Reading the Plantation Landscape of Barbados: Kamau Brathwaite’s The Namsetoura Papers and Annalee Davis’s This Ground Beneath My Feet: A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands
by Melanie Otto
—
First published in the Journal of West Indian Literature
2017
and I bent down
listening to the land
and all I heard was tongueless whispering
as if some buried slave wanted to speak again
—Martin Carter
Tongueless Whispering
In his 1951 poem “Listening to the Land,” part of which forms the epigraph to this essay, the Guyanese poet and activist Martin Carter expresses “the discursive paradox” of recording a history that has been violently disrupted, at best diffused, and in most cases erased (DeLoughrey and Handley 5). Yet the “tongueless whispering” of the Caribbean earth continues to speak to those who have made it their task to listen, decipher, and interpret it. Evelyn O’Callaghan argues that “Caribbean landscapes are texts in their own right, huge canvasses on which history has certainly painted very different pictures over time and which can be read in very different ways” (O’Callaghan, “Looking”). Similarly, the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has described the Caribbean landscape as an “open book”: “The landscape possessed a life, because, the landscape, for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which one worked was all around me” (3). At the same time, the editors of Caribbean Literature and the Environment rightly point out that “there is probably no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean” (DeLoughrey et al. 1). Consequently, what is being read, and how, is not at all straightforward, nor is there just one possible interpretation of the “tongueless whispering” of the soil. Using these observations as my starting points, I look at how the poet Kamau Brathwaite and the visual artist Annalee Davis read the landscape of their native Barbados in search of historical clues and personal meaning. In the process, both artists create a language of landscape that offers a sense of belonging and redemption in the face of the lingering traumas of history that characterize the region.1 Choosing both a poet and a visual artist reflects my wider interest in different forms of discursivity and their often fluid boundaries. More specifically, it allows me to engage with how different approaches to artistic practice articulate what Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley in their introduction to Postcolonial Ecologies have referred to as the “recuperative role of place” (5, emphasis original). While DeLoughrey and Handley emphasize “the impossibility of fully translating place because of the historical violence that produces ‘tongueless whispering’,” my own reading foregrounds how both Brathwaite and Davis create media that engage in acts of imaginative recovery and translation of seemingly irretrievable or lost narratives encoded in the ecosystem of the Barbados landscape (5, emphasis original). In this sense, the reading of landscape is open to interpretation and depends for meaning on who reads it and in what context.
In addition to their choice of medium therefore, Brathwaite’s and Davis’s racial and ethnic backgrounds are crucial to how they receive and subsequently translate the tongueless whispering of the land. Brathwaite’s work is culturally and politically primarily Afrocentric. As a descendant of slaves, he reads the landscape for traces of their history and for a version of the past that does not appear in official colonial documents or dominant versions of historical narrative. The Namsetoura Papers, first published in 2004, blends poetry, personal essay, visual images and archaeological reports, creating what Anthony Carrigan has called a “formally inter-discursive” text (85). As such, the diverse discursive forms employed by Brathwaite speak and relate to each other, creating a multimedia environment in the process. Thematically, The Namsetoura Papers is a response to Brathwaite’s return to Barbados in the late 1990s after many decades spent living and working abroad, and his settling in the new home he calls CowPastor in the district of Christ Church on pasture land that was once part of the Wilcox sugar plantation.
Annalee Davis is of white creole descent. She keeps a studio on Walkers Dairy, formerly a sugar plantation, which has been in the possession of her family for the last one hundred years, while the island itself has been home to her ancestors, who came to Barbados as freemen, planters and indentured labourers, since the seventeenth century. Davis’s 2016 multimedia exhibition This Ground Beneath My Feet: A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands explores how the ground of the family property contains and records history.2 For Davis, as for Brathwaite, the ground beneath their feet is an archive that demands to be read as the layers of the past are excavated, either deliberately or accidentally, and interpreted. While a large part of Davis’s exhibition is focused on drawings of typically Barbadian rab land plants or weeds, many of which are drawn on archival documents, such as plantation ledgers from the 1970s, the ground itself holds traces of the unrecorded dead for both artists.3 In his reading of The Namsetoura Papers, Carrigan argues that Brathwaite is “sensitive to the ‘ghosts’ of the past, which bequeath stories and historicities to landscapes” (80-81). The same sensitivity can be said to apply to Davis as well.4 For both artists, the land and what it contains inspires the creation of “inter-discursive” multimedia works while its history is read not as a single story but as a collection of discursive fragments.
Land Shaped into Plantation
In its basic definition, landscape means “shaped land.” Most, if not all, landscapes today are man-made and, as cultural landscapes, connect places to people. In other words, cultural landscapes create a sense of history and belonging; they express narratives of culture and regional identity. The plantation landscape of Barbados is one particular, if extreme, version of cultural landscape. Britain’s colonization of the Americas was largely by private enterprise, and in the Caribbean the economic purpose of settlement dominated. Especially with the arrival of sugar as the main plantation crop, the connection between place and people became principally an economic one. In addition, the plantation economy altered the landscape of the island so radically that the ecological and climatic impact was significant. When Barbados was first colonized by the British, the island was covered in dense forest. These woodland areas quickly receded as colonization and settlement expanded, so that by the mid- to late seventeenth century the forests had virtually disappeared (Handler, “Escaping Slavery” 187). In Brathwaite’s own words, Barbados was a “total plantation”, meaning that all of the island was used for agriculture and plantation economy (“KB/Xtending”). Barbados lacked what most other Caribbean islands had: an environment that could not be cultivated and so could have served as a site for ecological and cultural resistance. Despite retaining wooded gullies and caves that served as temporary hideouts for runaway slaves, colonial Barbados never had such “sites of environmental opposition” (DeLoughrey et al 3) that could have harboured a permanent rebel slave community (Handler, “Escaping Slavery” 189-90). For this reason, Brathwaite regards the rab and pasture lands of Barbados as the only “spiritual alternative” to the spiritual death of the total plantation (“KB/Xtending”).
This landscape is important to Brathwaite and Davis alike. In the exhibition catalogue to This Ground, curator Holly Bynoe defines rab land as a typically Barbadian landscape: “In Barbados it refers to land that was formerly under sugarcane cultivation and has been left to grow wild plants. The term is usually used in a disparaging way signalling land that is deemed unsuitable for agricultural production.” As such, today’s rab lands are reminders of the ecological impact of deforestation and the introduction of plantation economy monoculture, leaving the topsoil thin and exhausted. During the plantation era, rab land was infertile and inaccessible land on the margin of the plantation grounds, often used as spots for workers’ chattel houses (movable cabins) (Potter 11). For Davis, the rab lands provide the archive from which she works through the complex involvement of her ancestors in the plantation and slave economy. It offers the material, often literally, from which she creates her art. For Brathwaite, on the other hand, rab is associated with political and intellectual resistance and as such with the figure of Caliban:
Prospero Wilcox Plantation of which CowPasture is the rab. the Caliban. the waste. the land no good for planting sugarcane. (NP PDF 10; Hambone 137)
Earlier generations of white creole artists and writers in the Caribbean, most famous among them Jean Rhys, expressed a deep emotional attachment to the place precisely because of their ambivalent position as (former) owners of land and people, both subject to colonial violence. The work of Annalee Davis can certainly be read in this context. Brathwaite’s poetic universe too is very strongly influenced by an environmental imagination that is explicitly expressed as such in The Namsetoura Papers but also in earlier publications, such as History of the Voice as well as Mother Poem, Sun Poem and Barabajan Poems. For Brathwaite, knowing the names of local flora and fauna, “so rare in Caribbean people” (The Zea Mexican Diary 192), is a way of identifying with the Caribbean as home, which, he intimates, is often absent in the descendants of slaves precisely because it implies an acceptance of their slave origins and the slaves’ intimacy with the land they worked. Yet, in addition to creating a sense of belonging, Brathwaite suggests that ecological knowledge has anti-imperial potential. In much of his writing, Brathwaite aligns tourism in Barbados and the wider Caribbean with the historical plantation. In the more immediate context of The Namsetoura Papers, the destruction of biodiversity in the service of an expanding tourist industry is compared to the monoculture (ecological and political) of the sugar plantation. As such, ecological knowledge and protection of biodiversity in the island becomes a way of articulating freedom from “MENTAL PLANTATION MENTAL SLAVERY” (Brathwaite, “Kamau Brathwaite and CowPastor”). In the case of both Brathwaite and Davis, then, the Barbados rab lands evoke a passionate personal attachment and political commitment that they explore in different ways in their work.
Kamau Brathwaite, The Namsetoura Papers
The immediate context of The Namsetoura Papers, apart from Brathwaite’s homecoming, is the expansion of the Grantley Adams airport, affecting the land of several properties in the area, including CowPastor. At first, Brathwaite accepts this without resistance. A large part of The Namsetoura Papers consists of a detailed and lyrical description of the house and the surrounding countryside, a verbal memorial to a place on the verge of loss. The text also records how the poet and his wife set out to take a photographic record of the place for the same reason. This “field trip,” however, leads the poet to an encounter so extraordinary that he decides to protest against the airport extension, the loss of his home, and the ecological destruction of the pasture in the wider context of “development” in Barbados.
The Namsetoura Papers is a condensed version of “the Namsetoura papers,” a dispersed archive of writings by Brathwaite and others on the particular matter just mentioned. These include the website Save CowPastor, originally set up by the poet Tom Raworth in 2005 in response to the then immediate threat to CowPastor; the two collections of poetry Words Need Love Too (one published by House of Nehesi in 2000 and the other by Salt in 2004) where the central poem, respectively called “The Nansetoura of CowPastor” and “Namsetoura,” appears; The Namsetoura Papers themselves (Hambone 17), subsequently published as a PDF in a slightly different format on the Save CowPastor website; “Poetics, Revelations, and Catastrophes: An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” conducted by Joyelle McSweeney; and Brathwaite’s own Namsetoura & the Companion Stranger, related in theme and format to The Namsetoura Papers. As is characteristic of Brathwaite’s work, different versions of the same texts and themes are often translated across publications. Therefore, The Namsetoura Papers, both in its Hambone 17 and Save CowPastor versions, has to be read in conjunction with those other publications.
The Save CowPastor PDF version of The Namsetoura Papers opens with a Kikongo proverb: “Where your ancestors do not live you cannot build your house” (3). On his archival field trip, Brathwaite encounters the ghost of one such ancestor, the spirit of a female slave, who reveals herself as Namsetoura and who addresses the poet as her “great great grandbrother” (NP PDF 52; Hambone 170). Communication with the spirits of the departed, a central aspect of African-Caribbean spirituality, is of great importance to Brathwaite’s artistic practice. Spirit communication informs his poetry not only in theme but also in form, where the written word or the empty space on the page becomes a vessel through which the spirits articulate themselves. The poet describes himself as very attuned to what he calls the “spiritual presences” of the pasture (McSweeney). This spirit reality reveals itself when Brathwaite attempts to take a picture of a spider in its web that, as it turns out, happens to be in the same spot as Namsetoura’s unmarked grave. In his conversation with Joyelle McSweeney, Brathwaite explains that Namse is a version of Ananse, the African-Caribbean spider trickster, an important figure in Brathwaite’s poetry. The spirit’s name is also a reference to nam, Brathwaite’s word for spiritual essence and the submerged African survivals in the Caribbean, and by extension a version of the life force of the universe that is common in African beliefs and sometimes compared to the Christian Logos (Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems 241, 256-57). Through nam, Ananse is linked to the Akan sky god Nyame or Onyami, whose name also makes an appearance in The Namsetoura Papers (Brathwaite, “An Alternative View” 56). Brathwaite further explains that “‘toura’ is a way of telling stories” (McSweeney). The name of Namsetoura is thus associated with trickery, storytelling and spiritual survival.
When Brathwaite attempts to take a picture of the spider in its web, his digital camera mysteriously breaks (suggestive of a form of trickery in the context, engineered by Namsetoura), and the analogue camera he uses instead captures not the spider but the face of Namsetoura herself on film: “we get this pic. ture. not of spiders spiderwebs. but this. the one shot out of a whole wide roll of blacks & blanks of flim. this Nam- / setoura” (NP PDF 45; Hambone 165). The photo is included in both versions of The Namsetoura Papers as visual evidence of this encounter. Elsewhere, Brathwaite describes this experience of seeing Namsetoura on film as a gradual receding of material reality and an equally gradual exposure of the spirit dimension of the pasture embodied by Namsetoura: “[...] four pictures came out that afternoon. One spider, normal looking, in the web, the second one, still reasonable, in the web, the third spider seemed to be receding from our gaze, and the fourth shot came up was the image of Namsetoura” (McSweeney). The camera opens a brief window onto another reality “its sun’s eye illuminating my own eye into the at last spirits & magicals I’ve nvr known before tho they are here” (Brathwaite, NP PDF 43; Hambone 163).
The conceptual difference between digital and analogue photography is interesting to consider here. A photograph taken with an analogue camera carries a physical trace of what it depicts: it captures the light as it falls on the recorded object (Loughnane 15). Brathwaite’s account of how the photograph came to be therefore emphasizes Namsetoura’s actual presence. Namsetoura’s snapshot portrait demands that we engage with it as real and documentary. Digital photography, on the other hand, is removed from the physical reality of the recorded object as it captures the image through binary code (Loughnane 15-18), which may be one reason the spirits of the pasture refuse this archival method. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes observes that “in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there” (76, emphasis original). As opposed to art forms such as painting, drawing or the written word, photography emphasizes the reality of what is recorded. Consequently, the intention of photography “is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference” (77). This very much aligns with Brathwaite’s own intention, which, at least in the first instance, is documentary. In addition, photography makes the past permanently present and seemingly alive: “[...] something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever” (Barthes 78, emphasis original). For Barthes, this presence of the past creates “the melancholy of Photography” (79), which relates to the nostalgia that motivates Brathwaite’s archival field trip.
However, as “the living image of a dead thing” (Barthes 79), Namsetoura’s photograph is also, and perhaps solely, a “memento mori” (Sontag 15). As such, the camera is ill equipped to record the rab lands as living and spiritual landscape. Ultimately, it remains a discursive device from the realm of Prospero or “backra culcha” as Namsetoura later says (Brathwaite, NP PDF 52; Hambone 170). A different form of narrating these events is necessary, one that is attuned to the tongueless whispering of the buried slave beneath the poet’s feet. Brathwaite chooses poetry in its very ancient form, emphasizing its oracular quality by letting Namsetoura speak through him in an act of spirit possession. In his reading of The Namsetoura Papers, Carrigan argues that the poet’s acceptance of Namsetoura as part of the reality of the pasture rather than a figment of his imagination “undermines binary understandings of the visible and the invisible by asserting their entanglement” (Carrigan 84). Namsetoura’s subsequent revelation that Brathwaite has inadvertently stumbled upon her unmarked grave drives the poet to consult the archives on the place (Carrigan 85) and to defend what he calls her “little property.”
One of the words Namsetoura uses when addressing the poet is gyaNyamebiriw, which has its origins in Asante Twi. Biriw implies possession “in both its senses,” i.e., spirit possession and ownership (Brathwaite, Words Need Love Too [2004] 78). Brathwaite traces both meanings back to related words in the Twi language: abíribiriw, “epilepsy. sacred insanity. Possession,” and biribíwa, “the little property which is (still) left to me,” which he understands as “a ref to CowPastor” (Words [2004] 78). Through Namsetoura’s intervention, her injunction to protect her “little property,” the poet begins to contest the airport extension and to defend the historical and ecological heritage of the pasture against this and other forms of “development,” such as the expansion of golf courses for the tourist industry. Despite Brathwaite’s belief in the existence of a grave in the spot where he encounters Namsetoura, no archaeological fieldwork has been conducted there. In his conversation with McSweeney, Brathwaite speculates that up to one million African slaves could have died in Barbados, though there is only one official slave graveyard on the island, on the nearby Newton plantation, where archaeological research has been undertaken. Poet Melissa Kwasny raises an interesting point in this context: “Even if his estimate is cut in half, the small island would be literally made of the bones of his ancestors from Africa. Any possible ground could be a gravesite” (17). In the absence of more tangible evidence, the only visual sign for Brathwaite is a nearby grove of trees, which he reads as suggestive of African burial customs:
and right on the ridge. behind the old ruin of the slave attendant cabin a calabash a clammacherry an old cordia. nunu. nuni. man piaba and a dark obscure i don’t even kno. some croton and a small army of the smallest cactus you have ever seen. decorated w/pale yellow marks & spikings. some even looking like a soldier crabs. and all these in a space & time relation to each other and now to somehow me. these xtrasensory & semination < signs that usually mark the graveyards of the Africas. (NP PDF 5; Hambone 132) The trees and plants listed here are all non-food bearing and are, in Brathwaite’s own words, “traditionally connected w/slave ceremony, ritual, naming, burial” (“The Rosie Doc”); they indicate the spiritual parameters of the slaves’ spatial ordering of the landscape. The Namsetoura Papers therefore raises important questions about how we read the landscape: how does one bear witness to the unrecorded dead? How does one read their presence in the landscape? What inscription does one look for? What language do we use to create an archive for the voices of the dead who never left any written documents? Namsetoura chides Brathwaite for “eatin de backra culcha” (NP PDF 52; Hambone 170) and urges him to consider different forms of inscription, speaking in a mixture of Bajan nation language and Twi:
Write dis in flesh befo the next red
season brunn Doan write i down in
coral Dat is white water quarry
quarrel Write i inside my umfôbody
berry burnin coal gyaNyamebiriw
gyaNyamebiriw gyaNyamebiriw
Gya Only under God the
Nyame fire But only from my
bosomtwa –
Yu tink i sick yu tink i
slick i slack?
-Yu know whe
bosomtwa? – wha
crack it so?
Only from my bosomtwa mi
tell yu tell yu –
An the chilldren
chilldrens of these
wounds – th
Liberation
(NP PDF 53-54; Hambone 171-72)
Namsetoura’s language is both sexual and spiritual in nature. When she alerts the poet to his duty to save her “little property,” she does so by pointing to her sexual organs and reminding him that she is his (fore)mother. She puns on “Bosomtwi,” sacred lake of the Ansante (where “years ago” Brathwaite had made his “pilgrimage”), but says “bosomtwa” instead, which Brathwaite translates as “the sacred lake of pussy” (Words [2004] 79). Water functions as a spirit conductor in much of Brathwaite’s poetry, connecting Africa and the Caribbean spiritually. In his CowPastor writings more specifically, Brathwaite refers to a “wet-season pond” which, he claims, is of crucial importance to the ecosystem of the pasture and was essential in sustaining the lives of the slaves (“from Kamau”). This well is close to the sacred grove of trees and Namsetoura’s grave. In fact, it becomes synonymous with her “bosomtwa.” In this way, Namsetoura’s body and grave become an alternative archival receptacle, a way of the land to record and inscribe the history of its slave population, a history that emerges and can be read while observing the lay of the land.
Brathwaite links his own reading of the landscape to published archaeological reports, in part to verify his own observations and perhaps also to appeal to a more scientifically-minded readership that may demand evidence for his claims. In The Namsetoura Papers, Brathwaite creates a connection between CowPastor on the former Wilcox plantation and the excavated slave graveyard at Newton. The Newton cemetery contains an interesting find, the only “prone burial” in the area, referred to as “Burial 9” in the archaeological reports, “unique not only to Newton but also to early African cemetery sites in the Americas” (Handler, “An African-Type Burial”). The grave contains “a young adult female, around 20 years of age [...] probably interred during the late 1600s or early 1700s.” Publications on West African burial practices reveal that prone burials were only performed under exceptional circumstances, usually when “the person was considered to have socially negative traits or had been convicted of witchcraft, a criminal offence in all West African societies.” The archaeologists working at Newton therefore concluded that Burial 9 contains a “witch or sorceress -- in any case, someone who, following African custom, was feared or socially ostracized because she was a vehicle of supernatural contagion” (Handler, “An African-Type Burial”). Passages from the African-American Archaeology Newsletter and Historical Archaeology discussing the Newton graveyard are cited verbatim in The Namsetoura Papers and are followed by the description of Brathwaite’s encounter with Namsetoura. In this way, the text collapses both locations into one and implies that the woman of Burial 9 is in some way related to, if not identical with, Namsetoura herself. In addition, Brathwaite describes Namsetoura as mutilated in a similar way to the woman in Burial 9. By extension, this mutilated body becomes a metaphor for the land mutilated by plantation monoculture and the violent history recorded in both burial sites. However, by collapsing the story of the unnamed woman in Burial 9 with the story of Namsetoura, Brathwaite also commits his own act of erasure. While the reports on Burial 9 included in The Namsetoura Papers are meant to strengthen the account of Brathwaite’s own encounter, which indeed they do, the nameless woman of Burial 9 recedes further into anonymity, reduced to an instrument in furthering Brathwaite’s call for the conservation of Namsetoura’s “little property.”
Brathwaite’s attempt to protect Namsetoura’s grave as part of the heritage of the Barbados pasture is also connected to his concern for the ecological and environmental heritage of the island landscape more generally. Rab land was traditionally the place of slave cabins or chattel houses, many of which still exist: “[...] historically the black people of this island, descendants of slavery, were not allowed to own land – were not even permitted to build unless the houses were of a certain dimension, made of a certain material and shd have no foundational connection w/the earth – a terrible metonym in itself” (Brathwaite, “KB/Xtending”). These chattel houses are a unique aspect of the cultural landscape of Barbados, and together with the pasture they represent the “spiritual alternative” to what Brathwaite calls the modern plantation of tourism, development and foreign investment.
Also significant in Brathwaite’s desire to preserve the pastures and their historical heritage is the village of Thyme Bottom, “what in Ja we wd call a Free Village,” the closest thing Barbados has to maroon heritage: “the slaves of this plantation lived along this ridge and what we had here until a few weeks agao [sic] was their descendants – who turned to independent cattling (hence CowPasture) and blackbelly sheep herding, gardening, welding, seamstresses etc and a foreday morning horizon of cocks” (Brathwaite, “Letter”). The airport extension and creation of golf courses to attract more tourism not only have a considerable cultural impact but also affect the biodiversity of the island as land converted into golf courses, for example, is “difficult to reclaim [...] as agricultural land” (Brathwaite, NP PDF 39; Hambone 159).
In the postscript to The Namsetoura Papers, dated 2003, Brathwaite finds the grove of trees around Namsetoura’s grave nearly gone. Elsewhere in his CowPastor writings, he laments that the wet-season pond had been filled with rubble due to construction work on the pasture. And in 2011, he writes:
i return to CP to find our Thyme - my past present fewcha – gaan; our Serengetti - all the cows black-belly sheeps goats fowls the white rhode-islann fowlcock egrets donkeys guinea birds etc – gone gone gone
Xcept for the brave green spaces kept by the few remaining residents, the whole place is into depressing overgrowing wildernesse. the Govt still in negative limbo if we will have to move or whether i will be granted the xtension for my planned Bussa-Namsetoura Cultural Centre and the dream of a beautiful pristine Pasture. . . (“+++SaVing CowPastor” 8)
In other words, he finds the tongueless whispering of the land in its diversity of plant, animal and spiritual life threatened and in many cases overwritten by the monolingual tongue of “development.” In this way, ecological destruction becomes synonymous with an erasure of archives, an act of violence against collective memory (DeLoughrey et al 2). In fact, the Bussa Centre, named after the Barbadian rebel slave Bussa and envisioned in The Namsetoura Papers as a cultural centre for artists and a new home for Brathwaite’s personal archive, is here represented as continuous with the natural environment of the pasture (Brathwaite, NP PDF 40; Hambone 160).
While much of Brathwaite’s writing is characterized by a sense of impending disaster and catastrophe, such as he experienced at CowPastor, much of it also has a magical quality and engages with a magical reality that is ultimately redeeming. Brathwaite’s answer to the loss of ecological and historical archives in the landscape is to commemorate and store them in his poetry. In her interview with the poet, McSweeney raises this issue with regard to Brathwaite’s 2005 collection of poems, Born to Slow Horses:
JM: I have one last question for you. Several times, now, unfortunately, you’ve been in a struggle to find a secure place for your archives. And in this new book, you have so many forms in it: elegies, of course, and drum songs, and newspaper clippings and letters, anecdotes, essays. It seems like the archive itself is almost becoming a poetic form for you.
KB: I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose the only way to keep the archive is to write a poem!
Ultimately, for Brathwaite, poetry becomes the only possible archive and the word on the page or the word performed an archival vessel. At the same time, this is also an acceptance of defeat. Throughout his CowPastor writings as well as in The Namsetoura Papers itself, Brathwaite laments the lack of public interest in the preservation of his archive, a concern that goes back to the destruction of his home in Jamaica by Hurricane Gilbert. By preserving memory, personal and communal, in the form of poetry alone, Brathwaite implicitly aligns the threat to his physical archive with his slave ancestors’ strategies for spiritual survival on the plantation. In Gods of the Middle Passage, Brathwaite argues that with their material culture under constant threat of erasure, story, poetry and dance became the only possible means for slaves to ensure the survival of communal and ancestral memory: “So that Kromantin captured, stripped and slavered, ‘with nothing but his breath,’ the slave could wait. In having pparent [sic] nothing, he had everything” (2). Brathwaite’s statement that “the only way to keep the archive is to write a poem” gestures towards a contemporary political climate that is little different from the cultural economy of the plantation.
Annalee Davis, This Ground Beneath My Feet: A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands
“Where your ancestors do not live you cannot build your house.” The Kikongo proverb is as applicable to Davis’s work as it is to Brathwaite’s. Yet, while Brathwaite is descended from people who never owned land, connecting the threat of his own dispossession to a long history, Davis lives on land that has been owned by her family for at least one hundred years. “The plantation sits deep inside of me,” she says in her opening essay of the exhibition catalogue (“This Ground”). Like Brathwaite, she walks the ground to listen to its tongueless whispering, but she, like the older poet, also goes to the archives to uncover what lies hidden in the ground. This Ground Beneath My Feet includes written historical documents, such as plantation ledgers and family wills, through which those who lived on the farm before her speak to her and, through Davis, to us. In theory, her endeavour to articulate the stories of the past should be much more straightforward than Brathwaite’s—she has recourse to the written archive—yet her position as a descendant of white creoles in a racially stratified island makes her project just as complex and complicated. Veerle Poupeye, author of one of the first books on Caribbean art, argues that exploring an identity with roots in the plantocracy is “a painful subject very few Caribbean artists have tackled” (204). As such, This Ground Beneath My Feet is a timely and necessary intervention.
Davis describes the difficulty in negotiating her complex position in the opening essay of the exhibition catalogue:
While walking these fields I consider the historical complexities of what lies beneath the soil, a virtual slaughterhouse. Walking across this landscape and poring over family archives disrupts the notion of a single history with one set of coordinates articulating the plantation as the sole (colonial) instrument. Rather, it becomes a kind of base line, which other notes exist in concert with. The audacity to compose other arrangements, to strike new chords, allows for alternate utterances to take place, and for different understandings to unfold across these grassy grounds. (“This Ground”)
Davis alludes here to the need to create alternative narratives to the dominant ones passed down through colonial documents. She also highlights that sugar cultivation is only one aspect, albeit a decisive one, of the ecological history of Barbados. With sugar monoculture no longer the dominant economic model of the island, other narratives now have room to emerge. Davis interrogates these other narratives in relation to the rab land vegetation and its potential for increased biodiversity.
The same introductory essay is prefaced by two excerpts from Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion that acknowledge and express Davis’s need to question her own privileged position as a descendant of the plantocracy as well as the validity of received and possibly outdated forms of historical narrative. The two passages from Miller’s collection, one told from the perspective of “the cartographer,” the other assuming the perspective of “the rastaman,” sum up the central theme of The Cartographer Tries to Map: the different and often conflicting ways of reading place and articulating knowledge. This is mirrored in Davis’s own uncertainty expressed in her personal essay and her artwork itself, as opposed to one of the first colonial writers on Barbados, Richard Ligon, whose scientific certainty about the history of the island is unmistakably articulated, “[i]llustrated with a mapp of the island, as also the principall trees and plants there, set forth in their due proportions and shapes, drawne out by their severall and respective scales.” Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, first published in 1657, is cited by both Brathwaite and Davis as a foundational document of colonial Barbados. However, each artist questions the certainty of the cartographer and historian Ligon with their own contesting sources of knowledge, which, as those of Miller’s rastaman, are more uncertain, yet informed by an experience of place that is both personal and anti-imperial. In this context, biodiversity as envisaged by Davis and Brathwaite functions as a metaphor for systems of knowledge conceived in opposition to a Western scientific episteme, challenging its status as dominant (mono) culture in the process.
Like Brathwaite, Davis affirms that she has fallen in love with the land, but her love is complicated by her social and racial position. As a consequence, she attempts to articulate multiple points of view, whereas Brathwaite, despite the inter-discursive nature of his Namsetoura writings, privileges only one, the tongueless whispering of the slave. In a similar way to Brathwaite, Davis, too, hears the spiritual presences and ghostly hauntings, the tongueless whispering of the land and is aware that different ways of archiving these are necessary:
I walk the fields in early mornings or late afternoons. They seem to have a voice and are speaking back. What once were acres of uninterrupted, well ordered Saccharum officinarum are now a disarray of red-tipped grasses, Elder Bush, Wild Plumbago, River Tamarind, Ink Vine, Jack Lantern, Clammy Cherry, Broad Path, Cerasee Bush and many other wild plants forcing themselves up through this ground beneath my feet. (“This Ground”)
This passage is remarkably similar to Brathwaite’s description of the sacred grove of trees, which is suggestive of an immediate and personal experience of place that challenges official narrative. Yet, in its emphasis on biodiversity, and especially when read against Brathwaite’s interpretation of the pasture as spiritual landscape, Davis’s challenge is also decidedly anti-imperial in a wider political context. In this, she assumes a position that allows her to critique her inherited privilege.
Focusing on Jamaica, this new narrative of place is also articulated in Miller’s collection, particularly in the series of “Place Names” where places and their names are read and reread from multiple perspectives, as for example in “Shotover”:
Shotover – so named because our people, little acquainted with French, could make no sense of Château Vert. And talk truth, Mr Backra, dat was too stoosh a name for your house. ‘Green and fresh,’ you said. No – it did just mildew and old; a house which, like yourself, has since returned to the fold of Portland’s earth. But oh Mr Backra, if through the muffle of mud you should hear us traipsing on your ground, one of us asking – how it come about, the name? you will discover that when victims live long enough they get their say in history: Well sah (an old man answers), in dem dere backra days, bucky-master had was to catch back the runaway slaves, so him would draw for him long musket and buss gunshot over dere, and gunshot over dere, shot dissa fly pashie! pashie! all bout de place. And so comes we get de name. (Miller 41)
Using a range of different artistic media, Davis’s work, like Miller’s, attempts to reconstruct often conflicting versions of history and narratives of place. In a similar way to Brathwaite’s Namsetoura writings, the themes expressed in This Ground are more widely dispersed in Davis’s work and not solely confined to this exhibition, which represents a condensed version of this theme. Additional material from the artist’s website and Facebook pages, where she promotes much of her work, will have to be considered in the process.
Based in the history of the island, This Ground Beneath My Feet is a personal story told through a variety of visual and scribal discourses: drawing, pottery, photography, as well as “White Creole Conversations,” a series of written and recorded interviews with people who are identified as white in Barbados and the wider Caribbean, making Davis’s project as inter-discursive as Brathwaite’s. While whiteness as a racial category is the basis from which Davis’s work develops, her art itself engages with the fragmented nature of Caribbean culture in both theme and form. A recurrent image in This Ground are the potsherds the plantation soil keeps turning up. These are either clay shards from pipes used in sugar production, pottery produced by slaves for their own use, or pieces of porcelain from cups and plates used in the plantation Great House. In one series of drawings, F is for Frances, Davis uses coloured pencil drawings of the shards to spell out the name of the slave girl Frances whose manumission is requested in the 1815 will of Thomas Applewhaite, who was then the owner of Walkers Plantation. We know nothing further of the life of this slave girl, except that she lived on the plantation. Davis presents us here, as does Brathwaite in relation to Namsetoura, with a case of lost archives and lost memory: we know of Frances only indirectly, through the document of a white plantation owner; she has not left us a record of her own. Like Brathwaite, who offers himself as a vessel through which Namsetoura can speak, Davis uses delicate pencil drawings on plantation ledgers to make the tongueless whispering of Frances visible to us. Yet Davis’s discursive medium, pencil on paper, is based within a Western tradition of drawing. As such, it has less oracular immediacy than Brathwaite’s poetry-as-spirit-possession, nor does it have the documentary power of his Namsetoura photograph. Instead, it draws attention to the difficulty or even impossibility of recreating a voice from the past without discursive mediation, especially if that voice speaks from a different racial and historical position from that of the artist.
In this very tangible way, then, the art of Annalee Davis works with the fragmentary nature of archival knowledge in the Caribbean and highlights both its discursive possibilities and limitations. The most powerful metaphor of this is the sculptural centre piece of the exhibition: a tea service made from local Barbadian clay in which Davis has incorporated potsherds found on the family plantation. For Evelyn O’Callaghan, who wrote one of the catalogue entries to This Ground, the tea service evokes the often quoted lines from Derek Walcott’s Nobel lecture: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. [...] Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary [...]” (Walcott 69). As Brathwaite’s poetry becomes a vessel through which the ancestral spirit Namsetoura speaks, so Davis’s tea service brings together the disparate archives of the different strands of Caribbean history that are pooled on and in the plantation ground. From the tea set, the artist has served bush tea at various cultural events, such as the Empire Remains Shop in London in August 2016.5 The ingredients of the tea are collected from the fields of the family farm and adjoining rab lands. At “The Colloquy: Wild Plants as Active Agents in the Process of Decolonisation,” held at the Empire Remains Shop, Janice Cheddie emphasized that bush tea was not traditionally served in a tea service, an object of the Great House; it was boiled in a pot and served in a mug for medicinal or ritual, not social purposes (Davis et al.). However, the participants of the Colloquy also draw attention to the creolity of the land, the traffic of plants into, out of and within the Caribbean. So while bush tea was cultivated by slaves, it was also served to slave owners when they were sick, thus crossing the threshold into another social space and diffusing the boundaries between the races, obliterating any notion of “true” origin in the process. Likewise, the once traditional and local ingredients for bush tea, such as cerasee and vervain, collected from the rab lands surrounding the plantation can today be bought in London shops (Davis et al.), further contributing to the idea of creolization and its related notions of cultural indeterminacy and connection. In this way, Davis’s work engages with the field of colonial botany and the circulation of plants around the colonial Atlantic.
Related to this interest in botany is Davis’s use of the pattern of the Queen Anne’s lace plant. The pattern appears in the form of crocheted earrings, the fabric of a dress and in various places in her drawings. In the series Ledger Drawings, the piece Edith Gertrude Theodocia et al shows a family group portrait drawn enmeshed with a Queen Anne’s lace design. The dominant colour is red, with the deepest areas appearing in the rosette patterns themselves, and the support, as the series title suggests, are plantation ledger pages that were once in use. From the edges of the round lace patterns emerge the tangled roots and vines of rab land weeds and plants, reaching out and connecting the group of people sitting for the portrait. The same group appears again in Long Drawings, a series of drawings on long paper panels. The panel Walkers 1660–present shows the rosette-shaped lace at the top of the drawing, which itself is composed in layers. The layers show, in succession from top to bottom, the family portrait, a map of the plantation grounds, a drawing of the Great House and the rab land grass with its roots creating a similarly entangled, though structurally more chaotic and Mark King unpremeditated, pattern as the rosette design at the top. The rab land grass, especially, defies the notion of a single root and draws attention to the plants’ power to diffuse and heal. As such, it also works as a visual metaphor of Édouard Glissant’s notion of a “poetics of Relation” in his book of the same title.
A photograph of fabric in Queen Anne’s lace pattern introduces the section “White Creole Conversations” in the exhibition catalogue, where Glissant is referenced directly. The essay in this section is prefaced by a quotation from Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse: “Creolization is, first, the unknown awareness of the creolized.” Here, the Queen Anne’s lace pattern is symbolically aligned with the processes of creolization in the Caribbean, as well as the inevitable entanglement and connectedness of races, classes and cultural practices signified by the concept. In this context, it is instructive to consider that Glissant himself uses a botanic metaphor, the rhizome, “an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory root stock taking over permanently,” to illustrate his understanding of creolization and Relation (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 11). While it is seductive to read the cultural interpretation of the rhizome or Queen Anne’s lace—and the processes they are meant to embody—as predominantly anti-hierarchical and mutual, both Glissant and Davis are attentive to the violent origins of creolization in the plantation economy. Significantly, the Queen Anne’s lace rosette appears as a support for cups with sugar- sweetened tea in a number of Davis’s drawings. This suggests that the motifs and symbols Davis uses for her discourse on the family land are derived from the material culture of the plantation and its history and, on the surface, often support the hierarchy inherent in Caribbean plantation culture (the layers in Walkers 1660–present are suggestive of this hierarchy).
However, while acknowledging her complex and difficult ancestral entanglement with the “total plantation,” Davis also creates metaphors of healing which are derived from the plant life itself, which she finds on the former plantation lands. The series entitled Wild Plants shows common rab land weeds drawn on plantation ledger pages. Davis presents us with a visual image that revises or overwrites the history of the “total plantation” with its “spiritual alternative”: the vegetation of today’s rab and pasture land. The simplicity and fragility of the artist’s line emphasizes the redemptive nature of the exercise. In her artist statement, Davis says that the process of phytoremediation, the plants’ capacity to absorb toxins from the soil, provides a structure for her work, “allowing reconciliation with the land and the virtual slaughterhouse that lies below it.” As such, the plants create an alternative reading of the plantation landscape, a redemptive story out of the toxic history recorded in the soil. Davis’s ecological knowledge, in other words, works towards creating a sense of belonging that includes ownership, quite literally, of the diverse plantation histories buried in the ground beneath her feet by telling them in a way that works against the hierarchical and imperial structures she has inherited through her family history.
In this context, it is instructive to remember that despite its imperial name, Queen Anne’s lace is a wild flower and often regarded as a common weed. The plant “seems particularly comfortable growing where the earth has been disturbed or affected by people, and the soil is not very rich” (Melia). As such, Queen Anne’s lace is a symbolic part of the process of phytoremediation, while at the same time appearing as an imperial design in Davis’s work. This double meaning of the plant as well as the healing and connecting influence that Davis ascribes to it in her art work is supported in a short series of photographs entitled Sweeping the Fields. The photos show the artist wearing a cape or shawl made in Queen Anne’s lace pattern, sweeping the rab lands with a broom in a gesture that is reminiscent of cleansing rituals found in many different magical traditions. The cleansing and detoxifying aspect of Sweeping the Fields as well as the symbolic use of Queen Anne’s lace may overwrite the more imperial connotations of Davis’s botanic metaphors as well as the violent origins of creolization, yet both introduce structural shifts that reflect on how the complex formal aspects of Davis’s work challenge artistic convention. Sweeping the Fields, for example, is part performance captured in stills and part self-portrait. As such, the photos document a work in progress, and this documentation in turn becomes the work itself, leading to a hybrid archival method working across artistic media and genres. In this use of hybrid media, both Davis and Brathwaite articulate an interest in the possibilities of different forms of discursivity.
Painted Books and Written Images: Reflections on Form
There are many reasons why Brathwaite has tended to publish the same or similar texts across different publications, but the most enduring lies in the more or less accurate rendition oof his distinctive “Sycorax video style” and the willingness, or not, by publishers to engage with it. In ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite describes his video style as “a mural, with the video [...] at last making the mural go” (207, emphasis original). Through the poet’s play with font size and visual images, “the poetry gets closer [...] to a kind of cinema-painting” (207). Brathwaite envisions that the poetry “will, thr(u) these senses, become more public in the sense of more shared, more part of the community? — large-scale statements shared at important visible levels by all (many? most?)” (207). The Sycorax video style aims to merge movement, sound, script and image, aspiring to something like a total work of art. Brathwaite has compared his video style projects to the illuminated manuscripts of medieval Europe and/or the hieroglyphic writings of the Egyptians, Mayans and Aztecs (ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey 166-67). His essays often refer to the hieroglyphic stele of the ancient Mayans, which serve as a model of the kind of picture writing he envisions in his video style. More closely related, however, are the hieroglyphic books of the ancient Mayans, even though Brathwaite does not write about this connection in any detail. Mayan hieroglyphs “are partly phonetic (glyphs which stand for individual sounds) and partly logographic (picture writing in which a glyph stands for an entire word or concept)” (Christenson 33), blurring the boundaries between image and text. Brathwaite’s video style combines scribal and visual elements and translates them into postmodern computer graphics. Like the Mayan codices, Brathwaite’s multimedia texts function as ilb’al, “instrument[s] of sight or vision” (Christenson 34), though with a different emphasis on what vision means. The Mayans used the codices partly for divination (Christenson 34). While there is no divinatory aspect to Brathwaite’s video style texts, they can be opened almost at random on any page, mimicking the practice of bibliomancy, with new meanings and narrative combinations emerging as a result.
In this way, Brathwaite’s video texts combine words and images, making little distinction between them in the narrative. The Hambone version of The Namsetoura Papers is the one most fully rendered in the Sycorax style, which means that it is also the most visual. The nearby airport, for example, is rendered as a computer graphic image of an airplane on a runway. The “maroon rooster” that is part of the living landscape of the pasture is depicted in visual form (the rooster is also an omen of the impending destruction of the pasture as Brathwaite finds the animal dead one morning). One could argue that, in many cases, the images are illustrative rather than fulfilling an independent narrative function, but they do introduce a conceptual space that allows for a wider field of interpretation, which may otherwise be absent. In post-Renaissance Western culture, the division between writing and image is not only sharply defined but is also a hierarchical one, with primacy given to the written word over the visual image. Collapsing the visual and scribal continues the observation made by Carrigan about Brathwaite’s refusal to see Namsetoura as a figment of his imagination. In relation to Namsetoura, Brathwaite “undermines binary understandings of the visible and the invisible by asserting their entanglement” (Carrigan 84), and by extension he refuses hierarchical and divisive thinking. In the context of the Mesoamerican painted books, which equally make no or little distinction between writing and image, Brathwaite’s video style is an expression of an American reality and episteme that, through its indigenous presence, harks back to a heritage rooted in a shared experience of place. In this context, Barbados becomes part of a wider American reality.
Davis too traverses the boundaries between writing and image in addition to working across a range of artistic media. In many of her works on paper exhibited as part of This Ground, she interrogates the dynamic between writing and drawing, two disciplines that are intimately connected but also hierarchically divided. Among the visual arts, drawing is the most difficult to define (Pergam 4): “Many contemporary organisations concerned with drawing resist a definition, preferring to acknowledge drawing as a fluid and evolving MEDIUM and subject. Some suggest that drawing is ‘mark making,’ ‘works on paper’ or marks that express visual ideas” (Moran and Byrne 6). In addition, an emphasis on line aligns drawing conceptually with cerebral activities such as writing. Deanna Petheridge has therefore described the drawing hand as a “thinking hand” (11-12). As graphic art, drawing also shares the same root with the Greek word for writing (the ancient Greek “graphein” means both writing and drawing). As such, writing is related to drawing and has its roots, in terms of human evolution and individual development, in visual representation: “At an early age most children spontaneously engage in mark making using whatever material comes to hand: pencils, crayons or even found materials, such as food, dirt or sand. This mark-making process prefigures writing and is a natural process by which infants attempt to understand their environment and their experience of it” (Moran and Byrne 6).
Like most visual artists, Davis uses drawing to understand and gain knowledge. In her case this involves gaining knowledge of the plantation landscape and the layers of the past contained in the soil. In Walkers 1660–present, she mimics the layers of history by structuring the drawing from top to bottom with images representing either concepts or historical periods. In Shards, however, she undermines the layered hierarchy by drawing the coloured shards of pottery formerly contained in the soil (their ghostly imprints can still be seen) in the sky, above a sugarcane plant. She subverts the monoculture history of the plantation, symbolized by the sugarcane, by elevating the fragments of other stories into a position of visibility that challenges the power and status of the cane and, by extension, colonial and postcolonial plantation history. Likewise, in the Ledger Drawings and Wild Plants series, she gives primacy to the drawn line, emphasized by its dominant colour red, over the faint handwriting on the plantation ledgers. In this way, her drawings overwrite the monoculture of the plantation and its history with plants that attest to the bio- and cultural diversity of Barbados and, by extension, plantation America. In addition, the entangled roots that appear across a range of Davis’s work are indicative of a visual “poetics of relation” that works against a racially divided society inherited from the plantation era.
Metaphors of healing and connection are numerous in the work of both artists. Brathwaite and Davis share a belief in the redemptive power of art in the face of the enduring presence of the region’s violent past. Poetry as well as art object become symbolic vessels for this redemptive power, while also gesturing towards the absence of more sustained efforts at conservation, both ecological and cultural, in the region. Brathwaite and Davis create media that engage in acts of imaginative recovery of seemingly lost narratives contained in the Barbados landscape, yet they do so in a way that highlights the fragile and fragmented nature of this recovery. The gourd as ritual container or vessel appears frequently in Caribbean arts, usually in the context of the region’s African and Amerindian heritage. It has a prominent place and meaning in the opening poem “Gourd” of Olive Senior’s collection of poems Gardening in the Tropics. Senior’s gourd is an image that expresses the same kind of hope but also uncertainty and fragility that is addressed by Davis and Brathwaite. By coincidence, “Gourd” is a poem arranged as a visual image. The following quotation cites only the lower half, which looks like an open vessel, highlighting the open and fragmented process of recovering obliterated narratives that Brathwaite and Davis engage in, whereas the whole poem is in the closed shape of the ritual container or rattle mentioned in the following lines:
. . . If all we can manage is to rattle our stones, our beads or our bones in your dried-out container, in shak-shak or maracca, will our voices be heard? If we dance to your rhythm, knock-knock on your skin, will we hear from within, no matter how faintly, your wholeness resound? (8)
Senior’s searching questions addressed at the gourd receive no answer but rather express, like The Namsetoura Papers and This Ground Beneath My Feet, a desire for the artist’s work to give meaning.
Notes
This notion of a language of landscape is borrowed from Édouard Glissant’s “The Novel of the Americas” (Caribbean Discourse 146).
The exhibition was on show at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies, The University of Texas, Austin, from 15 September to 15 December 2016.
Walkers Plantation ceased sugar production in the 1980s.
Of related interest in the wider context of this argument is Anna Reckin’s Ph.D. thesis, “Landscape as Poem: Poem as Landscape. Space, Place, and the Visual in the Poetry of Kamau Brathwaite and Susan Howe.” Here Reckin examines the dynamics between landscape and textuality in the work of the two poets.
The Empire Remains Shop programme was a temporary project in Baker Street, London, in 2016. Conceived in the 1920s, the idea of the Empire Shops was to sell produce from around the British Empire. In her review of Davis’s (bush) Tea Services, Janice Cheddie reflects: “Central to the Empire Shop was the idea of the Empire as farm – a managed and productive landscape, selling to the British consumer the products of the Empire as part of Britain’s ‘enriching agricultural project.’” Though the Empire Shops never came into existence, the programme of the Empire Remains Shop is a response to the original idea. It “speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today” (“About,” The Empire Remains Shop).
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