Work 17

Queen Mary, oh, where are you going to burn? Queen Mary, oh, where are you going to burn? Don’t ask me anything, just give me a match and some oil. The basin prison, that’s where the money is.

Citation: Jeannette Allis Bastian (2003): Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost its Archives and Found its History. London: Libraries Unlimited, p. 12. Image: Wikimedia

Song about Mary Thomas (ca. 1848-1905), called Queen Mary. She was one of three black leaders of the labor protests in the Virgin Islands, then a Danish colony.

Although slavery was abolished in 1848, working conditions had not improved much. Together with Queen Agnes and Queen Mathilda, Queen Mary organized the so-called Fireburn protests in 1878. These were the largest workers' protests in Danish history(The Workers Museum 2018: Fireburn) in terms of participation in the protests, the destruction of infrastructure and, above all, the loss of life, especially on the side of the rebels (conversation by glokal with Gunvor Simonsen, University of Copenhagen 2020). Statues on the islands and in Denmark, songs and theater performances keep the memories of the three "queens" alive.

*Gunvor Simonsen (2017): Slave Stories: Law, Representation, and Gender in the Danish West Indies. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. *Jeannette Allis Bastian (2003): Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. London: Libraries Unlimited.