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Babeth Fonchie: The formation of a scab

By Babeth Fonchie, translated by Laura Vroomen
25 February 2021 1 min. reading time Young Voices on Slavery

Eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors give a voice to an artefact from the Slavery exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Babeth Fonchie wrote a poem inspired by old wooden stocks and matching iron shackles.

the formation of a scab

the metal is cold but not as frigid
as the people who took you by the scruff
of the neck. veins in the wood
are the notches in you. somewhere between
ocean voyage, display on platforms
and the whistling of the whip,
the epidermis lost its role.
it tends to happen fast the more
you tear open the wound
the more the body
forgets to protect itself, there is
flesh on the bone fearful is the bone.
you’re reduced to veins fit to burst,
rage with nowhere to go, muscles
convulsing, such is
the side effect of a day of graft.
hunched back heat on the mark
that turns to scar – in this generation
and the next, pigment migrating
penetrating the deeper layer of skin,
yet another day that spills over
into the colour of dirt under your nails
in welts and imprints, there’s a reason
rust is red and brown.
these instruments were made
for squeezing man
out of his body.

This text was written during a residency at Flemish-Dutch cultural organisation Huis deBuren in association with the Biermans-Lapôtre Foundation.

Babeth Foncie klein

Babeth Fonchie

Poet, artist and law graduate. Journeys of discovery and the raw reality of life are central themes in her work. In autumn 2019 she became the in-house poet at online feminist magazine LilithMag. She was selected for deBuren’s poetry programme Vers van het Mes and the Slow Writing Lab. Her poems have appeared in, among other publications, Hard//Hoofd, De Groene Amsterdammer, ELLE and the collection Zwemlessen voor later (2020, Vrijdag).

photo © Marianne Hommersom

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