1. Haunted Places, Development, and Opposition in Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘The Namsetoura Papers’
- Author
-
Carrigan, Anthony
- Subjects
traduction ,intertextualité ,mythologie ,mythology ,LIT000000 ,translation ,postcolonial literature ,ghostwriting ,spectrality ,ghost ,politique ,intertextuality ,commonwealth ,fantôme ,Literature (General) ,littérature postcoloniale ,politics ,spectralité ,DS - Abstract
Kamau Brathwaite’s genre-crossing piece ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ (2005) is a polemical and intensely lyrical intervention into an ecologically destructive instance of tourism development in present-day Barbados. It portrays Brathwaite’s struggle against eviction from his home in CowPastor in the south-east of the island due to the proposed construction of what he describes as an ‘unnecessary and unethical’ airport access road. Spurred by his visionary encounter with the ghost of Namsetoura, a slave woman who asks him to defend her burial ground, Brathwaite suggests that the proposed development of CowPastor threatens not only to transform the visible landscape but also to destroy a site of deep historical and spiritual significance. In this paper, I explore how Brathwaite’s representation of Namsetoura’s ghost complicates the implementation of ecologically destructive and historically insensitive development in postcolonial Barbados. By highlighting the importance of understanding the spiritual and sacred dimensions of landscape in relation to one of its previously silenced ghosts, Brathwaite insists on a mode of evaluating natural environments (and opposing unsustainable development) which reclaims some of the island’s buried histories. I address specifically how Brathwaite’s opposition to the proposed development is discursively reinforced by his inclusion of a photograph he has taken of Namsetoura which challenges reductively dualistic divisions between the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the incorporeal. I proceed to suggest that Brathwaite’s poetic re-evaluation of local landscape and the spirits of its past paradoxically adds touristic value to the very site that is due to be transformed as a result of tourism industry demands. As such, the ghost of Namsetoura can be read as a powerful agent in the process of creating more sustainable tourism futures.
- Published
- 2023