yet vocal, as crucial in the exploration of “black noise.” As both a poignant, urgent display of life and something natural and inevitable to the human, the cry illuminates some of the gravest realities of enslavement. The everyday forms of “resistance” that Sadiya Hartman writes about and were not politicized particularly for enslaved women and children included the spread of folk culture and “folksy slave gatherings.” Virginia Hamilton’s folktale collection entitled The People Could Fly characterizes the myth that enslaved Africans had a magical power and phrase that would let them fly back to Africa, and the story is invoked with the enslaved mother and the cry of her child. She writes about the mother working in the field with her child: 

Say the child got hungry. That babe started up bawling too loud. Sarah couldn’t stop to feed it. Couldn’t stop to soothe and quiet it down. She let it cry. She didn’t want to. She had no heart to croon to it. “Keep that thing quiet,” called the Overseer. He pointed his finger at the babe. The woman scrunched low. The Driver cracked his whip across the babe anyhow. The babe hollered like any hurt child, and the woman fell to the earth.18 

After she continues to be beaten and can’t get up anymore, she utters magical words that let her and her daughter fly away. As beings made into property in the structure of labor power, Hamilton’s folk tale is a testament to how innocence, and even natural inevitability, are forced into a kind of criminality. Through this folktale, we can see how the concept of criminality is produced and sustained in the act of survival–the need to eat, the relative possibilities of self-defense and protection, the act of birth even if for the master, etc. And what does it mean that this folktale with a due sense of agency, the act of flying away, was embraced only after the woman is beaten for the acts of her child? Other mentions of the child’s cry arise in Harriet Jacobs “Incidents of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself,” in which she writes “But I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my children. There was joy and there was sadness in the sound. It made my tears flow. How I longed to speak to them! I was eager to look on their faces; but there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep. This continued darkness was oppressive”19 and is both drawn to and detached from the cry of her daughter. By understanding “stealing away” through Hartman’s notion that the agency of enslaved peoples was humane and just- though it was often only understood as criminal and violent- we can situate both community as a possible source of “resistance” and also the infiltrative power of the enslaved child’s cry as driving enslavers to perpetuate violence. Just as the concept of “resistance” may assume an intentionality against authority that the child’s cry lacks, so too can we see criminality then as a framework of state power that shapes how not only agency but life itself are defined. In these texts it is the child who mostly urgently illuminates the shortcomings in the legitimacy of criminality.

Many of the texts we have read this semester bring into question how we think about “resistance” when it is so void in the historical archive. Shakeel A. Harris, in his work “The Play Practices of Enslaved Children,” explores the ways in which enslaved children come to terms with their environment through a unique condition of play, defining “enslaved child’s play as any bodily action, gesture, or decision enacted by the enslaved child with the intent of generating behavioral, social, intellectual, or physical rewards” and pushing it to include “the human desire for self-preservation and the reality of slave life as unpredictable and invasive.”20 Looking to play to more properly flesh out the figure of the child is unique in that it typically is an act ascribed to pleasure and personhood. Harris writes about enslaved children’s relationship to their masters as a game in itself, both deliberate in its manipulation of the master and enslaved child’s dynamic (for example the invocation of innocence in order to destroy crops though an intentional act in their labor) and also a possibility of survival, learning to read and write through letters placed over the plantation. Even a skill like hiding as a child from the master’s daughter21 set precedent that slaves could run away and hide. In Oluadah Equiano’s autobiography he writes, “Generally when the grown people in the neighborhood were gone far in the fields to labor, the children assembled together in some of the neighbors’ premises to play; and commonly some of us used to get up a tree to look out for any assailant, or kidnapper, that might come upon us; for they sometimes took those opportunities of our parents’ absence to attack and carry off as many as they could seize.”22 In his own subsequent kidnapping, he details how he and his sister cried out for help, but it only made their punishment harsher. As Harris describes, play practices then became attached to the reality of violence as still-propertied beings. It is important to note, however, the distinction between the physical conditions and disfiguration of play in spaces of violence and the child’s emotional understanding of play. For example, in “Scenes of Subjection” Hartman asks “how does one survive slavery and still believe in freedom,”23 or not think of all life as domination? Though Harris applies the violence of the enslaved quarters to child’s play, “play” as a concept in itself is not just manipulation but also still exists “beyond the realm of violence”24 The enslaved child can survive in their war-like adaptation of play but also in the lexicon of life and pleasure associated with play. The first person accounts from Harris and Equiano’s texts reveal that enslaved children did not understand their livelihoods as enslaved when separated from their mothers at a young age. Rather, there seems to be an interesting impermanence to the choices many of those subjected to violence make, that is particularly notable for the child who may not be asserting agency as much as “existing.” Vicky Osterweil, in describing the relationship of enslaved people to the North and South during the Civil War, writes “the most reliable form of resistance was flight,”25 though this was not always permanent. Hartman’s “stealing away” could fit this description, wherein meetings, quilting parties, and dances, for example, appropriated the spacial organization, even if temporarily, of the slave quarters. These brief but continuous moments of innovation speak to how “resistance” is termed through the perception of power: the runaway slave is seen as the most defiant symbol of freedom. However, the real conditions that provoke survival—the need to hide from the master’s daughter who could hurt you—is a precondition to what is most predominantly conveyed in historical texts about what “resistance” is. We can better understand the sheer force of “criminality” as a concept reinforced by the state and its power by looking to children because they can be at once invisibilized and hyperagential.

Children as objects of biopolitical control is a reality that extends to our present. In “The ‘right’ to maim: disablement and inhumanist biopolitics in Palestine,” Jasbir Puar writes about the relationship between Israel’s targeting of bodies and territory as maiming, used as a tactic of settler colonialism. Targeting youth is a part of an apparatus of biopolitical control to “stunt” their capabilities and possible resistance in Palestinian life. But on this attempt to destroy the generational possibility, Puar writes 

This is a biopolitical fantasy, that resistance can be located, stripped, and emptied. ‘Resistance itself’ becomes a target of computational metrics: How to measure, calculate, and capture resistance? But not only is biopolitical control a fundamentally productive assemblage; the ontological irreducibility of ‘resistance itself’ is elusive at best.26 

This maiming harnesses the delicate border between the ideas of “let live” and “will not let die”: to attack Palestinian children enough but give them the minimum they need to survive to quell “resistance.” Like the children in the texts we have studied, their lives continue to be fractured by the state’s phantasmal idea of “resistance” and to survive then, is also to be imposed into a state of criminality. 

The etymology of the word “choke” includes to “gasp for breath,” to extend life. The enslaved child’s first form of life, a cry, is indeed turned into another chokehold of enslavement—the violent reduction of all possibilities of life and therefore of love. But the child who chokes on their cry first takes another gasp of air, their brief survival is a form of continuance. To look at children is to see the differences between violence and resistance as a means to an end by the economic, colonial, state framework and the embodiment of life and survival. What is resistance, criminality, survival, and life if not imposed by the state? It is in these brief but continuous moments of air and breath, that power can be reimagined.

  1. Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Beacon Press, 2015), 6.
  2. E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Abacus, 2017), 22.
  3. Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic, 9.
  4. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2014), 33.
  5. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 39.
  6. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 40.
  7. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 74.
  8. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 88.
  9. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 89.
  10. Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, (Duke University Press, 2021), 18.
  11. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery, 31.
  12. Morgan, Reckoning With Slavery, 228.
  13. Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal.Carceral Notebooks, vol. 12 (2016): 255
  14. James, “The Womb of Western Theory,” 263.
  15. James, “The Womb of Western Theory,” 278.
  16. Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/2, (1972): 6
  17. John Newton in David Northrup, “Part 3.” The Atlantic Slave Trade (Wadsworth 2011), 80–89.
  18. Virginia Hamilton, et al, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (A.A. Knopf, 2016), 167.
  19. Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : Written by Herself, ed. L. Maria Child (Hodson and Son, 22, Portugal Street, Lincoln’s Inn, 1862), Chapter 21.
  20. Shakeel A. Harris, “The Play Practices of Enslaved Children,” American Journal of Play 13, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 232.. EBSCOhost,
  21. Harris, “The Play Practices of Enslaved Children,” 240.
  22. Olaudah Equiano, “The Interesting Narrative Of The Life Of Olaudah Equiano,” The Project Gutenberg EBook of “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African,” 2005, Chapter 2
  23. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2010), 8.
  24. Harris, “The Play Practices of Enslaved Children,” 16.
  25. Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting (Bold Type Books, 2020), 10.
  26. Jasbir K. Puar, “The ‘right’ to maim: disablement and inhumanist biopolitics in Palestine,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (May 2015): Gale Academic OneFile
 
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