From the Slave Ship to Indentureship to the Oil Tanker

Abstract In 1942, the Dutch colonial state authorized the massacre (bloedbad) of Chinese sailors working under material conditions of de facto indentured servitude on an oil tanker—at constant risk of attack from Nazi U-boats—in Curaçao. Drawing from Triunfo di Sablika’s poem entitled ‘1942: A Dutch Colonial Bloodbath in Curaçao’ (2019) as well as original archival work, this article tarries with the memory and legacy of the praxis of radical kinship amidst Dutch colonial counterinsurgency in the Caribbean Sea as it manifests in the simultaneously national and anti-national monument known and commemorated as Santana Kolebra Bèrdè in Curaçao. Noting how, from the slave ship to indentureship to the oil tanker, the history of shipping and logistics owes its very existence to the shipped subjects, the article explores how the comradeship and militancy of those who were shipped constantly undermines the ostensibly totalizing force of the imperial, colonial, and racial capitalist violence of containerization and counter-insurgency. How did the shipped and their indentured kin theorize the ship in relationship with their shipmates, and in comradeship with each other? Attending to this question, the article explores how the conditions of superfluity and fungibility brutally imposed on the Chinese workers is redirected into a radical claim of kinship and comradeship as shipmates who share a common fate on the oil tanker (and its slave and indenture ship avatars) come together in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle.