Silence as Talk and Women's Testimonies as Unspeakable Acts in Manumission Papers

This paper explores the testimonies of women whom as runaway slaves recounted their experiences of slavery and pursuit of freedom to British Political Agents in the Gulf protectorates of Muscat, Bahrain, and Sharjah. It focuses on women either who identified themselves or whom British agents identified as domestic servants in manumission records from the 1920s to the 1940s. Scholarship on slavery in Arabized Muslim societies depict the primary roles performed by enslaved women as domestic servants and concubines valued for their sexual labor. However, British manumission records are silent on explicit references to the sexual labor of “domestic servants.” Popular, heritage, and scholarly discourses assume both sexuality and slavery to be unspeakable topics in Arab societies. This paper focuses on the silences in women’s testimonies in manumission records around their work as domestic slaves. It considers the roles that British agents played in documenting and silencing aspects of the experiences of runaway domestic slaves. It questions whether the silences in their testimonies might be indicative of veiled references to unspeakable acts -- reflecting hidden, obscure, and even secret communication in their testimonies.