Thomas Thistlewood and Tom by Pamela Mordecai | Poems Rethabile Likes

"Thomas Thistlewood and Tom"
by Pamela Mordecai

Poet Pamela Mordecai reads from "Thomas Thistlewood and Tom" — a searing excerpt from her collection Subversive Sonnets (Tsar Books, 2012).

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Mordecai's Subversive Sonnets confronts the history of slavery in Jamaica through the figure of Thomas Thistlewood — a real historical figure, an eighteenth-century plantation overseer whose diaries documented, in clinical detail, the systematic torture and rape of enslaved people.

In this excerpt, the poet gives voice to Tom — both the enslaved man and the ghost of Thistlewood's own name. The lines are unbearable and necessary:

"I tell myself: 'So many days I dig the soft
ground of her front, water it, plant my seed,
watch it breed in her belly. If one day
I have to eat the stinking fruit it voids to live,
See my mouth here. Come. Fill it with her excrement.'"

My name is Tom. It is this fiend's as well.
He is no person, nor no man, nor common visitor
From hell.

Pam's craft is merciless — the sonnet form holds atrocity in its cage, and the voice of Tom refuses to let us look away. This is poetry as witness, as exhumation, as reckoning.

— Rethabile

Pamela Mordecai reading "Thomas Thistlewood and Tom"

In this video, Pamela Mordecai reads her poem "Thomas Thistlewood and Tom" from her collection Subversive Sonnets. The reading is stark and powerful, giving voice to the enslaved man Tom and confronting the brutality of the historical figure Thomas Thistlewood.

Video source: YouTube. Duration slightly over 2 minutes.

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