Yet regardless of whether intimate sexual contact took place between enslaved Africans in the Atlantic or after landing, relationships between shipmates read as queer relationships. Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity waiting to be excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer in the sense of marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths.
— "Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage" by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley
I began to learn this black Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word Creole women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is “my girl,” but literally it means mate, as in shipmate — she who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sedimented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships. [...] Sally and Richard Price’s research on Saramacca maroons documents mati as “a highly charged volitional relationship . . . that dates back to the Middle Passage — matis were originally ‘shipmates,’ those who had survived the journey out from Africa together . . . those who had experienced the trauma of enslavement and transport together.” Colonial chronicles suggest that shipmate relationships were prominent in other parts of the Caribbean as well. Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry reports mati-like partnerships between enslaved women in prerevolutionary Haiti in his Description. . . de l’Isle Saint Domingue (1797), and in The History . . . of the British West-Indies (1794) Bryan Edwards remarks: “This is a striking circumstance; the term shipmate is understood among [West Indian slaves] as signifying a relationship of the most endearing nature; perhaps as recalling the time when the sufferers were cut off together from their common country and kindred, and awakening reciprocal sympathy from the remembrance of mutual affliction.” Expanding these observations, the anthropologist Gloria Wekker notes the significance of bonds between shipmates throughout the Afro-Atlantic: In different parts of the Diaspora the relationship between people who came over to the “New” World on the same ship remained a peculiarity of this experience. The Brazilian “malungo,” the Trinidadian “malongue,” the Haitian “batiment” and the Surinamese “sippi” and “mati” are all examples of this special, non-biological bond between two people of the same sex.
#does that make ‘batiment’ the root word for ‘batty man’ in Jamaican patois?#I know the latter is a slur I’m just wondering
good question! it seems like the etymology is usually explained as "batty" (buttocks) + boy or man, but thats an interesting connection! i do wonder if the two are connected and it just hasnt been discussed.
