by Ros Martin
I’ve always had a penchant for visiting old graveyards wherever I am..... the tranquility they offer, wholly absorbs me, an oasis, an antidote to one’s busy inner city life for the cemetery has an ecosystem of its’ own where bird-life & wildflower flourish. For me it is a place to pause, reflect and when I was younger, escape & play games. When I had small children, I would take them there to explore. I read undisturbed, safeguard memories, most of all it is my place to keep company with the dead.......
Going past tombstones, I imagine those interred, past lives. I build a picture in my mind, probing always. Those mounds with no names or markers that have fallen away, what age were the buried when they died? What did they die from? Why are they positioned where they are? Who else is there? What was their life like? Why so little information?.....
.......Finca Clavijo and Newton plantations, sugar plantations’ burial grounds.....one 15th to 17th century in Gran Canaria the other 17th to 19th century in Barbados, my starting place to begin my dig, a psychological dig of a burial site; me, a woman, a mother, a writer of Nigerian & Caribbean heritage.
.......Bones cleaned, slithers examined then analysed, dental sampling .....evidences lives worked to the bone in arduous repetitive work, malnutrition, dental decay, dental carries, premature deaths, aspects of former selves of the Old World absorbed into the New World ...... careful observations that make one unique.
Ghosts of our ancestors who survived the middle passage, their descendants absorbed into plantation life, life after slavery, live before captivity
Captivity
I’m thinking many things; for the project’s archaeologists Drs Emma Lightfoot & Catriona McKenzie, set before us writers, their findings from studies of unearthed skeletal remains from these respective burial sites:
Random thoughts come and go
This digging exercise, is hard, so hard. I feel tense here (chest) and here (stomach) I pause. breathe deeply.....
‘Located close to the site of the former slave village, this burial ground at Newton, Christ Church, Barbados is one of the largest excavated slave cemeteries in this entire hemisphere. Extensive excavation of this burial ground took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Approximately 104 individuals that were buried sometime around 1660 to 1820 were found at this site.
Despite this excavation, the burial ground has remained the only one of its kind to be the earliest and largest undisturbed burial ground to be discovered in Barbados.’
Christchurch
Christ!
There are names on Newton plantation 1828 ‘slave’ list, not their African names........
For a little while I search frantically online records for names familiar to me from my own Barbadian ancestry Agard, Phillips, Butcher........
I leave it.
I conjure up images in my mind capturing thoughts, feelings, words, sound- quotes, fragments to weave together.....
.....Reeds in the wind, you bow to survive......... over arching reeds on burial sites
The sugar cane is a long grass......
Each burial, a rite of passage
A site of memory
Commodities: cotton, gold, tobacco, coffee, sugar......
Slave
Slave
Slave
Slave
SLAVE
SLAVE
Is NOT my name!
I howl.
I study your image you illustrating our project for a long time; it arrests & haunts me.
You, a young man ..... all the beauty & promise of youth, ...... head bowed, chain around your neck; chattel.
Me, a mother of three sons ......
Why?
Why?
Why?
Tell me why?