‘Bartica girl’ Estherine Adams gives voice to women “Chained in Silence”

Estherine Adams was scrolling through her Facebook account in late December, 2023 when she spotted a notification about submissions for the Guyana Prize for Literature.
Just a few hours remained before the deadline ended for submissions, and she had a manuscript that could be entered in the non-fiction category. She had done extensive research for her dissertation on the incarceration of non-white women in British Guiana following emancipation, and
she’d completed the tedious task of crafting her project into a manuscript.
Still, she wasn’t very confident that it was complete, particularly not for submission for the country’s most prestigious literary award. “I had thought about it (submitting the manuscript), but I felt that the work was not ready, not good enough. On the day of the deadline, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I saw the reminder on the Ministry of Culture’s page. It was the last day for submission, so I thought: ‘This must be a sign. I’m just going to send in what I’ve completed. I’ll use this opportunity to see if the manuscript is ready for publication’. I told myself that at least I will get some good feedback on what I need to work on to make it ready for the world of academic publishing.”

And what a feedback she got.
On Friday, March 1, her entry, “The Few Among the Many: Women’s Labour in British Guiana’s Jails, 1838-1917,” received top honours in the Guyana Prize for Literature (2023) Non-Fiction category. It was lauded as being “original and meticulously documented.”
That was a week ago —possibly too short a period for Estherine Adams to come down to earth. “Wow! That was my immediate reaction upon hearing that my work was shortlisted,” she told Guyana Times.
“My friends were saying to me, ‘You know you’ll win this!’ But to be quite honest, I did not believe I would, especially looking at the lineup I was up against. I am humbled to have won the award,” she said.
In ‘The Few Among The Many’, Adams poignantly shows how the labour of non-white women prisoners was exploited in service of British Guiana’s plantation economy during the 1883-1917 post-emancipation period. This research was for her 2022 dissertation (Ph.D. History,) project.
“But I can argue that it started a lot earlier, when I worked as a researcher on several Leicester University /ESRC/UG/Guyana Prison Service projects that explored various aspects of the prison system in Guyana, to ascertain the colonial legacy on the current prison system. While researching at the Walter Rodney Archives (supplemented with documents from the National Archives, Kew London, the University of Guyana’s Caribbean Research Library), I was amazed at the volume of documents on the colonial prison system, including prison reports, punishment records, clemency petitions, parliamentary papers detailing prison reforms, etc.
“What struck me is that a lot tended to focus on incarcerated men, which in a sense is understandable, since men make up the majority of the prison population. But every so often, these women kept emerging, and I found that interesting. They were few in comparison to the men, but their presence in the prison was significant. And so began my journey to excavating these women’s stories,” she detailed.
Unearthing these harrowing stories tested her emotionally. “The women I met during this research had different stories; some heart wrenching, like the 14-year-old girl sentenced to death; some funny, some inspiring with their acts of resistance and their resilience. Several stories inspired a sense of outrage, like this story of an enslaved woman who had been incarcerated for a few years and ended up having a child while in jail. Some had me rooting for the women, like the one who escaped jail only to be found many years later with a well-established business in Berbice. I can go on about these wonderful women who took me through a rollercoaster of emotions,” she declared.
“This was my most challenging project to date. I probably wrote about five different drafts of this work. It is always challenging to pull the material together, because I always collect way more than I need, and sometimes I feel like I need to include everything. I had a wonderful dissertation advisor, Professor Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez, who kept remining me that it was okay to leave stuff out. He would say to me, ‘Estherine, think of this dissertation as your first book project. Once you get this out of the way, you’ll use the other material you have for your second and third books’,” she disclosed.
“Of course, I always felt guilty for including some of the women and not being able to include others. Like Talitha LeFlouria, one of my favourite authors, suggests, I feel giving voice to these women who have been Chained in Silence for so long is important work,” she explained.

Dissertation into manuscript
Another challenge was converting her dissertation into a manuscript. “It’s a lot of work; almost like rewriting the entire thing, and I had been working on it since my graduation,” she explained.
And even on completion and submission, she had little hope of even being shortlisted. “Wow! That was literally all I said when my friend Shammane Joseph-Jackson called me at 10:30 to tell me that I was shortlisted. I think there was some mix-up with my email, so I did not receive the initial correspondence from the Ministry of Culture informing me that I was shortlisted. So, when Shammane called, both of us were surprised. On her part, because I did not tell anyone that I had submitted an entry, and on my part, because I still doubt my abilities,” she explained.
“The response has been tremendous, and I’m still a bit on the high.”

Estherine Adams grew up in Bartica, and ironically, attended the Mazaruni Primary School before moving to St. John the Baptist Primary.
“I then attended the Anna Regina Multilateral School (go ARMS!),” she disclosed.
“I always loved reading, and my mother nurtured this love. As children, she encouraged us to stay inside and read, rather than being outside gallivanting (her word, not mine!). She used to tell us, ‘Books can’t seh you seh’.
“I was a business student in high school, but when I entered CPCE (Cyril Potter College of Education), there was no business studies programme at the time, and my two options to major were English and Social Studies. I had excellent CXC grades in both subjects, but felt Social Studies would be easier. I did not know at the time that Social Studies at CPCE meant courses in history, geography and social studies. In my first history class, the tutor was Ms. Nebert Haynes, I clearly remember her standing in front of the class and lecturing. She had no text books or lecture materials; she was just teaching the class from memory. That lesson was Europe in the late 15th century. That was my wow moment! My come to Jesus! My eureka moment! Right there and then I knew I wanted to teach history, and the rest, as we say, is history,” Estherine explained.
“After college, I returned to Bartica, where I taught history and geography at the Bartica Secondary School. I then moved to Georgetown to pursue my BA, and then my MA in history. I taught at Campbellville Secondary, North Georgetown Secondary and St. Rose’s High before moving over to the University of Guyana as a full-time faculty member,” she explained.
Estherine Adams has a slew of impressive credentials: Head of the University of Guyana’s Department of History and Caribbean Studies; Ph.D., History, (University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi, USA); Master of Arts, History; Bachelor of Arts, History, (distinction) as well as her Cyril Potter College of Education Trained Teacher’s Certificate (Cyril Potter College of Education, Turkeyen).
She is seeking to have her ground-breaking manuscript published. “I’m interested in academic publishing, so I am looking at various university presses. I am still in the process of finalising the book proposal that I’ll be sending out to potential publishers,” she said.
“I also had the wonderful opportunity of visiting the Gladstone Library in Wales last November, as winner of the 2023 Miranda Kaufmann Black British History Scholarship. I was able to photograph a large part of their archive on British Guiana, and came across an inquiry into a sexual abuse scandal on the West Coast of Demerara in the early 1800. So, one of the projects I am currently working on is a piece about this prominent reverend from the London Missionary Society who was accused of raping several enslaved women,” she disclosed. (Michael Jordan)