Innerseeing versus Overseeing by Annalee Davis

Aerial view of Walkers Dairy, St. George, Barbados. Photo credit: Justin Went

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.[1]

 The land knows you, even when you are lost.[2]

PART I - LIVING DEEP WITHIN LAYERS OF CRISES

The original plan for this text was to spend April to mid-June logging my regular walks through the fields at Walkers Dairy – the farm where my home and studio are located – with photographs, drawings and words. That plan got diverted due to an explosive volcanic eruption that began on the morning of April 9th. La Soufrière, an active stratovolcano on the Caribbean archipelago of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, 110 miles west of Barbados, began erupting and continued for several days. The release of gases including sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide among others, embedded in thousands of tons of ashfall consisting of tiny jagged particles of rock and natural glass, blasted into the air, covering St. Vincent in several feet of debris. Some of the eruption columns were so tall that they penetrated the atmosphere, entered the stratosphere at around 20 km high where the wind direction shifted to blow in an easterly anti-trade wind direction, covering Barbados in thousands of tons of ash ninety minutes later. Day turned to night on April 10th as volcanic matter blocked the sunlight and much of the island was in total darkness by early afternoon.

Ashfall on Philodendron in the artist’s garden, April 10, 2021

The ash particles covered everything and entered my tightly shut home through cracks in windows and openings under old wooden doorways. Every blade of grass, barks and leaves on trees and shrubs, every vent, crevice, nook and cranny, was covered in and filled with the powdery toxic material. The entire island turned an ashy grey. It was suffocating. The eruptions exacerbated the already dusty conditions caused by plumes of Sahara dust, creating hazy conditions over the island while bringing tiny bits of minerals from the north coast of Africa across the Atlantic to this most easterly Caribbean island.

Sahara dust over Barbados. Photo credit: Alexander James.

After more than a year of dealing with the pandemic, the island was now moving into a different kind of lockdown. Before, it wasn't safe to breathe in air from other people because of the risk of contracting COVID. Now, it wasn’t safe to breathe.

My routine of briskly walking 7 km three days a week as a form of exercise, and, more importantly during COVID, to preserve mental wellbeing, supplemented by slower ambling through bovine populated fields of grass as a way to know the land, was immediately drawn to a halt.

My allergy to sulphur present in the pervasive volcanic ash, inflamed my airways. The middle of my chest felt like a slow burning fire, causing cough-induced variant asthma for the first time in my life. Prescribed seven medications, I was told to stay indoors, wear a mask and keep all windows and doors closed. Because the ash was so extreme in St. George, (the parish I live in) I eventually relocated from the dairy farm where my home and studio are, to temporary accommodation on the south coast of the island with double-glazed windows and doors sealed shut to prevent ash from entering the interior space and my lungs. My home had become unsafe as had the outdoors. Except for trips to the doctor, I remained indoors for almost five weeks.

 As challenging as COVID was, I at least had the privilege of walking in my curtilage, swimming in the sea, and breathing safely.

PART II - THE PLANTATION AS MEDIATOR OF LANDSCAPE

“Visuality’s first domains were the slave plantations, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, operating as the surrogate of the sovereign.”[3]

So rather than log recent walks for this text, I was forced to reflect on my years of walking on this particular site I have called home for two decades. My work responds to and is informed by the history of the plantation where people, plants and ideas were transplanted and displaced, to re-landscape foreign spaces and generate wealth for the British Empire. My understanding of this place is informed by research, reading, family and public archives, and my personal experience of living, walking and loving this site haunted by a burdened past.

West Indies Central Sugarcane Breeding Station, Barbados. November 2014.

Born and raised on three plantations in what I understood to be ‘the countryside’, I was a young child thinking of these locations as natural environments. I spent my formative years moving from one rural environment to another and later understood that these landscapes, rather than being natural terrain, were perfectly manicured plantations where varieties of sugarcane were carefully bred, planted, harvested, converted to brown crystals and exported in bulk for foreign exchange to pay our nation’s bills, and keep our economy afloat while maintaining a system of wealth for a small segment of the society. Part of a centuries-long history of extractive plantation economics, I later understood there wasn’t anything natural about the plantation.

Since the early 17th century, this small island has been deforested, mapped, farmed and under surveillance as Britain’s first sugar isle. Those actions, under the guise of Empire expansion, agriculture and progress, contributed to what is now understood as the birthplace of the Anthropocene or the Plantationocene[4], the era of environmental transformation and climate collapse. In addition, extended cartographic practices since the 17th century have mediated these landscapes, filtering our own understanding of and relationship with the physical environment.

I have been thinking recently about the role of the Overseer who dominated the plantation landscape in the Caribbean from the early-17th to the mid-19th century. Typically, his oversight was carried out by regulating indentured and enslaved labour, overseeing the planting of 1,742 stalks of cane per acre in clearly delineated 5’ x 5’ plots in ploughed fields, logging tonnage of cane stalks cut, measuring rainfall, mapping soil types – all to procure knowledge from a supposedly objective viewpoint with the goal of extracting as much profit from the soil no matter the human and environmental costs.

My wide-open studio window looks onto a 17th-century sugar mill, built by captive labour stolen from their native lands and operated by enslaved people who were systematically brutalised. Now home to a trip of bleating goats, the bucolic nature of this site belies its centuries-long history of brutality, death, injustices and the traumas on which this society was built.

Sweeping the Fields, Mill Wall, Annalee Davis, (2016). Photo credit: Helen Cammock.

Even though violence has been enacted on these fields through the death machine that was the plantation, this ground has its own agency and the quiet revolution happening in the fields through the proliferation of wild botanicals is a reminder of that. They tell us that we can nurture this broken place and through caretaking, both we and the soil can aim to be whole. As a newly independent nation, there was shame associated with working in agriculture given its cruel historical undertones. More than fifty years later, young black and white Barbadians are choosing to engage in small organic farming operations, overturning the alienation that many have felt from food production and its consumption while many black Barbadians are intentionally reconnecting with the land as a way to engage with their African spiritual roots. It is through this repair work that we can shift from extraction and degradation to regeneration and reparation.

Wild Plant Series, latex on plantation ledger pages, Annalee Davis, Art Gallery Black Studies, University of Texas, Austin. 2016. Photo credit: Mark Doroba,  

PART III - TOURISM AS MEDIATOR OF LANDSCAPE

As I write these words today, I am sitting at a small table pushed up against a tightly sealed double-glazed door looking on to a perfectly laid out garden. This ground floor unit, part of a well-manicured beach-front residential complex, is the glass-fronted cave where I have come to convalesce.

While observing many varieties of ‘tropical’ palms, fragrant frangipanis, majestic mahogany trees, and shrubs including ixora, and crotons – all still covered in minute particles of ash two months since the eruptions – detritus blows in blustery dry season winds and the skies still have a grey pallor over them. The rains, desperately needed to wash the ashfall away, are slow to come.

The sensation of burning embers in the middle of my chest has transitioned to what feels like cotton wool wedged in between the lobes of my lungs. I inhabit this dry aquarium, breathing in the same stale air for weeks while keeping out harmful, powdery, volcanic material. Looking at what may be described as a tropical exotic paradise, I wonder why I feel like I am suffocating in this well-articulated, brochure-perfect paradise? 

Sweet Island Cookie Cutters – Sweet Fuh So!,  Annalee Davis, 2012. Install shot at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Seven Acrylic cookie cutters, indoor/outdoor carpet and laser engraved andiroba boxes. Each box measures 7.75″ x 7.75″ x 2″, Image courtesy PAMM.

Like the plantation, the tourism sector has its own way of reordering the environment and those who move within it. The website for the property where I temporarily reside lists regulations prohibiting residents from draping towels or washing of any kind over patio rails. Hanging intimate apparel to dry on the patio is considered unsightly, negatively impacting the quality of the property, something common across middle- and lower-class communities. Birds are not to be fed. The pool can only be used between 8:00 am to 8:00 pm. No loud music, only headphones allowed in shared public space. Children can’t jump in the pool or make loud noises.

Systems of classification, rules and regulations are familiar to those of us in the Caribbean – we are well-versed in codes determining who belongs and who doesn’t, we understand social and racial hierarchies, rules around legitimacy and illegitimacy. Before we relate to a place, our understanding of it is mediated by externally imposed rules and regulations.

But there are cracks in these systems of order. Barbados, keen to maintain relationships with the cruise ship sector, eagerly offered our blue waters as fluid berthing stations for these floating hotels during the pandemic. The rest of the Caribbean did not want these massive vessels in their watery jurisdictions. More than one year later, reports of five ton anchors sitting on the ocean floor, connected to 300 meters of metal chains swinging in 180 degree motions, resulted in the killing of our coral reefs that will take more than a hundred years to replenish. Apologies to eager snorkelers and glass-bottom boat clients whose expectations of vibrant underwater parks will not be met.

As noted on June 1st 2021 in Barbados Today, “A report prepared by the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES) estimated that around 3.8 million square metres of coral reef were damaged between March and September 2020 while 28 ships were docked here during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Live, healthy coral reefs may not measure high on the Return on Investment metric but our government has been able to secure loyalty with the cruise ship industry which will continue to have access to our waters.

On June 8th, the first cruise ship to sail in the Western Hemisphere in fifteen months and since COVID-19 called on the Bridgetown Port in Barbados. Our Minister of Tourism and International Transport, Senator Lisa Cummins, welcomed the vessel which she said made history by being the largest COVID-19-vaccinated cruise in the world carrying some 500 vaccinated passengers to our waters.

PART IV - FINDING WILDNESS IN MEDIATED LANDS -  INNERSEEING VERSUS OVERSEEING

Walking as Ritual

 “The wild is the only place to go to calibrate your mind.”[5]

From my relatively privileged position as a 21st-century visual artist aiming to investigate a place I have deep affection for, I often ask myself how else I could come to know this burdened place, love this land, walk in step with sites I first learned of through foreign measurements? How do I learn to listen with another ear, connect with grounds buried beneath ceaseless cadastrals, surveys, mappings, sweat, blood, labour and death as though the profound depths of any land could ever be measured or owned? These lands, layered substrates with restless histories running through them, have their own language, a mother tongue that I yearn to become well-versed in. Coursing through these old lands at dawn or dusk is one way I have come to know this place. But what is this land’s lexicon and how do I learn to speak in its mother tongue?

King Line, Mixed media on plantation ledger page, Annalee Davis 2016.

Having walked these bovine-trodden fields for many years, rather than experiencing the terrain on its own terms, I am aware that my understanding of this place has been heavily mediated. Firstly by the names I learned from my brother, imposed on the fields centuries ago and passed down orally. I most often walk through Big Orchard, Little Mansion and Big Mansion, traversing the track that runs parallel to Upper Gittens and Lower Gittens. I wonder why a field was named Moor Door or Girls School. Did someone see fit to educate girls in that field hundreds of years ago? I made a drawing on a plantation ledger page called King Line, a former field of cane where my father built his house. It shows the delineated shapes of all the fields on this 140-acre farm labelled with their monikers. I have learned about the types of grasses planted for cows to ruminate on including Pangola, African Star and Tifton. Some years, sorghum is planted and attempts to establish King Grass (known locally as Elephant Grass) continue.

17th-18th-century clay and porcelain sherds found in the fields at Walkers Dairy, St. George, Barbados. Photo credit: Holly Bynoe.

Alternatively, I find porcelain and ceramic sherds poking out of earthen tracks between fields, making me think about this crockery originating from potteries in the north of England. They crossed the Atlantic as ballasts in ships and were used by the settler colonial class for drinking tea and serving food. Broken sets eventually found their way to the indentured and enslaved. They are now embedded in soils all over this island and the entire Caribbean.

Sometimes, while walking, I recall the will written by Thomas Applewhaite in 1815. I first read it late one evening in my studio and learned about Frances, his ‘favourite girl slave’ whom he offered manumission to six years after his death and who undoubtedly walked these fields. Or, I remember reading the names and ages of the 223 enslaved people–100 men, 115 women and children – listed in the slave return for Walkers in 1834. Thirteen were deceased, fifteen were listed as African and the rest as Barbadian, nine referred to as ‘Coloured’ and the rest ‘Black’, ten were classified as domestic workers and the balance as labourers. This register calculated the economic value of the formerly enslaved, owned by Edward Archer Applewhaite, the England-based proprietor of the plantation, so he could receive his payout at the time of abolition.

Other times, I reflect on how some bodies, determined not to have souls, were not welcomed for burial in the hallowed cemeteries of Barbados’ Anglican churches. Exhausted bodies were laid to rest, finally, in burial sites beneath the surface of each and every plantation–sepulchers likely located below their humble homes. While roaming these lands, I might think about unmarked graves and wonder where they are situated. How many are entombed under these thin layers of topsoil? Do I desecrate the dead while walking unknowingly atop these sacred chambers?

In the post-independent era, less fertile lands, historically designated as plots for the enslaved to grow their own food, have become counter-plots–carefully tended beautiful home and communal gardens–non-commercial spaces for self-care, self-sustenance and community sharing. Having migrated to villages on the fringes of former plantations, I see them challenging history and authority, in resistance to large scale monocrop farming practices and the monopoly of expansive supermarket chains.

 Walking challenges my historically mediated thinking-mind to expand my feeling-heart and experience the fullness of this terra firma beyond forced monoculture practices, human traumas, global marketplaces and more recent extractive tourist economies. Once our physical environments are so irrevocably altered, where do we go to calibrate our hungry, wanting souls and experience the sublime? Many of us are robbed of a rapport with wildness often intervened by mechanisms of order under the rubric of agriculture, cheated by inadequate curricula in schools, distracted by the prevalence of technology and sedentary work lives, increasing our alienation from the natural world.

Encountering wild botanicals in former sugar cane fields or wandering past small-scale counter-gardens in villagers’ front yards suggests the possibility of reconciliation with broken lands–vestiges from our history when human beings were reduced to property and soil treated as a resource from which we took so much and gave too little in return.

Opposing the practice of the plantation overseer, my own effort at disalienation inspired by walking, includes drawing inexact, uncertain and subjective cartographic expressions prompted by a practice of ‘innerseeing’ this multivocal ground beneath my feet. Roaming, listening with another ear and seeing have become intimate acts of moving my aging body through these radically modified environments, provoking an interest in post-extractive ethics and prompting a sense of care for and relationships with human and non-human kin alike.

The trauma and negativity of our shared past does not have to be the blueprint for our collective futures. In spite of the anguish and upheaval these fields have witnessed, we can seek alignment in lands that have been out of calibration for so long, create sacred spaces in spoiled soil and in so doing give meaning to our reckoning with these broken places while forging intentional relationships with where we are.

Private garden, St. George, Barbados. Photo credit: Holly Bynoe.

I would like to acknowledge the feedback of two fellow readers, Holly Bynoe and Katherine Kennedy, who helped to make this a stronger text.

For more information: https://annaleedavis.com/

https://www.instagram.com/annalee.devere/

Notes

[1] Kimmerer, R.W. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (London: Penguin, 2020) p. 48

[2] Ibid, p. 36

[3] Mirzoeff, N. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, N.C: Dukes University Press, 2011) p. 2

[4] “I threw out that word in a conversation with Anna Tsing and others in Denmark precisely because we wanted to foreground the world-changing importance of our relations to plants. In formulating the Plantationocene, we needed also to pay more attention to the work of mainly Black scholars on plantation slavery and its ongoing consequences, such as Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, and Dianne Glave. The Anthropocene refuses to name the political and economic apparatus that drives the practices that are so destructive, and it treats the dilemma we’re in as if it’s our own natural evolutionary trajectory. That’s simply not true. We act that way in historical conjunctures and systems that can be changed. It’s not human nature that’s the issue, but a situated historical metabolism with the planet in conditions that nurture extraction and extermination. Not all people have lived on the Earth that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way. It can still change.” (https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/making-kin-an-interview-with-donna-haraway/ - Taken from an interview with Donna Haraway. Accessed June 3rd, 2021)

[5] Zwicky, J. and Bringhurst, R. Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (Regina, S.K: University of Regina Press, 2018) pp. 31 -32