3 ideas
Under chattel slavery a newborn is the master's future property, so an enslaved woman's womb is part of the plantation's capital. Killing an infant at birth therefore works as sabotage: it denies the system its next generation of labor. The novel presents this as an act that is monstrous and resistant at once, and it will not settle that tension.
Lisette was born in the colony and has no memory of Africa. Because this memory lives only in speech, the elders decide what is passed down, when, and to whom, and each telling is a deliberate act of shaping who the listener becomes.
As rumors of Makandal's poison conspiracy spread, the enslaved people closest to the masters become the people the masters fear most, including cooks, nurses, and house servants. Poisoning is a weapon suited to the powerless because it uses the access that servitude itself requires. It also exposes how fragile colonial control was, since the masters' fear of unseen revenge spread far beyond the actual poisonings.