Millie Gone to Brazil - (Anthropology) by Elaine P Elaine P Rocha (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

'Millie Gone to Brazil' is the title of one of the most popular folk songs in Barbados. Written in the early 20th century by an unknown author, the song has travelled with Barbadian migrants to Cuba, the United States of America, Canada and England. It tells the story of a young woman - Millie - killed by her lover, who claimed that she had left Barbados to go to Brazil.

This book focuses on the killings of Millicent Gittens, murdered in Barbados in 1916 and of Christine Minggs, a Barbadian immigrant murdered in Brazil in 1924. As a backdrop to those crimes, it depicts the poverty and marginality among Black populations during the post-abolition period in Barbados and Brazil, emphasizing the low status of black women and their vulnerabilities. To understand the vulnerability of Black Barbadian women. At the turn of the 20th century, economic, social and political exclusion drove thousands of people to emigrate from the small islands of the Caribbean in search of a better life. Black immigrants, although much necessary labor force, faced discrimination and limited opportunities to improve their lives, for women, life was harder.

Who speaks on behalf of the dead women? In criminal processes, they are the victim, the corpse, not a person.

'Millie Gone to Brazil' sheds some light on the anonymous lives of Black people from lower classes in Barbados and examines a not well-known migration path of West Indians to the rainforest region of Brazil. Women and men struggled to make a life in Barbados and in Brazil, working, loving, building families, facing conflicts. Some survived, some perished. Scraps of their stories were registered in the pages of newspapers, in police reports, in criminal processes, and in popular songs. Some of those stories are narrated in this book.

Review Quotes

Elaine Rocha's book explores the nature of intimate partner violence against black women, using the stories of two black Barbadian women who were brutally murdered in the early part of the twentieth century - one in Barbados and one in Brazil. Her sensitive and incisive historical analysis locates these stories in the intersections between gender and labour history and provides a grim reminder that black women in the Americas are still subjected to such acts of violence today.

Dr. Alan Cobley

Emeritus Professor of History,

The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, Barbados

"Millie Gone to Brazil" is far more than a simple folk song. It hints at untold stories of how Barbadian women navigated the perils of life after slavery, unprotected against the threats of multiple forms of violence. Eliana Rocha skillfully pieces together sparse traces of two women's deaths to reveal the courageous lives of those who stayed as well as those who went abroad. An important part of the history of all Bajans, and a refusal of the silences that continue to hide violence against Black women.

Dr. Kim D. Butler

Rutgers University