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.

Full text

Island Studies Journal, ahead of print
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Mourning Balliceaux: Towards a biography of a Caribbean
island of death, grief and memory
Niall Finneran
Department of Archaeology, Anthropology and Geography, University of
Winchester, UK
Niall.Finneran@winchester.ac.uk (corresponding author)
Christina Welch
Department of Theology, Religions and Philosophy, University of Winchester, UK
Christina.Welch@winchester.ac.uk
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.
Keywords: Balliceaux, Caribbean, Garifuna, islands, phenomenology, St Vincent and
the Grenadines, social memory
https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.121 • Received August 2019, accepted January 2020
© 2020—Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”
Caliban, The Tempest, William Shakespeare, Act III, Scene 2: 130-131

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Introduction: A troubled islandscape
The small, uninhabited island of Balliceaux lies just to the east of Bequia, the northern-
most of the St Vincent Grenadine islands, north-east of Mustique and some 20
kilometres south-east of the St Vincent capital, Kingstown in the south-eastern
Caribbean (Figure 1). In popular imagination the Grenadines conjure images of sandy
beaches and beautiful blue seas, of bright sunny skies and yacht-filled harbours. Above
all the Grenadines resonate with perceptions of luxury—and indeed the island of
Mustique is a private holiday destination beloved of millionaires and royalty. These are
islands rife with the symbolism of Caliban’s cadences, sweet airs and delights. This is
not the case with Balliceaux, however. This is a Grenadine island which is pervaded
by a much darker history, and which, as we shall see, embodies (for that is the verb we
deploy in this analysis) many complex meanings.
Figure 1. Location of Balliceaux. © www.arcgis.com
Balliceaux is an island with a troubled past and an uncertain future. It is a haunted
place, an island disturbed by events of the past, and thus a focus of profound social
memory for the modern Garifuna (‘Black Carib’) people of St Vincent and its diasporic
communities. The bones of some 2000 men, women and children, ancestors of the
modern Garifuna, lie under its stony soil. This is a Caribbean island of profound dis-
quiet and as such presents a contrast to the neighbouring Windward islands. Indeed, in
writings about traditional Garifuna ritual and belief, Garifuna ancestors are understood
to travel from not only from Sairi (the land of the dead) to visit descendants, but also
from Yurumein (St Vincent and Balliceaux) (Johnson, 2018); Yurumein is the Garifuna

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ancestral homeland as it is the physical location of the bones of those who founded
their people. The physical and metaphysical dead are bound together here.
As we shall see, Balliceaux, this island of death, is also an important place of
memory and place of pilgrimage, an island to be revisited and reintegrated into Garifuna
social memory annually. The pilgrimage, a ritual, can be understood in classic rite of
passage terms (Van Gennep, 1960). We start with the pre-liminal separation from
everyday life in preparation for the journey and boarding the boat—the only means of
travel to Balliceaux. Then follows the liminal act of being on the island, kissing the
ground, and wailing or keening on arrival, temporarily inhabiting in the betwixt and
between space where communion with the land means a visceral connection with the
ancestors can take place. Then finally we have the post-liminal journey back—to St
Vincent, or ‘home’ in the diaspora in the knowledge that the continuing bond with
the ancestors has been physically embodied. To use a literary trope, Balliceaux thus has
a complex biography embracing death, memory and life affirmation.
We take as a starting point for this paper the contention that islands have a
distinctive ‘biography’, or sense of place. Caribbean islands, for example, are today
popularly viewed through the prism of Euro-American high-end tourism as places
embodying luxurious and sensuous qualities (Nelson, 2011). The reality though is
obviously much more complex (Sheller, 2002 passim). We can construct a notional and
longer-term biography of the Caribbean islandscape (as seen through European, and
Euro-American lenses over the last 500 or so years) with reference to three distinct
phases of interaction.
In the very early phase of European contact, from the late-15th Century, the
Caribbean island was perceived as an explorers’ idealised botanical and environmental
Eden (Grove, 1995; Hulme, 1986), but like its rebellious native inhabitants, it was seen
as a place that requiring civilising, taming and making productive (Hollsten, 2008, p.
84). This was achieved in the second phase via the industrialisation of the islandscape
in the 18th and early-19th Centuries. European and Euro-American notions of
industrialised land-use however, required the labour of enslaved Africans to mass
produce sugar, and to a lesser extent other cash crops such as indigo, tobacco and
cotton. In the final phase, the 21st-Century Caribbean island has become a tourist
paradise to be enjoyed and ‘consumed’ by the well-heeled (Gillis, 2010).
Furthermore, each stage of the story (or biography) of the Caribbean islandscape
can be seen in terms of a continuum of pre-modernity-modernity-post-modernity,
reflecting the transition from the ante/anti-colonial, Calibanesque ‘wild island’ (Joseph,
1992, p. 1) to (and still using a Caribbean literary analogy) the controlled and externally
created Cartesian islandscape of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe, the archetypal European
‘discoverer’ of the Caribbean island is: “the perfect Lockean man” who “projects onto
the pristine island his desire for power and property” (Peraldo, 2012, p. 19). The
Caribbean island thus becomes an exploited, controlled entity both within the context
of ‘modernist’ intensive industrial development through the context of the Plantation
economy, and then (and this is often conveniently forgotten) as an equally exploited
focus of leisure, an archetypal post-modern transitory place, framed within a subtler
and less direct form of economic neo-colonialism.

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The story of the island of Balliceaux, although subject to a different form of
historical processes and events to other Caribbean islands, broadly mirrors this tripartite
structure: a place of pre-contact settlement, a place of genocide, a place of memory and
memorialisation. In order to nuance this biography however, we need to move beyond
the external perceptions of the island and engage with the meanings and emotions
placed upon it by local communities using an explicitly decolonial approach (Nadarajah
& Grydehøj, 2016). Furthermore, taking our lead from an influential contribution to
the discipline of island studies (Hay, 2006), we seek to enrich this biography with
reference to metaphors associated with Balliceaux as an island of profound memory,
yet also an island of death and grief. In so doing we will argue that this single (and
essentially physically unremarkable) island holds up a mirror to (and embodies) the
struggles of a small, creolised African-Caribbean population. Using the lens afforded by
grief and death studies in general, and in particular by the work on bereavement of the
American psychologist Dennis Klass (1991), we build further on this notion of
embodiment.
Before considering the historical context that informs the biography of
Balliceaux, and the meanings of death, grief and grieving attached to it, let us consider
more fully the theoretical underpinning of this paper, and look more closely at the
phenomenology of the Caribbean islandscape. As we shall see this is a crucial approach
to moving beyond the concept of the physical island to understanding the embodied,
metaphysical space in terms of Garifuna emotion, memory and metaphor. This
Indigenous-centric methodology offers a fresh perspective to the historiography and
study of the Caribbean islandscape (Baldacchino, 2004).
Embodying the Caribbean island biography: Applying phenomenology to
islandscapes
“Phenomenological investigation lays stress upon vernacular construction of
meaning and its attendant technologies, beliefs, value codes and myth
structures” (Hay, 2006, p. 33)
This quote captures the essence of the phenomenological approach to studying the
biography of the Caribbean islandscape (although Hay is writing about islands more
generally). To return to the literary allusions presented in the preceding section (and
islands do lend themselves to such comparisons; Crane & Fletcher, 2016), in the case
of the insular Caribbean this requires more of an emphasis upon the perspective of Caliban
than Crusoe. In broad terms, phenomenology as a philosophical concept focuses upon
the study of human perception, sense and experience, and is rooted within the German
Romantic movement of the 18th-19th Centuries (a detailed consideration is beyond the
scope of this paper, but useful overviews include Husserl, 2006; Zahavi, 2003).
Our route into the phenomenology of islandscape in the context of this paper is
also informed by the work of the British landscape anthropologist and archaeologist,
Christopher Tilley (1994). Tilley draws extensively upon theoretical concepts taken
from a range of disciplines and is grounded in what is termed a post-processual
archaeological position, which de-emphasises the role of functionalism and adaptive

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cultural behaviour, and focuses more upon metaphor, symbolism and embodiment. For
Tilley, a landscape is not just a passive palimpsest of physical and historical meanings, it
embodies human emotion and sensuality (for wider perspectives and critiques see
Ingold, 1993; Johnson, 2012). Furthermore Tilley sees landscapes that are saturated
with human memories and feelings, and act as a mnemonic. Taking the work of Hay
and Tilley together, we can appreciate the possibilities of an exciting theoretical
approach for seeing islands as rich symbolic metaphors and wells of social memory. As
Pete Hay states, “Islands are places, special places, paradigmatic places, topographies of
meaning in which qualities that construct place are dramatically distilled” (Hay, 2006,
p. 31). As we shall see, as an islandscape Balliceaux dramatically distills a range of human
emotion, but as previously noted, little of it is positive.
Hay’s paper, while providing us with a broad phenomenological approach to
exploring Balliceaux, also identifies three concepts (or ‘fault-lines’) that require our
attention. Firstly, the notion of islands having a hard edge or boundary is disabused;
they inspire transgression and movement, and as permeable and connected entities,
islands cannot be viewed in isolation. His second fault-line relates to this permeability
through human immigration and emigration, both provoked in differing ways as a
response to economic stimuli. His third fault-line focuses upon the island as a metaphor
(Baldacchino, 2012; Gillis, 2004 passim), a concept closely related to the archaeological
approach articulated by Tilley above. It is this third fault-line that most interests us most
here as any ‘meaning’ of an island as a place, is fluid and responsive to historical and
political contingency (Escobar, 2001; Harvey, 1996).
The writings of the Martinique-born Francophone author Édouard Glissant
(1928-2011) inter alia show how Hay’s ideas (and to some extent those of Tilley) can
be applied within a Caribbean insular context. In his 1958 work La Lézard (The
Ripening), Glissant views his home island of Martinique in explicitly feminine terms,
and the whole island is structured through symbolic geographical and environmental
reference points; mountains, plants and places (Heller, 1996). In his Discours Antillais
(Caribbean Discourse), Glissant (1992, p. 63) that the imposition of the European
plantation system on these islands, as a manifestation of capitalism and modernity,
suppressed a ‘natural/cultural dialectic’, and he therefore urges Afro-Caribbeans to ‘re-
territorialise’ (re-naturalise) the Caribbean island, which for him is also a historical
monument, a place of memory (Deloughery, 2001, p. 34). Archaeology and
anthropology can also assist in theorising the notion of the Caribbean island landscape
embodying resistant strategies, using nature and the local to overcome the imposed
colonial systems of control and surveillance (Delle, 1999).
The work of American anthropologist Lydia Pulsipher (along with her local
collaborators) in Montserrat comes close to viewing from the ‘bottom up’ by focussing
on enslaved peoples’ perceptions of their landscapes and environments through the
study of small-scale hidden slave gardens as a mechanism for economic independence
and resistance (Pulsipher & Goodwin, 2001), and this local knowledge persists to this
day. On Barbados, runaway slaves were often drawn to caves in the interior of the
island as a means of finding their ‘own’ social space, places of refuge to reconnect with
their African ancestral deities through deposition of iron artefacts (Armstrong, 2015).
Meanwhile, the work of American archaeologist Matthew Reilly (2019) among the

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‘poor white’ communities of the eastern side of Barbados ‘below the cliff’ has started
to reveal the symbolic attachment to a very circumscribed area of the island by a
marginalised and largely ignored community; poor whites were imported into
Barbados as a form of indentured labour during the 17th Century and as such should
not be understood as part of the ruling Plantocracy.
Balliceaux is also a metaphor for resistance embodied in a Caribbean island
landscape, albeit in a more nuanced manner. Balliceaux, as we shall see, is a place of
grief and memory. It is also place of exile, but also paradoxically a place of return
through pilgrimage and a place held up as a memory of the struggle against colonialism,
but also for reparations against its horrors. In order to understand these multiple
meanings, we need to consider Balliceaux’s historical context in more detail.
Balliceaux: A historical biography of a small Caribbean islandscape
The Garifuna, or ‘Black Caribs’, developed as a separate and distinctive island
population on St Vincent at some point in the late-17th Century, their ethnogenesis
being the result of intermingling between Indigenous ‘Island’ (otherwise known as
‘yellow/red’) Caribs and shipwrecked enslaved Africans, or runaway slaves from
neighbouring islands such as Barbados. The British anthropologist, the late Charles
Gullick, remains the author of the key work on the Vincentian Garifuna, and he
provides a succinct and balanced overview of their origins myths as he heard them
during his fieldwork in the 1970s (Gullick, 1985, p. 39 ff; space precludes an overview
of the issue of the historical, archaeological and anthropological validity of the term
‘Carib’; see Allaire, 2013 for an overview of current debates).
It is during the late-18th Century that the Garifuna/Black Caribs become more
visible as a distinctively cultural creolised group. This was a period when the French
and British were vying for control of the south-eastern Caribbean; the Caribs (both
‘yellow/red’ and ‘Black’) had been ceded their own ancestral lands in the north of the
island of St Vincent, which they referred to as Yurumein. These agreements were however,
broken by the British (Kirby & Martin, 2004). Guerrilla war broke out between the
Black Caribs and the British in 1769-1773 and then 1795-1796, in what became
known as the Black Carib Wars (see Taylor, 2012 for the definitive account). Finally,
in 1796 the Black Caribs, under their leader Paramount Chief Joseph Chatoyer, were
defeated by the British and had harsh terms imposed on them. In order to ‘solve’ the
Black Carib problem, the British decided that they should be removed from St Vincent.
It is estimated that some 4195 Caribs (mostly Black but also some Yellow/Red
Caribs) were forcibly removed to Balliceaux in October 1796 (Gonzalez, 1988, p. 35), an
island with minimal facilities and no access to fresh water; some reports suggest however,
that there were as many as 5080 exiles (Bullen & Bullen, 1972, p. 40). Although
provided with canoes and fishing tackle, as well as the services of a doctor when
required, and regularly provisioned with water and food (Anderson, 1992 [c1798], p.
227), approximately 2000 Carib men, women and children died there, mainly through
disease (Taylor, 2012, p. 163). The surviving Yellow/Red Caribs were returned to St
Vincent (Gonzalez, 1988, p. 35), while the Black Carib survivors were boarded onto

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HMS Experiment on 3 March 1797, and five weeks later on 12 April “were dumped
on the island of Roatán off the coast of Honduras” (Anderson, 1997, p. 27).
Balliceaux as an islandscape thus has a very troubled history, and to date no
archaeological work has taken place on the island with the express intention of locating
human remains or land-use dating from this dark episode. But it would be incorrect to
assume the Garifuna exile is its only history. In 1969, the American archaeologists
Ripley and Adelaide Bullen visited the island, and whilst locating some ‘Peasant Ware’
they believe may be related to the 1797 exile, only found evidence of extensive
habitation dating to the Suazey/Suazoid period, i.e. 1000-1500 CE (Bullen & Bullen,
1972, p. 36; see also Fewkes, 1922). In more recent times a plantation briefly existed
there, and today the island remains in private ownership, and is essentially scrubland.
The descendants of those forcibly exiled to Balliceaux continue to live in Central
America (e.g. Belize, Honduras) and have more recently established themselves in
North American cities such as Los Angeles and New York (Johnson, 2007). The terms
ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide do not fall too short by way of descriptions for
this 1797 expulsion, and this is how the episode is widely perceived. Indeed, the
deportation of most of the Garifuna (a small number managed to evade capture and
remained on St Vincent in hiding; see Pollard, 2014, p. 133) and their safe landing in
Central America is still recalled today in annual commemorations. 12 April is the Punta
Gorda Festival in Roatán, which celebrates the welcoming of the exiled onto the island,
and 19 November is Settlement Day in Belize which celebrates the arrival of the
‘Garinagu’ (their term for Garifuna) in that country. In St Vincent, the exile is annually
remembered on National Heroes Day (14 March). Chatoyer is the country’s first (and
currently only) National Hero, and the deportation often features in political discourse;
a particular favoured topic of St Vincent’s left-wing Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves,
himself author of the Caricom reparations for slavery policy.
For the Garifuna generally but especially those in the diaspora communities,
Balliceaux has, by and large, become a byword for their diasporic exile, the attempted
destruction of their Black Carib identity, and death in what is often described as a
‘concentration camp’ setting (Hulme, 1991, p. 193; Palacio, 2002; Alvarez, 2008, p.
32, Tate & Law, 2015, p. 20). The history of Garifuna, and their exile has placed St
Vincent as the motherland of this ethnic and cultural group, it is Yurumein, their
birthplace and spiritual home (Johnson, 2007, p. 180). Further, it has framed Balliceaux
as a, if not the, Garifuna place of pilgrimage and memory. Thus, we can see an implicit
linkage here of three geographically separated islands that make sense as an ‘emotional’
rather than ‘physical’ archipelago (Pugh, 2013): St Vincent, the Garifuna homeland;
Ballicea,ux the place of brief exile and suffering; Roatán, the place of secondary exile
and freedom. During our ethnographic work we have interviewed a range of Garifuna
people, and the one overriding emotion that is emphasised when talking about their
psychological archipelago, is that Balliceaux is the most important of these islands, and
alone is associated with loss, grief and grieving.
The biography of Balliceaux’s islandscape as a setting of exile and death has, as
previously noted, the further attribute of being additionally a place of pilgrimage by
the descendants of those who settled in Roatán and moved outwards to other diasporic
locations. As such Balliceaux is a very meaningful Caribbean island for the Garifuna,

Niall Finneran & Christina Welch
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especially those in diaspora. But the island has meaning to non-Garifuna others, as more
pragmatic ‘values’ are attached to the place. Since the 19th Century the island has been
in the private ownership of one family, the Lindleys, and of late many rumours have
circulated within St Vincent and among the Garifuna diaspora that the island would be
sold for development as a luxury holiday resort. Predictably such news has caused
widespread disquiet among local and diaspora Garifuna peoples
(privateislandsonline.com, 2019).
The proceedings of the Fifth International Garifuna Conference in Kingstown,
St Vincent and the Grenadines in March 2018 were given over to strategies on how to
save Balliceaux. Calls for Gonsalves’ Government to meet the alleged US$30 million
asking price to buy the island for the nation were rebuffed by politicians (according to
the latest figures, the country’s annual GDP is approximately US$800 million; Vanessa
Demirciyan, personal communication, 2018). At the time of writing these rumours
remain just rumours, but the picture is uncertain. However the situation resolves itself,
there is a realisation that this is more than a physical island, it is an embodiment of a peoples’
communal memory and sense of grief. Taking, then, this phenomenological approach
outlined above, we can begin to perceive deeper meanings of the island of Balliceaux,
based upon a site of memory generally, and a site of grief and grieving more specifically.
Figure 2. View over the west coast of Balliceaux showing the island landscape. © Niall
Finneran & Christina Welch
Balliceaux as a site of memory
The meaningfulness of Balliceaux for the Garifuna lies beyond the island’s history as a
site of temporary settlement between their exile from St Vincent and their
transportation to Roatán, for a noted earlier, the site was not just a transitory home.
The death of approximately 2000 Garifuna on Balliceaux means that the island is the
permanent home to the bones of those who died there, and the continuing presence
of the dead is felt by Garifuna pilgrims who travel to the site to connect with Yurumein
and their ancestors (Leland & Berger, 1998). The island also has mythic significance

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through the ancestors on Balliceaux in traditional healing rituals known as Dügü
(Jenkins, 1983; Flores, 2002; Johnson, 2018).
A place of memory is a site that resonates with where one locates one’s sense of
“self and being,” it is a location of memory and of mythic history (Nora, 1989). It is
also a place where typically those who are “outsiders to the place” are considered by
its inhabitants, or here the descendants of its inhabitants, to be incapable of recognising
“the territory’s sacred qualities” (Olúpònà, 2011, p. 24); hence the disquiet concerning
the possible sale of the island by its owners. Sites of memory typically have a mythic
history (mythscape; Bell, 2003; Rojas, 2013), and with myth crucial to identity and
often the bedrock to ritual, sense of place sites potently enforce and reinforce community.
In terms of the island of Balliceaux, this mythic history, and the rituals that take
place during the pilgrimages to the island and during Dügü, centre on the suffering of
exiled ancestors and on the site as an effective cemetery for those who perished there.
This perception was powerfully expressed by Michael Polonio, President of the
Belizean National Garifuna Council, in a letter sent to the Prime Minister of St Vincent
and the Grenadines in 2005. It stated that the island is “the burial ground of our
ancestors,” their resting place and the home to “the souls of our ancestral dead” (qtd.
in Middleton, 2014, p. 31). This assertion was reiterated by David ‘Darkie’ Williams,
President of the St Vincent and the Grenadines Garifuna Heritage Foundation in his
opening address to the 5th International Garifuna Conference on 12 March 2018, which
emphasised the island’s sacred qualities as a place of memory to all Garifuna.
We have noted above that Balliceaux is a metaphor for (and embodiment of)
Garifuna grief yet also a place where memory is continually being refreshed through
pilgrimage. The island reflects Garifuna recent history, and taking this explicitly
phenomenological approach, Balliceaux becomes more than a physical island that has
monetary or aesthetic value. As a place of memory it has considerable potency. Now
we propose to investigate this idea using a perspective drawn from the field of grief and
death studies to help us think through the process of how the Garifuna engage with
the island as a place of mourning. We will be using the work of the psychologist Dennis
Klass (2001) to consider the mechanisms by which societies and individuals grieve, and
how this action can give meaning to a physical island.
Mourning Balliceaux
As a number of scholars have noted, because one’s identity is powerfully linked with
place and memory, to home and history, when dislocation occurs (such as forced
resettlement from one island to another), grief typically follows (Pflüg, 1998; Volkan,
2017). Grief theory and the study of death is a relatively new academic field, although
one largely concerned with the changing patterns of death and grief-related behaviour
in the industrial West and Westernised world (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996;
Garces-Foley, 2006; Davies & Park, 2012). Explorations of rituals per se and ceremonial
practices outside the West and the main ‘World Religions’, have typically been the
preserve of anthropologists, ethnographers, and more recently scholars of religion, but
increasingly, death studies scholars and psychologists have engaged with non-Western
lifeways and deathways to explore cultural expressions of grief (e.g. Ebenstein, 2017:

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Jonsson & Walter, 2017). Although a very recent addition to the death studies field,
Jonsson and Walter (2017, p. 408) have briefly touched on peoples’ continuing bonds
with land through applying grief studies to the notion of the phenomenology of place.
They suggest that “thinking about ancestors has potential to illuminate the special
location of continuing bonds.” This is a useful approach to considering the attachment
of the Garifuna to this special island.
In 2001 the American psychologist Dennis Klass published an article that
suggested that death and grief are understood in a social/society rather than
individual/familial context. Klass (2001) argued that in Japan, for example, while
mourning rituals are changing to fit in with the contemporary high-tech world (for
instance see Martin, 2017), they retain traditional elements including the notion that
the uncared-for death can bring potential harm and/or dis-ease to not only relatives of
the deceased, but also to Japan as a nation. The perception that the uncared-for dead
can bring about problems for a community is not untypical in many religions, especially
those with an African origin such as the Garifuna (Jindra & Noret, 2011; Alolo &
Connell, 2013; Ekore & Lanre-Abass, 2016). The Garifuna human remains on
Balliceaux, although not visible or discovered, pervade the islandscape and have to be
mourned in the correct way.
Although in a different context from the Garifuna’s ancestral grief and their
connections to Balliceaux as the home to the bones of their exiled ancestors, Klass’
studies into the affect of grieving, have relevance. In trying to understand approaches
to dealing with grief, he explored parental grief from infant death in America, and
noted four cross-cultural ways that the parents interacted with their deceased child
(Klass, 2001, p. 752). We suggest that these ideas are applicable to the continuing bonds
that the Garifuna have with Balliceaux. Let us consider each of Klass’ “paths to solace”
in order, relating them to how the Garifuna encounter their special island of memory.
Klass’ (2001, p. 752) first path to solace is ‘linking objects’. These are physical
objects that in his study were understood by grieving parents as containing the presence
of the deceased child. As Jonsson and Walters (2017, p. 409) argue in their paper on
continuing bonds and place, a location can become a linking object providing a deep
connection to the dead, recent and/or ancestral. Thus we argue, Balliceaux acts as a
‘linking object’ for the contemporary Garifuna, providing a tangible connection with
their ancestors who died there. It also affords them a sense of solace, because not only
are their ancestors ‘at rest’ on the island, but through pilgrimages to the island, the
linking bond with them is retained across the generations (England, 1999).
The Garifuna connection with their ancestors resonates potently with the
findings of a study by Laurie and Neimeyer (2008, pp. 176-177) into the experiences
of grief amongst African-Americans in America. They noted that “experiences of an
ongoing spiritual connection with the deceased” amongst the descendants of enslaved
Africans was stronger than that of Euro-Americans, and that ritual and mythic
interconnectedness, strengthen a sense of self-identity in those with a past where
dislocation due to the slave trade was strong. Further evidence that Balliceaux can be
understood as a potent linking object for the Garifuna comes from Tutter’s (2016, p.
xxxviii) exploration into the ways that grief is traditionally transcended. She argues that
for displaced people in particular “the periodic traveling of ancestral paths” helps secure

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links between the past and future. The connections between memory, and identity
need, she argues, to be assured in order to provide some consoling sameness against the
devastation of loss.
Klass’s (2001, p. 753) second path to solace he terms ‘religious ideas and
devotion’. Here Klass found that the use of prayers and rituals provided the bereaved
parents with meaning, often allowing them to sense the presence of their child, and
their deity. Most Garifuna today are Christian or combine Christianity (in many
different forms) with traditional beliefs (Norales, 2011), and whilst the complexity of
Garifuna religious expression is beyond the scope of this paper, rituals that involve
ancestors are central to traditional Garifuna culture (Foster, 1987; Kerns, 1997).
Regardless of which religion the Garifuna use to commune with their ancestors,
communication does take place, and ritual pilgrimages to Balliceaux strengthen
ancestral connections.
Further, given the deeply traumatic experience that the dislocation of the
Garifuna from their homeland would have brought about, alongside the death of
several thousand of them on Balliceaux, as Gump (2010, p. 46) argues in the context
of African enslavement in America, ancestral traumas require a form of revisiting to
provide meaning, or “solace and release.” Here the findings of Tutter, Gump and
Laurie and Neimeyer combine, we maintain, to position Balliceaux as the place of
Garifuna memory, as the space where connections to the exiled ancestors allow the
fortification of Garifuna-ness as an identity. The island thus inspires and incites
expressions of grief, grief centred around not just exile, loss, and death (Leland &
Berger, 1998), but also survivance—meaning a cultural continuation that is greater than
survival (Vizenor, 1998, p. 15; Vizenor, 2008).
The third of Klass’ (2001, p. 753) four paths to solace is ‘memory’. Remembering
the deceased is important for the bereaved but in Klass’ study it refers to memory related
to the grieving parents remembering better and happier times. We do not wish to
suggest that times for the Garifuna were better on Balliceaux, as it marks the end of
their time on Yurumein and their defeat at the hands of the British, but the island has a
potent mythscape. It functions as a location for the on-going expression of grief
regarding the loss of the Garifuna’s ‘golden age’ (Foster, 1987, p. 77), and the historical
events leading up to the exile and the diaspora that followed. Balliceaux therefore holds
a potent place in the memory of the Garifuna people, and as noted, is central to their
self-identification, and ‘Identification’, is the last of Klass’ (2001, p. 753) paths to solace.
For Klass, identification relates to storying. For the bereaved parents in his study,
identification involved making an inner representation of the deceased child part of
their own self-representation, and indeed incorporating the deceased into one’s own
ongoing story is normative (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996; Pector, 2002; Field,
Gao, & Paderna, 2005). For the Garifuna, the ancestors on Balliceaux, and the life they
led before exile from Yurumein are fundamental to their story. The dead are not
forgotten but return in traditional Dügü ritual (Jenkins, 1983; Flores, 2002; Johnson,
2018), and are central to the Balliceaux pilgrimage; they are an important part of being
Garifuna, particularly for those in the diaspora.
The Garifuna identification with their ancestors relates to findings from Klass’
follow-up 2017 study, which explored sustained interactions with the dead, and the

Niall Finneran & Christina Welch
12
continuation of bonds with them. Klass in his study on continuing bonds with the
deceased, noted that the deceased frequently became role models for his interviewees.
He found that his subjects would often draw on the wisdom and strength of deceased
close relatives and friends; typically, their guidance was sought in specific situations,
often where the bereaved would have sought support from the deceased person were
they alive (Klass & Steffen, 2017, p. 147). In Garifuna culture, ancestors similarly
provide strength and wisdom to contemporary Garifuna people, and in Dügü rituals
they are called upon for specific healing purposes (Jenkins, 1983; Kerns, 1997; Greene,
1998; Flores, 2002; P. Johnson, 2002; C. Johnson, 2018). The bonds that the Garifuna
have between the living and the dead continue over generations and span the centuries,
and thus conform to the first two of Klass’ (2017, p. 147) four ‘functions of the dead’;
they act as a ‘Role Model’ (strength and wisdom), and provide ‘Situation-Specific
Guidance’ (through Dügü).
The courage and endurance of those exiled to Balliceaux can be understood to
echo Klass’ (2017, p. 147) third function of the dead, which is ‘values clarification’.
According to Klass, the bereaved he interviewed would take up a moral position that
they believed conformed to that of the deceased. In terms of the ancestors who died
on Balliceaux, the autonomy of their life on Yurumein, their fortitude and tenacity in
the face of colonialism, are aspects that are commemorated, and celebrated; they are
central to Garifuna identity and the freedom-fighter rhetoric is often repeat in St
Vincent and the Grenadines through the figure of Chatoyer, and in diaspora via the
annual commemorations which foreground pride in Garifuna heritage.
Klass’ final function of the dead, ‘remembrance formation’, echoes the Garifuna
strength in their past. For Klass’ (2017, p. 148) interviewees, they spoke of
remembering the deceased in ways that made them feel better, that gave them solace,
and this can be seen in multiple Garifuna narratives. In the film, The Garifuna Journey,
tradition bearer, Roy Cayetano states that he admires “the versatility of [the] ancestors
who were deported from St. Vincent.” He notes that they provide “strength” to the
Garifuna today, and that the mutual obligations with the recent and ancestral dead “cut
across the borders of this life” (qtd. in Leland & Berger, 1998). For the Garifuna then,
Balliceaux is not just a place of pilgrimage, but it is a potent site of memory; it is a site
that is central to their self-identification and their pride as a people. It is both a place
of solace and fulfils Klass’ functions of the dead.
In a 2017 study on the topic of continuing bonds, death studies scholars Annika
Jonsson and Tony Walters explore the importance of place to bereaved people.
Drawing on the phenomenology of place attachment, they found that cross-culturally,
there was a potent connection between place and memory, and that their interviewees
told them about places “in which continuing bonds with the deceased [were]
particularly vivid” (Jonsson & Walters, 2017, p. 413). They further noted, that the
destruction of somewhere significant to the bereaved in terms of their relationship to
the deceased (such as the deceased’s former home, or other potent memory places) had
a disruptive effect on the bereaved’s connection with the deceased. Their participants,
regardless of age or geographical location (provided their pre-death relationship was
positive), found that the enforced break in connection was often unsettling as the place-
specific interaction helped “anchor continuing bonds” (Jonsson & Walters, 2017, p.

Island Studies Journal, ahead of print
13
411). Although the Jonsson and Waters study highlights the importance of place to
those who had a living memory of the familial deceased, as with Klass’ studies, they
emphasise the potency of connections with the dead. For the Garifuna, the long-
deceased ancestors on Balliceaux and in the form of National Hero Chatoyer (a symbol
of the Garifuna who perished fighting the British to retain their homeland), are vital
symbols of identity, of minority resistance, and of survivance. Balliceaux as a specific
place anchors this connection and its importance in Garifuna history and memory is
not one to be underestimated.
Conclusion
“Balliceaux has escaped the commercialization and development that many of
its Windward Island neighbors have succumbed to, making this […] paradise
one of the last truly unspoiled gems in the Lesser Antilles […] this magnificent
isle is an undeveloped gem just waiting for the right person to let it shine.”
Sales advertisement,
https://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/balliceaux-island
The foregoing analysis has shown how, using a predominantly phenomenological
approach foregrounded the work of Tilley and Hay, and using a framework of analysis
drawn from scholarship in grief and death studies, we can start to take an embodied
approach to a Caribbean islandscape, albeit one with a distinctive and complex history.
Balliceaux is more than just ‘an island’; it embraces many differing values. There is the
financial and personal value held by its current owners, the Lindley family, with its
potential as a luxury high-end tourist resort (as the quote at the top of this section
demonstrates). To the St Vincent Government it is a politically loaded potential
heritage site that they would rather not engage with. To researchers from the outside,
it represents an important historical site, a place of genocide, and perhaps a prototype
of later British models for concentration camps.
It is not difficult to position Balliceaux as part of a wider continuum of the island
as place of isolation, death and exile throughout human history. Islands have, since the
earliest days, traditionally been used as places of detention, exile (cf. Tolias, 2013) and
imprisonment (Mountz, 2017; Vannini, 2011): Alcatraz, Ellis Island, Robben Island,
Devil’s Island, Nauru, etc. have understandably taken on qualities as potent places of
memory and commemoration (Luo & Grydehøj, 2017). For the Garifuna though, as
we have demonstrated, and taking a broader theoretical perspective drawn from grief
and death studies, we can see it being more than just a place of pilgrimage, or a sacred
island, but a place where the ancestors dwelt, and a cipher for Garifuna identity and a
place of memory.
To return to Hay’s three fault-lines in the phenomenology of island settings, we
have established the third, the notion of metaphor, but what of the other two?
Balliceaux does inspire transgression as its boundaries are not impermeable at all. The
act of Garifuna pilgrimage shows how the island’s boundaries are crossed. Further, as
we look at Hays’ second fault-line we realise that rather looking at a ‘normal’

Niall Finneran & Christina Welch
14
emigration/immigration situation, we have here forced emigration over 200 years ago,
and the ‘new’ immigrants are the Garifuna pilgrims, returning as part of a mourning ritual.
We have taken a decolonial approach (Grydehøj, 2017) to the Caribbean
islandscape represented here by Balliceaux; echoing we hope the stance of Caliban
rather than Crusoe. This approach offers a new way of thinking through the Caribbean
island away from the top down and Cartesian lens of colonial history books, where
Balliceaux is reduced to just a small and marginal cog in a wider imperial system of
coercion and control, and away from the language of the real estate agent or tour
company that speaks of hidden gems and tropical paradises.
The biography of Balliceaux revealed here speaks directly to Hays’ urge to reach
into vernacular constructions of meaning rather than metanarratives constructed
externally. And to return too to Johnson’s third comment about the phenomenological
approach, it raises the question of the politicisation of the islandscape, which within
the wider context of Indigenous rights in the Caribbean is a very real and insistent issue
and one that highlights the value of a decolonial approach to island studies on a wider
scale (Nadarajah & Grydehøj, 2016).
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the following individuals who have supported so generously our
research in St Vincent: Zoila Ellis, David ‘Darkie’ Williams, Vanessa Demirciyan and
Nicola Redway. We also thank Jonathan Pugh for his editorial patience and for seeing
the merit in the paper, and the input of two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions
resulted in a much more effective end result. Funding for the fieldwork was provided
by the University of Winchester.
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