Chapter 1: From Slave Narratives to “Groundings”: Moving from the Peripheries to the Centre of Knowledge

By layering excerpts of Caribbean poetry, I layer in epigraphs of myself as a decolonizing researcher. Throughout the chapter, I pair selected stanzas with each section to illustrate the heuristic process of becoming decolonized or the constant process of resisting the colonizer’s gaze (Yancy, 2008). I selected an excerpt from “Talk” by Kwame Dawes as it specifically called upon women to not be silent but reveal their deepest grief and sorrow in hopes of healing and finding agency. It precedes the edited excerpt below from my doctoral dissertation (Stewart, 2013) where I re-tell the narratives of some of the hidden female figures of slavery in Jamaica.