1Over the last few decades, the explosion of mass tourism into the world’s largest industry has affected nowhere more dramatically than the Caribbean. The most tourism dependent region globally,1 the Caribbean receives over 40 million visitors per year, largely from wealthy countries with colonial histories, who stream into the islands by sea and air. Welcome sources of income in many cases, these visitors also sponsor (wittingly or otherwise) numerous exploitative and often neocolonial practices which have severe cultural and environmental consequences.2 These range from the commoditisation of local arts and customs to the desecration of sacred spaces and the destruction of vulnerable ecologies. Since the early 1990s, sustainability has been a buzzword in interdisciplinary tourism studies, not least because it promises forms of tourism development that respect relations between local cultures and environments whilst still retaining long-term profitability. However, despite scattered examples of good practice (generally involving local community autonomy over tourism development) the lure of short-term capital gain allied with the economic clout of governments and multinationals means that exploitative forms of tourism development continue to proliferate in the Caribbean. This essay addresses the role cultural production can play both in opposing the contemporary travel industry’s neocolonial dimensions and in contributing to the realisation of more sustainable tourism futures in postcolonial contexts. It focuses on Kamau Brathwaite’s genre-crossing piece ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ (2005), which represents a polemical and intensely lyrical intervention into an ecologically destructive instance of tourism development in present-day Barbados. I argue that by highlighting the importance of understanding the spiritual and sacred dimensions of landscape in relation to one of its previously silenced ghosts, Brathwaite not only insists on a mode of evaluating natural environments which reclaims some of the island’s buried histories, but also gives them a central position in his own resistance to exploitative development plans.

2After living in many different locations in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and America during his career, in the mid-1990s Brathwaite returned to a region of Barbados he calls CowPastor, located in the parish of Christ Church on the south-east coast of the island. On arriving there, Brathwaite set to work on reorganising his extensive archives which were thrown into disarray by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. He also conceived of constructing a cultural institute on the site to support the work of young artists. Soon after, however, he learnt of government plans to transform the area by building what he calls an ‘unnecessary and unethical road... for some new unexplained access to the airport’.3 This required eviction of the site’s current tenants in preparation for the land being bulldozed. In an open letter, available on a website dedicated to his struggle entitled ‘Save CowPastor’, Brathwaite describes the development as an ‘offence... to the people who choose to live here’ perpetrated by ‘a willful remote control decision by Authorities too arrogant & high & mighty to discuss plans that involve all our futures... w/us ‘out here’, who are still seen—MENTAL PLANTATION MENTAL SLAVERY—as chattel anti-heroes have no voice’ (‘Kamau Brathwaite and CowPastor’). The development involves both landscape transformation (‘this old plantation well, the little Lake... of Thorns—the natural water catchment for this area— filled in and flattened’) and the destruction of wildlife through a loss of pastureland. This includes not only fauna but also symbolic flora, including ‘a fledgling BEARDED FIG-TREE (shrine of ancient African & Amerindian spirits)... a dear endangered species. cruelly unethically soon to gone’. The cultural significance of such features is linked to the third aspect of the site which Brathwaite believes will be destroyed if the development continues: the cultural and spiritual histories contained within the land.

3Building on recent archaeological research that has identified the nearby Newton plantation as a slave cemetery (the first to be excavated in Barbados), Brathwaite argues that CowPastor was also a burial ground and should be protected from culturally and environmentally destructive developments on the basis of its historical value and sacred status.4 The creative work Brathwaite has produced in relation to this dispute depicts the haunted histories of the landscape in a way that involves self-reflexive evaluation of how dialectical opposition can be reinforced by aesthetic representation. After initially resigning himself to complying with government-ordained expropriation, Brathwaite was prompted to stay in CowPastor and fight for its protection following a visionary encounter he experienced with the ghost of a female slave named Namsetoura on the cusp of the millennium. The representation of this encounter in his genre-crossing 2005 piece ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ and its ramifications for more sustainable tourism futures in Barbados form the focus of this essay.

4Brathwaite opens the section of ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ entitled ‘Xidus_Xidus’ by describing the events of the day leading up to his encounter with Namsetoura. He writes of his feelings of:

dread & preparation. leaving< this one last chance to be home & at my age to be beautiful. we be -gin making an inventory of everything in our hearts... thirsting up all our images... now in these last words we wd use the camera. photographs of me mory. it’s sun’s eye illuminating my one eye into the last spirits & magicals I’ve nvr known before tho they are here.... ghosts we now know who won’t leave us.5

5This passage refers to how Brathwaite spent a day taking photos of the landscapes threatened by imminent development. He does so as a means of preserving place, whilst also attempting to capture the ‘spirits’ or ‘ghosts’ of the past which bequeath stories and historicity to natural environments. Brathwaite’s invocation of the spiritual domain here reflects some of de Certeau’s influential arguments regarding how places are endowed with meaning in The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau states that:

There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.... [T]hese ‘spirits’, themselves broken into pieces..., do not speak any more than they see. This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent.6

6However, the depiction of events that follow Brathwaite’s attempt to construct a photographic record of the landscape involves an important departure from de Certeau’s spatial philosophy, in which ‘spirits’ perform primarily metaphorical functions.

7After photographing various examples of CowPastor’s flora, the narrator describes how his ‘eye catch < /sight of a spider—ananse— then /the web’. However, when he tries to take a picture of it ‘in the grassfinder /of the camera—all comin in/is the bright afternoon in the iris/ & the eye of camera’. On switching to a close-up lens, his ‘new xpensive Sigma STOP / WORKIN’ and he almost makes the ‘fatal’ mistake of opening the camera which would have ‘lose us the few shots we hav / (e)leave inside / which i now » kno is / how the SPIDERS makin me do/this—TO LOO/-SE ALL RECORD OF »/DEM-IMAGES’ (‘The Namsetoura Papers’: 44). Commenting on this section of ‘The Namsetoura Papers’, Adriana González Mateos states that Brathwaite’s interest in the spider is ‘not that of a naturalist. In Ghana, the Akan worship Ananse, a spirit that is also a spider. It gleams in the darkness and entraps our fears, drives away malignant energies, plays with people’s certainties, and guards those places where our world comes into contact with other worlds’.7 Why though might this Ananse-figure wish to intervene in Brathwaite’s attempt to memorialise CowPastor photographically?

8Despite the manifold differences between the kind of photographs Brathwaite is taking here and the stereotypically paradisal images pursued by island tourists, in her work on photography Susan Sontag intriguingly characterises all photographers as ‘supertourists’.8 She argues that ‘ [t]o photograph is to appropriate’, and that the camera ‘may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the furthest reach of the metaphor, assassinate’ (Sontag 2001: 4; 13). This might imply that, despite his deep attentiveness to CowPastor’s natural beauty, Brathwaite’s problems in attaining a photographic record of the area are figuratively linked to the appropriative nature of this form of representation. Further, if photography is ‘supertourism’, his actions could even be considered complicit with the very process of expropriation that is causing him to leave his home and transforming his land. An alternative perspective to this can however be offered through reference to Roland Barthes’s discussion of photography in Camera Lucida. For Barthes, the co-presence of two ‘elements’, designated studium and punctum, causes photographs to attract attention. His first term refers to the ‘application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment... without special acuity’:9 it denotes a culturally conditioned field of interest through which photographs can be generically classed. Thus the palm-fringed beaches, azure seas, and dazzling sunsets repeated incessantly in the marketing of tropical islands all tap into a studium that both constitutes and is constituted by touristic sensibilities or ‘taste’. Barthes’ second term, punctum, is more subversive, literally acting to ‘break (or punctuate) the studium’. It is unsought for; it ‘disturb[s]’, ‘pricks’, and ‘bruises’; it is ‘poignant’; and it endows a photograph with sudden and powerful value (Barthes 2000: 26-27). In this light, Brathwaite’s troubles with his camera could be seen as bound up with his initial inability to break CowPastor’s ecological studium as fully as the site demands. Part of Ananse’s tricksy, contrapuntal purpose in this sense is to guide the photographer towards the hidden punctum of the scene. CowPastor is not only a site of threatened natural beauty but also one of deep cultural, historical, and spiritual significance which demands more involved engagement than that provided by conventional photographic images. Its punctum is represented by Namsetoura.

9Still attempting to capture the spider and its web, the narrator describes how suddenly ‘the whole/precious autofocus CRACK as if I have a heart attack or someone /cussin mwe’. At this point, his dreamwife Chad finds a ‘lil ole /Kodak camerata try a few shots sheself and is from this box we get /this pic. ture. not of spiders spiderwebs. but this. the one shot out of a /whole wide roll of blacks & blanks of flim. this Nam-/setoura. and is she. sheself. who writin mwe this poem’ (‘The Namsetoura Papers’: 12; fig. 1 on the following page shows the resulting picture [‘The Namsetoura Papers’: 49], which also adorns the cover of his collection of poems, Born to Slow Horses [2005]).

10The point when the lens cracks can be interpreted as an instant in which CowPastor’s cultural and historical punctum ‘pierces’ the boundaries between reality and representation, life and death. The general ‘commitment’ to a field of interest which is applied, in Barthes’ terms, ‘without special acuity’ and which characterises the photographic studium (constituted in this case by the beauty of CowPastor’s natural environment) is therefore literally ‘broken’ by Namsetoura. In this case, though, the punctum does not ‘shoot out of’ a photograph but seemingly from the physical surroundings themselves, ‘pricking’ the lens and thereby reinforcing its inaptness for capturing the cultural, historical, and spiritual resonances of this environment.

11One challenge this presents to de Certeau’s characterisation of haunted places as inert, mediated only by metaphors and stories, is that it is not the ‘spirits’ here that are, as he has it, ‘broken into pieces’ but the instrument of mimesis, the camera. Neither does this ‘ghost’, Namsetoura, ‘remain silent’ in the way de Certeau’s theory suggests. Rather she speaks to Brathwaite as follows:

12Namsetoura’s anguished yet provocative interrogation of the narrator allows suggestion that de Certeau’s emphasis on the ‘silence’ of ‘spirits’ has a Eurocentric bias, indebted to a ‘western’ empiricist tradition that understands spirit-worlds primarily as functions of the imaginary. Moreover, by calling the narrator ‘my metaphor/flesh of my flash’, Namsetoura performs a significant mimetic reversal. Although Brathwaite appears to mediate by ‘transcribing’ her words, her sentiments suggest that, not only is she the narrator’s ancestral progenitor, but he is a function of her imagination rather than vice versa—a metaphor fleshed out by the flash of her visionary intervention. The obvious counter-argument involves noting that the only ‘evidence’ of Namsetoura’s existence in ‘reality’ is Brathwaite’s personal testimony and the photograph he presents as Namsetoura. In this light, the encounter could be simply rendered the product of Brathwaite’s imaginative engagement with the history of a place to which he is deeply attached. However, the interface between history, memory, spirituality, and aesthetic representation explored in ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ significantly complicates this conclusion, something which becomes more evident through consideration of the relationship between the visible and the invisible in the text’s spiritual landscape.

13Investigating those aspects of environments that are conventionally rendered invisible is a crucial method of confronting the vapid clichés that characterise representations of tropical islands in tourist marketing. As Jeff Baldwin comments in an essay on contested land in Antigua, by historicising aspects of island environments, ‘a certain dissonance between the visible and the invisible, the unexamined and the manifest’ is foregrounded. This allows landscapes which are ‘ [a]pparently natural’ to be reconceived as ‘products of social relations at work in the context of ecological and physical processes’.10 In this light, the factual status of Brathwaite’s encounter with Namsetoura is arguably less important than the power of a specific place to provoke intensely imagined experiences through consideration of its invisible qualities (particularly its historical dimensions). Moreover, in refusing to accept that Namsetoura is primarily a literary construction or imaginative creation, both within ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ and in real-life interviews and correspondences, Brathwaite undermines binary understandings of the visible and the invisible as he asserts that the two are intimately interlinked. By incorporating a photograph of Namsetoura in the text, he challenges the reader to accept her both as a function of the imaginary and as a visible participant in its contemporary ecological reality. This in turn reflects the process through which Brathwaite has organised his response to his encounter with Namsetoura.

14In an interview with Joyelle McSweeney, Brathwaite states:

What she [Namsetoura] said is that I should do some real research, I should defend her sacred space, and I should become concerned therefore with the environment, both historically and spiritually, from which she had come. And soon after that I began to make it clear to the government of Barbados, without much response, that I was not going to leave CowPastor until I got some clear explanation as to why they wanted to build a road through this place.11

15This has some important ramifications. It enhances understanding of how the fragmentation of Brathwaite’s camera, as described in ‘The Namsetoura Papers’, represents the limitations of photography as a mode of fully comprehending or capturing CowPastor’s historically embedded but spiritually vital ecological reality. The complicity with touristic modes of appropriation mentioned earlier is produced because visual records only constitute part of the story of any human dwelling place (as de Certeau’s narrative theory of space and place recognises). The ghost’s intervention prevents Brathwaite from representing the site of CowPastor through sight alone; instead she drives him to the archives, to historical resources, stories, and imaginative reconstructions in order to ‘develop’ a fuller understanding of CowPastor which he then self-reflexively refashions as aesthetic artefact. The resulting text is formally interdiscursive, incorporating academic research, archival and historical evidence, poetical texts, government speeches and edicts, the photograph of Namsetoura, and written transcriptions of oral testimony. And in generic terms it embraces aspects of the ‘magical real’, which Brathwaite considers to be linked with the kind of postcolonial ‘catastrophes’ for which the ‘minuscule version’ (McSweeney 2005) of CowPastor is metonymic.12 It highlights how environmental destruction both provokes and demands recourse to a conception of ‘reality’ where the conventionally invisible (in this case, the spiritual domain) constitutes an inseparable aspect of its ecological specificity and texture.

16The interdependence outlined here between dialectical opposition and discursive interrogation of exploitative processes of development in Brathwaite’s work is both provocative and potentially empowering. His imaginative representation of place energises and extends real-life resistance through the discursive refashioning of its original logic, and this form of intervention is in turn reinforced and politicised by continued resistance in reality. Rupturing the kind of positivist distinctions between the corporal and the ethereal, the ‘active’ living and the ‘silent’ dead, on which de Certeau’s characterisation of haunted places rests, ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ offers a powerful contribution to debates regarding the kind of issues that must be embraced if a more expansive vision of sustainable tourism futures is to be realised in the Caribbean. It insists on a method of addressing the ongoing connections between the histories of exploitation embedded in the natural environments of islands such as Barbados via spirits of the past that are unwilling or indeed unable to rest while experiences of exploitation and dispossession of local communities still characterise contests over land.

17 In terms of the effects these considerations might have on sustainability planning, a comparative example from a very different but not incommensurable cultural context can be found in Fijian senator Atu Emberson-Bain’s work on postcolonial Pacific island development strategies. She suggests that as ‘ “sustainable development” flourished prior to colonial conquest... and the fostering of Western “development”... [i]t is perhaps timely... that we look back into the past for clues as to how to build a self-reliant, sustainable future: a time to wake up some of the ghosts of yesteryear’.13 Despite the widespread decimation of indigenous societies in the Pacific islands, Emberson-Bain’s call relies on the knowledge that cultural continuities still abound in the region, carrying with them various environmental epistemologies that have the potential to propel sustainability planning across the archipelago. Due to legacies of forced diaspora, genocide, and widespread cultural fragmentation, it is perhaps harder to identify the same type of ‘ghosts’ in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, Brathwaite’s portrayal of his encounter with Namsetoura speaks to a similar array of possibilities to those intimated by Emberson-Bain. On one level it reinforces the observation that ‘ [d]ue to colonial and tourist views of the islands as ahistorical, passive, and idyllic landscapes, Caribbean writers have had to recover a sense of historicity’.14 Yet on another level this ‘recovery’, in which the writer is roused by the spectral rather than vice versa, emphasises the ongoing role such ghosts can play in disrupting environmentally exploitative or insensitive forms of tourism development.

18Brathwaite’s encounter with Namsetoura and its aestheticisation highlight the importance of accounting for the conventionally invisible elements of landscape and ecology if more a more rigorous form of sustainability planning is to emerge in the postcolonial Caribbean. The necessity of this is all the more acute when considered in light of how entwined social and natural histories have for so long been overwritten, marginalised, and silenced in the region. Developments that do not fully account for such perspectives put future cultural and natural growth in jeopardy. They both extend histories of dispossession and threaten to destroy the very ‘resources’ (the cultural dimensions of landscape) that can help enhance the kind of specificity on which aspects of the tourism industry and the marketing of individual destinations depends.

19This point is by no means alien to Brathwaite. For instance, in the postscript to the open letter on the ‘Save CowPastor’ website he writes: ‘I’m being told that all this is too late—that time & the tide has pass me by... if that be so, let me then at least hope that you will allow... my faint words... be at least a verbal memorial to mark the graveyard of this place’ (‘Kamau Brathwaite and CowPastor’). This statement powerfully condenses the interrelationship between what could be considered a sacred environment and its ‘verbal’ interrogation. By making a ‘graveyard’ of land which is already a burial ground, Brathwaite invests it with a further layer of signification in the act of seemingly ‘marking’ its destruction. There is a sense of slippage between offering a ‘memorial’ to a place which itself has ‘died’, and one which merely acknowledges that the place is and continues to be a ‘graveyard’, despite the potential ineffectualness of intervention aimed at protecting it. Further, by accompanying these ‘faint words’ with the aesthetic response contained in ‘The Namsetoura Papers’, Brathwaite refuses to let the story and the land it relates to ‘die’. A swelling sense of cultural, environmental, and economic sacrifice becomes associated with CowPastor’s development, as its touristic interest (and economic potential) is further transformed through the discursive outcomes of Brathwaite’s encounter with Namsetoura. The irony here is engagement with the conventionally invisible—the ghostly, the spiritual, the incorporeal—has the potential to affect both the short-and long-term profitability of the site. Its extrinsic value alters as Brathwaite’s engagement with CowPastor becomes part of the culturally mediated palimpsest (and site of national heritage) it represents.

20Of course, converting the instrumental role of CowPastor from an airport access road to a tourist attraction in which Namsetoura becomes commoditised as a ghostly member of the postcolonial exotic15 and the local ecology is destroyed by the influx of visitors might appear to be an equally undesirable alternative. Yet one of the most empowering aspects of Brathwaite’s interdiscursive interrogation of this form of unsustainable development is that it heralds the potential for local communities and the spirits that abide amongst them to play more decisive roles in how such developments are managed. It also gestures towards some of the methods through which this might be achieved, such as the mobilisation of counter-histories and interrogations of landscape value (both intrinsic and extrinsic) that account for the interface between cultural, environmental, and economic sustainability debates. Moreover, by presenting concerns about tourism’s effects on island ecologies in a way that is accessible to similarly affected groups in the form of the cultural text that the ‘Save CowPastor’ website constitutes, the insights such work generates have the potential to inflect ideas regarding tourism’s role in diverse groups’ imagined futures. Brathwaite’s engagement with the spectral ecology of CowPastor shows how ghosts of the past have the potential to help augment more equitable social and environmental developments. As Canadian-based Trinidadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip comments in a lyrical missive to Brathwaite in 2006 (also accessible on his website): ‘Simone Weil, the French philosopher, once wrote that hunger presupposes the existence of bread. So too I think our hunger for worlds in which we can recuperate the erased, memories of another time, presupposes the existence of those worlds. Worlds that CowPastor signals’.16 If more sustainable and rigorously ethical forms of tourismdevelopment in the Caribbean are to be achieved, the kind of aestheticised engagement with the islands’ many haunted places inherent in Brathwaite’s work surely has a powerful part to play. Namsetoura’s ghost represents a central agent in this process of sustaining the culturally and historically rich ecology of sites like CowPastor. Her presence continues to act as an important stimulus towards wider considerations of the interrelations between culture and nature in postcolonial contexts, which refuse to be effaced despite the ongoing economic pressures facing postcolonial Barbados in a global age.