An evocative new play charting the deep involvement of the Anglican church in chattel slavery is set to tread the boards with the powerful rendering of a monologue by a London-based Caribbean writer.
Titled, “Incidents in the Life of An Anglican Slave,” the one-hour long dramatic play-poem in the form of a monologue by writer Desirée Baptiste is inspired by a rare letter written between August to September in the year 1723 and previously discovered in the Church of England Archives within Lambeth Palace Library.
The letter was addressed from 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 that was approved by the Anglican church at the time.
Baptiste’s powerful dramatic interpretation will be performed at 6pm local time at St George’s Parish Church in Church Street, St George’s Parish on the island of Grenada tomorrow, Nov. 12. It is followed by a question-and-answer session.
Baptiste told Christian Daily International the Q&A is intended to give the play’s audience a chance to ask questions “so that we can all — in that Anglican space filled with memorials to enslavers — as a community, many of whom like myself are descended from Grenada’s enslaved people, have a conversation about this important history.”
“In the fiction that I created, inspired by the 1723 letter,” Baptiste explained further, “the character’s journey takes her from Virginia where the letter was written to Barbados, where she bears witness to the brutality of Caribbean slavery on plantations owned by the very Anglican Church she had been baptised by in Virginia and to whose Head she had appealed in writing, for freedom. She realises, while in the Caribbean, the Church’s deep complicity in chattel slavery.”
The anonymous slave writer, brought to life in the play, displays resilience, ingenuity, humour and strength during her trials and tribulations, according to Baptiste.
“And now, a ghost, still with us centuries later, she is here to try one more time, three centuries after her 1723 letter, to confront the Archbishop of Canterbury through her monologue’s address. She is also funny at times, as I mentioned, so the play isn’t a misery fest. It is also entirely written in verse.”
Desirée Baptiste is a writer and researcher based in London, England.
The monologue, being performed as a wider Caribbean tour, has already been presented at Kingstown, the capital of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, on Oct. 22 inside the ‘Mother Church’ of the Diocese of the Windward Islands: St. George’s Anglican Cathedral.
Codrington College, an Anglican theological college in St. John, Barbados, and affiliated with the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, also witnessed the dramatic reading in 2023 following the invitation of college principal Canon Rev. Michael Clarke. The college was once the site of two sugar plantations owned by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in 1701 as a missionary arm of the Church of England.
Enslaved people at the time were branded with the word “Society”, indicating that they were property of the SPG.
It has also been presented in the U.K. at prestigious venues like Lambeth Palace Library, Jesus College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and the Edinburgh Fringe, as well as previously in the Caribbean at the Walcott Warner Theatre in Barbados.
Baptiste shares more about the letter in her own written account.
