The Hum of Power Rising from the Belly of Death

Sails slicing through Caribbean winds held whispers of chains sliding onto wrists while echoing the screams of dark lives being ripped from everything they knew. When Spanish ships dropped anchor in the early 1500s, touching down first in Hispaniola, they harnessed the idea that some lives could be bought and sold as property if deemed less than.

By 1502, the first known Africans arrived in the Caribbean, dragged upon her shores by the machinery of empire They joined Indigenous people already buckling under Spanish demands for labor, tribute, and forced faith. Slavery wasn’t some unfortunate side effect of colonisation; it was the engine, the oppressed fuel keeping those ships—and European fortunes—moving. From the jungles of the Amazon to the silver mines of Potosí, human bodies became bridges over which European wealth marched.

Spanish and Portuguese power spread like molten metal, burning new shapes into entire continents. But even in the middle of brutality, threads of humanity refused to snap. A mother sang Congo lullabies to a baby who’d never see African skies. An Arawak man, skin marked by forced labor, carved his ancestors’ faces into the walls of a mine. In secret moments, people kept love alive—the powerful love of community, and the radical act of surviving under the force of greed.

European ledgers tracked dates, human cargo, weights, gold tallies, barrels of sugar. What they didn’t record was how an enslaved woman held another’s trembling hand as they stumbled off the ship, or how men cried silent tears for homelands they’d never touch again, or how familial strangers bonded a rainbow nation, planting the seeds that connects the diaspora to this day, birthing a revolution.

Slavery spread like oil across water, slick and unstoppable, touching every shore and whitening every ripple. Colonisers profited through domination, but they couldn’t stamp out human connection. Even in the belly of slave ships, a vibration so strong echoed fear in the hearts of captors who secretly understood that revolt would be wholly justified. The hum of power rising from the belly of death; songs of life filling earth and ether and carrying scraps of memory and hope across the Atlantic. Those songs weaved new cultures, birthed new identities, and shouted the truth that no matter who claimed ownership of their bodies, soul and spirit remain untamed.

The part of history that survives erasure likes to talk about empires rising and falling as if it wasn’t on the backs of OG life. The original to their copy. The blueprint before dilution. Amid conquest and forced migration, love—in all its shades—survived in quiet rebellion. It still hums today as Black joy, the one thing they can never tame or control. A reminder to the world that no matter how many times whiteness tries to divide and conquer, humanity’s capacity for joy and love can’t be measured—or contained.

So the machine rages to keep the lie of inferiority alive, but under the churn of empire, flows the truth. Black is key to everything.