Project title

Con La Boca / With the Mouth

Research question

How do the history of slavery and its aftermath live on in one Dutch Caribbean family, and how can a novel drawn from that family’s oral history give them form?

Project description

Con La Boca is a historical novel, currently in draft, that follows six generations of women in one family. It is drawn from the family’s oral history and traces what passes from mother to daughter, both purpose and pain. Through these individual lives, the novel shows how slavery, as a vast historical system, reaches into family life, shaping relationships, identities and memories as well as ideas of belonging and survival. It also asks how one family on Saba found ways to live with that legacy. The novel is rooted in Saba and in the particular history of this small Dutch Caribbean island.

Selected publications

  • HER(E): A Collection of Queer Caribbean LGBTI Poetry and Short Stories (2019)

The image manifests how the lingering legacy of transatlantic human trafficking washes ashore across Saban generations. The ship bursting forth from the skyward face embodies the known and unknowable histories passed down between women seeking belonging and survival.