Mourning Balliceaux: Towards a Biography of a Caribbean Island of Death, Grief and Memory

Abstract

This contribution considers how a small Caribbean island (Balliceaux, St Vincent and the Grenadines) holds up a mirror to the wider experiences of the Garifuna (‘Black Carib’) peoples who live on the neighbouring island of St Vincent, and in diasporic communities through the Americas. In the late-18th Century Balliceaux was the scene of a genocide orchestrated by the British colonial authorities on the Garifuna, and as a consequence it has become an important place of memory for them, yet it also provokes other emotional responses. We start by taking a broadly phenomenological approach to the analysis of islandscape, emphasising its qualities as an embodied as well as physical entity, and then build upon the notion of embodiment using perspectives drawn from psychological studies of grief and grieving through the lens of grief and death studies. We argue that it is only through deploying such a phenomenological perspective to the study of this Caribbean island that we can discern the metaphors employed by the Garifuna in making sense of this island of death, grief and memory. By drawing on their own understandings of Balliceaux as a base for our theorisations, we offer an original theoretical and decolonised approach to thinking about the character, or sense of place, of a small, yet emotionally significant, Caribbean island.