This suite of drawings of parasites is inspired both by Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1992) and Evelyn O’Callaghan’s introductory text to the fictional 19th century text, With Silent Tread (2002). Benitez-Rojo writes of the “parasitical presence of the island’s sugar-producing history” and “its laborious intestinal history” while O’Callaghan articulates ways in which “white creoles were viewed with suspicion” due to “the fear of miscegenation... addressed indirectly by the use of the trope, disease.”
In the first drawing, Woman Looking at Long Annelid Parasites of History, a woman is looking suspiciously at writhing annelids or segmented worms. The text in the drawing, taken from the legend of a 1966 soil and land-use survey of the island of Barbados, charts various soil types and erosion categories facilitating effective control of the land mass for the imposition of a monocrop, Saccharum officinarum or sugar cane.
The third drawing in this evolving series is titled Woman Expelling Long Annelid Parasite of History While Standing on Top of a Mill Wall. In it, the woman wears a Cerasee-bush dress, leans off the edge of a mill wall, expurgating a long annelid parasite of history from her bowels, ridding herself of a contaminated history and the unrelenting spread of its infectious disease. The topographical depiction below the mill wall, also taken from the 1966 soil and land-use survey, focuses on the parish of St. George, Walkers, the location of the site under investigation. The chart defines the soil types in terms of colour, slope and erosion categories.
