Insurrection: A Family History of Barbados

From his Windrush generation mum to his enslaved and enslaver ancestors, Peter Brathwaite tells an unexpected family history of Barbados that swells with sadness, rings with laughter and rises in song

When Peter’s mum, a retired NHS nurse of the Windrush generation, gives him his grandpap’s cou-cou stick (for making Barbadian cornmeal), Peter’s investigation into his heritage begins. He finds that not only is he descended from eighteenth-century sugar-plantation owner John Brathwaite, but that members of his family also include Ann (an enslaved mistress of an enslaver ancestor) and Margaret and her husband Addo, who became free and landowning people of colour following the great insurrection of 1816. Margaret also went on to found the Brathwaite family festival, still celebrated today.

Peter’s troubling discoveries in the archives of his white forebears intermingle with this counter-archive of Black life – from the rebel sounds of Bajan folk songs to modern-day WhatsApps – to give voice to a wide diasporic community, then and now. Throughout, Peter channels the mischief of the island spirit Shaggy Bear (even donning his colourful costume at one point) as he seeks to embody the joys and complexities of an island’s violent history. Taking the Brathwaite family tag and reclaiming it for all the family, Not All of Me Will Die is an emotional reckoning with a legacy of oppression which generously opens the door to a richer understanding of colonial experience and our shared history.