by Aixin Aydin
Dunbar, Ericka Shawndricka. Trafficking Hadassah: Collective Trauma, Cultural Memory, and Identity in the Book of Esther and in the African Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2022. 132 pages. Ebook $19.50. ISBN 9780367769116
In Trafficking Hadassah, Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar reads the book of Esther through the lens of the later transatlantic labor and sex trafficking of Africana women and girls. A touching but also painful book, Trafficking Hadassah subverts the narration of the biblical story by focusing on the traumatic experiences of racially minoritized women and girls trafficked to sexually serve the king. Because of the intentional omission of female voices within the original text, Dunbar uses later research about Black women’s trauma and cultural memory to center Vashti, Hadassah/Esther, and the unnamed girls.
Very few scholars look at the way that religion’s role in racial formation contributes to sexualized violence. Works like Dunbar help us decode why patriarchal empires continue to reenact similar forms of violence against racialized women within a religious context.
Trafficking fundamentally changes the subjectivity of the trafficked girls. Dunbar explores how the three years of cosmetic treatments for trafficked subjects force them to suppress themselves, to conform both physically and mentally to colonial standards of femininity. The loss of identity and culture through trafficking, for Africana women and girls across history, produces multigenerational trauma.
The book of Esther continues to be read and told as an example of proper religious behavior, and thus, readings that ignore the bodily violation of Black women and girls within the text normalizes the same sexual abuses in the present. Dunbar questions the moral that Esther was trafficked “for such a time as this,” in order to save her Jewish community from violence in consideration that hundreds of other girls were trafficked by the empire beside her.
I felt nervous to approach Trafficking Hadassah because I do not have a scholarly background in biblical criticism; I came to the book out of my research in gender-based violence and religion. Dunbar manages to deftly and convincingly apply modern categories to ancient narratives, and similarly, demonstrate the implications of biblical criticism to non-biblical scholars. She lives up to her promise to provide an ethical biblical interpretation. The book is short and accessible to people interested in racialized gender violence as well as those who focus on biblical criticism. Read together with books such as Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh’s The Souls of Womenfolk gives us a powerful insight into the ways in which scholars can demonstrate the overlap between identity and memory, sexual violence, and religion.
Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar is Visiting Professor of Hebrew Bible, Payne Theological Seminary, Wilberforce, Ohio, USA.
Aixin Aydin is a PhD student at the University of Texas. She studies immigration, sexual violence, and religion.
