Reading Damma’s letter closely in two languages, Dutch Creole and Gbe, offers a window into a different world—a world that has been obscured by the legacies of slavery and colonization. The vast majority of surviving sources about the transatlantic slave trade were written by Europeans in European languages. As a result, they embed European concepts and categories like “God,” “white,” and “nation.” As we have seen, these terms do not have clear correlates in languages like Gbe, and they prioritize European ways of knowing and understanding the world.

One of the greatest challenges for historical research is confronting this structural inequity in our sources and countering it with a variety of methodological strategies. To explore the meaning of “adga tome,” we have combined linguistics with microhistory, a research method we have called critical conjecture: the use of interdisciplinary approaches to explore multiple possible interpretations of an archival source – in this case, Damma’s letter.

By examining the words that Damma used in Gbe, we can—and should—reconsider the meaning of English-language terms like “nation,” “race” and “God.” Damma conceptualized these categories in significantly different ways than they are understood today. The absence of racialized language in Gbe (i.e. yovo versus blanco) is one of the most striking differences between the two languages. Whereas “yovo tome” was translated into Creole as “blanco land” (the land of the whites), it is more accurately interpreted as a “foreign country” or “foreign nation.” This interpretation of “yovo tome” suggests that Gbe-language notions of “foreignness” should not necessarily be understood through a racialized framework, and that the ideology of white supremacy was one that Damma encountered after her enslavement. 

Similarly, the concept of “God” that emerges in Damma’s Gbe text is fundamentally different from the “God” of the Dutch Creole version. The God of Damma’s homeland, “Mau,” does not connote the same gender as “the Lord God” in the Christian cosmology. Moreover, the Dutch Creole “translation” intentionally removes Damma’s use of the Gbe term “Mau” to refer to the Christian God. The fact that Damma may have used the terms “Mau” and “vodu” to refer to Jesus further suggests that Damma’s “conversion” to Moravian Christianity did not mean that she abandoned the Gods of adga tome; instead, she had a flexible approach to divinity that offered space for both “Jesus” and “Bruku Mau.” 

Finally, while Damma’s homeland is “Popo op Afrika” (“Popo in Africa”) in Dutch Creole, the phrase offers an overlapping but distinct meaning that ties Damma to the Aja people as well as to “Popo” and “Africa.” Knowing this allows us to better understand the complexity of Damma’s identity and the numerous communities, “nations,” and people with whom she identified over the course of her life.

While we are proud of our work and believe that it offers new insight into Damma’s worldview, our interpretations are inconclusive. We intentionally use the word “interpretation,” rather than “translation,” since the former emphasizes the process of understanding, rather than its completeness. 

For us, the experience of reading and interpreting Damma’s letter has been both rewarding and difficult. While this digital project focused on a small number of terms and phrases in Damma’s letter, there were some sentences we could not interpret. We sometimes disagreed over the best interpretation of a particular phrase or word. The experience has challenged all of us, in different ways, to reconsider our assumptions and interpretations of the past. In fact, many of us had previously published essays or articles about Damma (i.e. Marotta or Madlena) that we now realize contain inaccuracies. This admission speaks to the importance of maintaining both humility and creativity in our research. 

Our experience also demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary research and collaborative work. Only by bringing together the fields of linguistics, archival studies, and history were we able to arrive at the new interpretations we have offered here. One field of research alone cannot provide a broad enough perspective, and none of us could have produced these findings on our own. Collective conversation and respectful debate enabled several breakthroughs in our interpretations of Damma’s letter. 

We hope that learning about Damma’s Gbe words has opened up a new window for you into a period of human history that continues to cast its shadow on our present. And, most importantly, we hope this project has encouraged you to continue to question, rather than to simply accept, the stories about the past that have been handed down to us all, and to listen closely to the voices of those who are the hardest to hear.