The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Terry Rey (review)
Alas, two fundamental claims of the text are problematic. The author asserts that his exploration of the major theme, surviving slavery, is disconnected from “the enslaved people’s efforts to rebel, resist and wrest some measure of autonomy from their enslavers” (4). Yet he repeatedly underscores that they were frequently compelled to disobey and run away to lodge complaints because their masters “did everything possible to keep enslaved people from making complaints” (57). Indeed, the letter of the Berbice law legalized their actions, but in practice enslaved persons intentionally defied their masters in lodging complaints. The perspective, therefore, that complaints were separate from resistance is not sustained in the discourse. The final conclusion of the text is also a difficult pill. In reference to the lives of enslaved persons in Berbice, the author declares, “It was, in the end, a world at once utterly foreign and disconcertingly similar to our own” (194). The comparative similarity the author draws between the lives of servile laborers and our current milieu is unacceptable and disconcerting.