Has the Plantation Complex Fallen?
Caribbean Studies Association—Bridget Jones Travel Award Lecture
Delivered on June 30th 2011
At The Liverpool Slavery Museum
by Annalee Davis
This paper was written for an audio-visual presentation delivered at the Society for Caribbean Studies annual conference (2011) which took place at the Liverpool Slavery Museum in the UK. I chose to respond to one of the conference panels which was titled, “The Fall of the Plantation Complex” and draw a thread to my own work to ask if the plantation complex has indeed fallen.
Introduction
Firstly, I’d like to give a bit of background to who I am and where I am from. Secondly, I’ll describe my understanding of what the plantation complex is and account for how it continues to manifest itself in the Caribbean. Finally, I will share my work as a Visual Artist with you all.
So Who Am I?
Barbados and I have grown up together – we are almost the same age. Born a British subject, I had just turned three when the island became independent and the Union Jack came down.
I was born in 1963 and raised on several plantations. My father worked as a manager of a sugar cane plantation. I spent my first three years at Graeme Hall plantation. The house was demolished once the government acquired it. The old factory buildings and barns in the yard now house the Ministry of Agriculture. Before me, my brother was born in 1960 when my father worked as an overseer at Dayrells & Lower Estate Plantation – now home to a hardware store, a vet’s office, a stationary outlet, an industrial park and housing lots. Before him, in 1958, my sister was born at Cane Garden Plantation – the overseer’s house my family lived in has been completely rebuilt and the land is now in housing, a secondary school and an industrial space.
Our younger brother was born in 1967 at Sandford Plantation, the first property acquired by my father with the help of multiple small loans from several banks. The house no longer exists and the agricultural land grows, yes, you guessed it, more houses.
The youngest of the five of us, our sister, was born in 1970 at Cliff Plantation. My father sold Sandford to buy Cliff. The three hundred year old house still stands but has been separated from the agricultural land and sold to a family. The arable land at Cliff still yields sugar cane and is leased to the Barbados Agricultural Management Committee.
I currently live on a farm. It has been in my family for five generations – my paternal great-grandmother inherited it around 1920 from her outside uncle, Nat McConney. It is about three hundred years old and it used to be a sugar plantation. My brother has been running it as a dairy farm for twenty-eight years.
Looking at this suite of images, it appears as though the physical infrastructure associated with the plantation complex has decayed…that it barely exists. One might even claim that since there are only two working sugar factories left on the island, that surely the plantation model is no longer viable.
Five of the six locations we lived at no longer function as sugar cane plantations. Many of the old great houses have been demolished, have deteriorated, been bought and renovated by people from somewhere else, or transformed into offices. Fields of cane have become golf courses. However there remains another kind of plantation evident throughout the Caribbean - a residual complex of a psychological nature that dwells, not in the limestone walls of the great houses or the thin top layer of soil spread across our limestone island. Rather, it exists in a less tangible way deep in the psyche of many Caribbean people - manifest in the way we treat each other and our landscape.
So what is a plantation complex?
On the physical level, we understand plantations as artificially designed farms on a large scale – rural factories that transplanted people and vegetation to the Americas with the sole purpose of making money for the colonial empire. This physical complex comprises the many interconnected parts that served the whole to include land, factories, houses, owners, workers, the market place etc.
But there is another more insidious complex – one difficult to see, that we choose not to look at or that we push under the carpet. It’s a psychological complex that relates to the human mind or spirit, brewing for centuries, affecting both the individual and the entire society; the stain of the plantation experience, African slavery and Indian indenture-ship on which it was built, has affected how Caribbean people feel, think and behave. I believe that the plantation complex continues to live on in our interactions with each other. It plays itself out in notions of legitimacy and illegitimacy. It reinforces hierarchy. It teaches us to know our place. It breeds insecurity about who belongs and who doesn’t. The racial, sexual, political, educational, and class factors underlying the plantation complex, continue to determine notions of human worth.
Lloyd Best said that one of the most important things for Caribbean people to do was to find a home and found a community. But for many we still don’t feel at home in Caribbean society … it’s like we’re squatting, just tolerated or just here to work. We still don’t feel legitimate. We too white, too black, too bleached, too red, too rich, too poor, too Indian, too Syrian, too ghetto, too refined. There’s always someone in the Caribbean ready to challenge our legitimacy because of something, whatever that something is.
My Work
My work as a visual artist is concerned with and about the Caribbean. The work is a bit like the illegitimate family tree…it drags out from under the proverbial carpet all the skeletons in the closet you don’t want to acknowledge. And as you well know, all of us in the Caribbean have two family trees; the one that sees the light of day, the legitimate one we show off as respectable, and the other one that no one talks about or even properly records.
The residual effects of favouring the legitimate branches of the family tree in a multifarious space like the Caribbean are injurious. Once the card of legitimacy continues to be played, ie. I belong and you don’t, or you belong and I don’t, the plantation complex will not fall. And until we acknowledge, understand and celebrate all that we are and all that we have been, and claim all of it, the plantation complex will continue to poison our interactions with each other while eroding our self-esteem.
Today, I think two of the arenas in which the plantation complex is evident is (i) in the debate surrounding intra-Caribbean migration and (ii) the physical transformation of the landscape.
And this is what my work is concerned with. It brings together knowledge drawn from treaties, legislation, the region’s daily papers, and reflection on the social space, with personal testimonies from the migrant experience, my imagination, and the use of modified found/manufactured objects - to speak to the complicated relationship between the individual and the state, specifically about intra-Caribbean migration and the shifting landscapes. The images function as back-chat to the state to remind our governments that human beings live on the other side of policies.
While here in Europe, the European Commission President recently suggested that “temporary” re-erection of national borders in 25 European countries was being considered, in the Caribbean, our own attempt at regional integration is crumbling all around us. There are countless examples of the Caribbean treating Caribbeans as other. For example:
Jamaicans and Guyanese now require visas to enter St. Martin;
CARICOM leaders in May determined that the process towards a single economy (slated for 2015) would take a bit longer than anticipated.
Jamaican Shanique Myrie claims to have been finger-raped at the GAIA by immigration officers, and within twenty-four hours, our Minister of Foreign Affairs said Myrie’s claims were a fabrication.
A second Jamaican woman, Donna Benjamin-McLean, revealed that while being held at a police station in Barbados, she was raped by two policemen, aided by a twenty-five year old policewoman who let the men into the prison cell.
“Illegal” CARICOM nationals are held in a cold room at the GAIA, sometimes for days.
Barbados has decided to exclude CARICOM nationals from access to free drugs they once received unless their national ID cards prove that they are citizens or have permanent residence.
It is alleged that Immigration will pay a bounty on the heads of undocumented CARICOM nationals in Barbados.
I, a citizen, can be fined for “harbouring” Caribbean people without status and if I am a permanent resident, my status can be revoked for the same.
And it’s just another day in paradise, folks.
In Barbados in 2008, under the leadership of the newly elected Prime Minister David Thompson and his party, the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), the island was engaging in increasingly heated debate about the presence of ‘illegal’ CARICOM nationals on the island who are there escaping failing nation states and working in any job they can get for any pay. The new government endorsed humiliating searches conducted by Police and Immigration officials for undocumented CARICOM nationals on public transportation vehicles, in nightclubs and at people’s homes in the wee hours of the morning.
The Selection of Art Works
"TRANS/PLANT" (2009)
‘Trans/plant’ is a short, two screen, looped video installation. Although presented here in a compressed version as a split screen, when installed properly, this work is to be projected onto two walls. Trans/plant reinforces the Caribbean as a space defined historically by movement and not by borders.
Caution!! (2009/2011) – Suite of digital prints
In 2009, I developed a project using an abolitionist poster from 1851. The broadside was originally posted in the streets as a warning to the Coloured People of Boston and was in opposition to the Fugitive Slave law of 1850 that was a threat to all African Americans. The law required citizens to help catch runaways and warned that those who aided a fugitive could be fined or imprisoned. An interracial group formed the Boston Committee of Vigilance and issued the poster to alert free African-Americans to the presence of Policemen who were acting as Slave Catchers and Kidnappers.
In response to the increase in raids on houses, public vehicles and nightclubs in Barbados in the state’s search for undocumented CARICOM nationals, I decided to work with the broadside, and drag it into the contemporary space. In March of 2009, in the dark of night, I pasted broadsides of the 1851 Boston poster at various locations throughout Bridgetown, including the Immigration Department, Queens Park, the Bridgetown Fish Market, walls opposite the Advocate daily newspaper office and the Central Police Station and the sidewalk outside the Accreditation Council, among others. The services of a videographer were procured and the plan was to develop a short video work that would reveal the act of dragging this 1851 document into the contemporary space and pasting it throughout the capital city to comment on the alleged bounty on the heads of undocumented CARICOM nationals in Barbados.
Unfortunately, the videographer became nervous of being associated with this project and he sabotaged the footage. What remains is a suite of digital stills, shot the following morning in the light of day and some days later, recording the action from the night before and showing how the public began to interact with the broadsides.
Show Me Your Status (2010) - Object with sound work - 2:91 minutes
'Show me your status' positions an audio work inside a locally made mini bus. The sound work includes the voice of a woman from St. Vincent who recounts the shameful experience of being approached on the bus by immigration officials and a police officer and of being publicly humiliated by being asked to show her status. A dub beat runs throughout the track referencing Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up”.
Hatchlings - A Requiem (2009)
The Free Movement of Persons has been the most contentious issue within the Revised Treaty and has exposed xenophobia, nationalism and racism among member states. Hatchlings - A Requiem, situates the fifteen member countries as insular national states, lying on a bed of the shredded Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. This is an open casket for CARICOM.
I have collaborated with Jomo Slusher to arrange a piece of music for this casket-like work. The sound piece is a requiem for CARICOM and accompanies Hatchlings as it lies in state. A polyphonic work, the requiem merges a stereotypical rhythm of the Caribbean, Island in the Sun, with a number of national anthems and Amazing Grace. The third and final movement returns to “Island in the Sun, sung as a requiem, the base line is Rally Round the West Indies.
So let’s listen to that composition. One must wonder if the fantasy of Caribbean unity has the engine or the machinery to back it up and how we might transition from the concept laid out in the Treaty to the reality on the ground.
Benchmarking (2011)
Benchmarks (in progress) is an evolving suite of laser engraved purple heart benches referencing the degrading practice of placing CARICOM nationals to ‘sit on the bench’ at the airport in Barbados while Immigration determines if they can enter the country. The benches are engraved with texts from the 2009 Green Paper on legislative reform which speaks to ‘harbouring’ and ‘monitoring’ non-nationals, as well as older pieces of legislation (18th & 19th centuries) and classifieds, which also speak to harbouring and documenting the population.
One bench borrows an ad from the Bridgetown Mercury & Gazette Paper of 1806 offering a reward to anyone who can prove that a White or free Coloured person harboured a Run Away. The images of rats on the bench recall legislature passed in Barbados in 1745 to encourage the catching of rats & a reward of two pence was offered for each rat caught in an effort to reduce the plague on the island. In Barbados today, it is alleged that there is a bounty on the heads of undocumented CARICOM nationals.
Units of Labour (2011)
This collection of objects reveals details of the working week of migrant CARICOM workers. Diary forms were handed out to workers and their diary entries have been faithfully reproduced onto a variety of objects that relate to their labour – “ready-mades”. The work recalls Lloyd Best’s statement about how the Caribbean was the only place in the world where the economy preceded the society. We were designed to work (and worship) in the Caribbean, not to have pleasure or to create.
Running parallel to the debate on immigration are discussions about the shifting landscape in a small island, developing nation dependent on a tourism industry insistent on marketing itself as paradise. The transformation of former sugar estates into perfectly manicured lifestyle communities suggests a continuation of the Plantation Complex, rather than its demise.
Just Beyond My Imagination (2007)
The title of this work is adapted from the Barbados Board of Tourism’s marketing slogan “BARBADOS – Just Beyond Your Imagination”. The work presents the countries of the archipelago (minus Haiti & Guyana) as sand traps locked into a sea of perfectly manicured green grass, no sign of water.
The flag pole bears the ironic title of the work, making reference to ways in which the region continues to develop play grounds for the tourist, offering the best resources to only those who can afford it, while limiting progress and access to local people.
The golf course is another kind of plantation…artificially designed and on a large scale. Instead of selling sugar we sell the use of the land for another sweet pleasure, instead of sugar factories we build hotels and instead of cane cutters we have hotel maids and golf caddies.
"Public Beach Access" (2010)
This work documents my repeated action of measuring ten Public Beach Access points to find out how many feet of beach access is available to local residents on seven miles of the most lucrative stretch of the West Coast on the island of Barbados. (One hotel on this coast offers a room for US$25,000.00 plus tax per night.)
Throughout the video work, I sing the lyrics to a song composed and originally performed by local performer, The Mighty Gabby, called “Jack, that Beach is Mine!” This song was his response to the Barbados Board of Tourism’s legal counsel (Jack Dear) advising hotel owners that they had the right to extend their property down to the waterfront. Although decreased access to the coast has become a contentious issue, the need for foreign exchange through the tourist industry, has trumped local desires for access to the beaches.
Signs of the Times (2011)
This suite of hand-worked ready-mades utilises street signs made by the Ministry of Transport & Works. I am interested in playing with the idea of how traffic signs are designed to regulate the flows of traffic on the roads and linking this to the flow of people across Caribbean borders. These beautiful surfaces have been embellished by collaging text and images directly onto the street signs to comment on the state’s position in relation to regional integration, implicating them in their attempt to regulate, document and monitor the movement of people throughout the archipelago.
(up)rooted (1997)
(up)rooted is another work which references the Caribbean as a space defined by the movement of its people and not by its borders, echoing the repeated actions of setting down and pulling up roots. Even though my family has been in Barbados since the seventeenth century, in some ways my own roots are questioned. Similarly “Other” citizens, who do not conform to some national ideal of the hetero-normative, Christian, homogenous, patriarchal, black space, can also feel like outsiders in their own homes.
