Seedcorn 2023/2024

In recent years Caribbean public calls for decolonisation have become more audible and urgent (evidenced by Barbadian and Jamaican moves to republic status, calls for reparations and the removal of colonial statues). Central to this profound decolonial shift we have seen a turn towards the re-prioritising and re-privileging pre-/de-colonial knowledge and spiritual systems. Here we see the reaffirmation of public and scholarly interest in Caribbean cosmologies. Historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite has identified the art of storytelling as central to Caribbean everyday life and cosmologies. In his landmark essay ‘Note(s) on Caribbean Cosmology’ Brathwaite locates twelve integrated cosmological pillars that order Caribbean worlds, with one of them focusing on Anancy stories. Here Brathwaite acknowledges (despite brutal dispossessions to which Afro-Caribbean peoples have been exposed) the ‘great tradition of people telling stories, people re/membering their past and then knitting it back together’, (p 8) and uses the Anancy tradition as a key example of storytelling’s centrality to Caribbean cultures of survival, creativity, sociality, and repair.

Storytelling is a vital and living practice in the Anglophone Caribbean. Across the region, stories of folk characters like Anancy, the Soucouyant, La Diablesse, Mama Dglo and many more are being told and retold across the generations. Storytelling has not only persisted as a means of connection and entertainment in the Caribbean, but also serves as a ‘methodological [tool] for unsettling colonialities in the twenty-first century’ (Clarke and Mullings 2022). It is a way of knowing that challenges and resists dominant narratives about knowledge production.

What will the project involve? 

This project forms a pilot / proof of concept phase in a larger multistakeholder project about Caribbean storytelling practices across the Eastern Caribbean (a lesser known, linguistically complex sub-region). The team intend to apply for a large award to explore the central question: what function do folktales serve in the twenty-first century world? To answer this question they will document, analyse and collaboratively archive folklore traditions and practices of storytelling across a number of islands in the Eastern Caribbean, before inviting local creatives practitioners (visual artists, filmmakers) to re-tell these stories in various digital formats for local, regional and diasporic audiences.

The pilot phase involves researching and capturing one story from one island. The research team will document, archive and analyse the story of Ti Bolom as told in St Lucia. The Ti Bolom (a Francophone Creole term that literally translates as ‘little man’) is a child-sized spirit, often thought to be servant of the devil, that is summoned into the world to do its master’s nefarious bidding. In St Lucia, people of all generations know stories about the Ti Bolom. The researchers are interested in learning more about how this story lives on the island today, archiving a number of tellings of the story by recording them, and attempting to locate any colonial archival records that point to the longer history of the story (e.g. in newspaper accounts or court records, as under the British colonial ‘Obeah Laws’ many such practices were outlawed).

The team intend to focus their research through the following questions:

• How is the story of Ti Bolom told on the island of St Lucia today?
• How do they function? What do they do/represent? (In moral, spiritual, social and pedagogical terms)
• Has the story of Ti Bolom been captured by the colonial archive?
• How best can we archive the Ti Bolom story in such a way that honours oral storytelling as a living practice?

The following activities will enable the team to answer these questions:

Leighan Renaud and Adom Philogene Heron will undertake fieldwork in St Lucia for 9 days. During that time, they will work with local filmmaker/lecturer Ted Sandiford, local community historian/photographer Fiona Compton, and St Lucian research student Lovell Cadet to film 3-4 local storytellers sharing their Ti Bolom stories. Given that Ted and Fiona live in St Lucia permanently, and Lovell visits often and has an extensive network on the island, they will utilizes these contacts to identify key storytellers and draft a detailed fieldwork itinerary prior to arrival on the island.

Ted Sandiford will film the stories being told. Filming will take place in each storyteller’s preferred location so as best to document the true context within which stories are told and retold. Lovell Cadet will offer additional support required for filming (fixer on the ground support, creole language translations and directing on-island travel).

The team will hold a small workshop/focus group in collaboration with St Lucia’s Folk Research Centre to speak with local people about their experiences of folk stories, the value of keeping oral storytelling traditions alive on the island, and how they would like to see these stories archived/preserved. Given her connections with the centre, Fiona Compton will help organize this meeting. These local partnerships will also promote equitable, Caribbean-led and collaborative research relationships – ensuring high quality and meaningful research outputs/impacts.

The project will employ a researcher with archival experience to visit St Lucia’s national archives to look for any instances wherein the Ti Bolom story has been recorded. Should instances of the Ti Bolom story not appear in the archival records, we are interested in learning what other kinds of folk stories/ folkloric characters feature in the colonial archive. We are also be interested to learn of both enslaved people and the post-emancipation masses telling stories for entertainment or gathering to listen to stories being told.

Who are the team and what do they bring?

• Leighan Renaud (Humanities, University of Bristol) is a researcher who focuses on contemporary Anglophone Caribbean literature. She is primarily interested in how contemporary writers from the region engage with themes such as gender, family, neo-coloniality, legacies of slavery, and language.
• Adom Philogene Heron (Visual Anthropology, University of Bristol) is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the Caribbean, particularly Dominica. He is an ethnographer of the Caribbean whose work spans: Black and indigenous ecologies, hurricanes, survivals & repair; the material and affective afterlives of Bristolian slavery; & Caribbean kinship and fatherhood.
• Ted Sandiford (Acid Kreationz) is a St Lucia-based illustrator, videographer and storyteller. His illustrations draw from various mishaps in his youth, and seek to be relatable to his audience. He believes that both making and viewing art can be a form of therapy.
• Fiona Compton (Know Your Caribbean) is a London based Saint Lucian Artist, Filmmaker, Historian and Cultural Ambassador. Her work has explored the various disparities in representation of the Afro Caribbean diaspora within art and mainstream media. She is also the founder of the Know Your Caribbean platform.
• Lovell Cadet (University of Portsmouth) is a Bristol based St Lucian born storyteller and carnivalist.

What is to come?

This pilot phase forms a necessary step in testing how the researchers will work with non-academic/creative partners across the Caribbean region in equitable ways that build sustainable partnerships ahead of applying for a larger award. This project is radically interdisciplinary (literature, anthropology, history, visual practice/film) and community-engaged (local institutions, artists, storytellers, creatives), and has the potential to reach a large audience of people from the Caribbean diaspora (via digital and visual outputs disseminated on a host of platforms). For over 400 years Caribbean societies have been made and re-made through planet-wide migrations; the regions peoples and cultural forms (music, literature, dance and cuisine) proliferate out to the world. The researchers are interested in how its folklore travels through digital worlds. By releasing the video footage in an open access format, through the popular Instagram platform ‘Know Your Caribbean’ (an Instagram page with over 250,000 followers run by team researcher Fiona Compton), they are confident that the recorded stories will reach a wide global and diasporic audience. The research outputs will be shared through a co-written paper (written by the project PI and Co-I) that will be delivered at the Society for Caribbean Studies’ annual conference. They will also write a blog post about their experiences of international, interdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation with non-academics in the Caribbean.

Based on findings, Adom and Leighan will co-write a conference paper to be delivered at the 2025 Society for Caribbean Studies (SCS) Conference. The paper will reflect upon on St Lucian fieldwork, and what we have learned about how folktales live in the Caribbean and its diasporas today, and the role they play in contemporary life.

The team will create short films of Ti Bolom stories being told by 3-4 St Lucian people. These will be released on a YouTube channel they will create, and act as the first entries of a growing folklore archive. This archive and the preliminary analyses they generate from it will act as proof of concept, as they aim to apply for a large award to develop this research into a bigger project featuring an interactive archival map featuring stories being told across the Anglophone Caribbean. They will make use of the ‘Know Your Caribbean’ platform to promote and direct traffic to the Youtube channel and the ambitions of the larger project.

They will create a blog post detailing the process of working with international creatives. This post will include reflections on the realities international collaboration and community-engaged research.