A provocative new work depicting the Church of England’s deep involvement in chattel slavery is likely to create a stir with its powerful monologue by a London-based Caribbean author.
Entitled “Events in the Life of an Anglican Slave,” this one-hour dramaturgy is in the form of a monologue by author Désirée Baptiste, written between August and September 1723 and inspired by rare letters previously discovered in the Anglican archives in Lambeth Palace Library.
This letter was written by an anonymous Virginian slave to the then Archbishop of Canterbury and King George I, pleading for freedom while reporting the horrors, abuses, and realities of chattel slavery, which was then sanctioned by the Church of England.
Baptiste’s powerful dramatic interpretation will be performed tomorrow, November 12, at 6pm local time, at St. George’s Parish Church, Church Street, St. George’s Parish, Grenada. Afterwards, a question and answer session will be held.
Baptiste told Christian Daily International that the purpose of the Q&A is to give the play’s audience an opportunity to ask questions. “This is so that we can all, as a community, many of us, like myself, descendants of Grenada’s enslaved people, have a conversation about this important history in an episcopal space filled with monuments to enslavers.”
“In my fiction inspired by the 1723 letter,” Baptiste further explained, “the character’s journey takes her from Virginia, where the letter was written, to Barbados, where she is baptized in Virginia and bears witness to the brutality of slavery in the Caribbean on a plantation owned by the Episcopal Church, where she appealed for freedom in writing. While she is in the Caribbean, Church is deeply complicit in chattel slavery.”
According to Baptiste, the anonymous slave writer brought to life in the play exhibits resilience, ingenuity, humor, and strength in the face of trials and tribulations.
“And now, centuries later, she is a ghost who is still with us, three centuries after her 1723 letter, and she is here to try once more to confront the Archbishop of Canterbury through a monologue oration. As I said, she is also funny at times, so this play is not a gory extravaganza. It is also written entirely in verse.”
Desirée Baptiste is a writer and researcher based in London, UK.
The monologue has been performed on a wide-ranging tour of the Caribbean, and has already been performed on October 22 at St. George’s Anglican Cathedral, the Windward Islands diocese’s “mother church” in Kingstown, the capital of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Codrington College, an Anglican theological college in St. John’s, Barbados, affiliated with the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, also witnessed a dramatic reading in 2023 at the invitation of the college’s principal, Rector Michael Clarke. The college was once the site of two sugar estates owned by the Society for the Propagation of the Foreign Gospel (SPG), founded in 1701 as the missionary arm of the Church of England.
Enslaved people at that time were stamped with the word “society” indicating that they were the property of self-propelled artillery.
The production has been performed in the UK at prestigious venues such as Lambeth Palace Library, Jesus College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford and the Edinburgh Fringe, and previously in the Caribbean at the Walcott Warner Theater in Barbados.
Ms. Baptiste spoke in detail about the letter in her own writing.
