“A Rusting Metal Behemoth, Within the Crumbling Masonry of Empire”: Addressing Sugar Plantations as Sites of Forgetting on the Island of Saint Lucia

The cultural memory of the transatlantic slave trade has received significant attention in recent years through both the raising and removal of monuments across the Atlantic world. However, dominant modes of remembrance have tended to neglect the Caribbean island landscapes and places upon which slavery took place. In the Anglophone Caribbean, statues and memorials have tended to focus on significant male liberators and warriors—such as “Bussa” in Barbados or “Cuffy” in Guyana—as postcolonial governments attempted to shore up national identities through a gendered and often hypermasculine form of commemoration that followed Eurocentric modes of statuary culture. These statues were erected as the sites of former sugar plantations regularly fell to neglect, privatization, and abandonment; rendering them ‘sites of forgetting’ which played little part in shaping collective memories of the past. This article reconsiders the site of a former sugar plantation, Balenbouche Estate, on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, as a commemorative landscape. Spanning archaeology, oral history, poetry, sound studies, archival research, and community co-curation, it offers a case study which emphasises how a multi-disciplinary approach can help to re-evaluate neglected landscapes that have become ‘sites of forgetting’. This approach reconciles more widely recognised forms of public commemoration with the hidden histories of former plantations, emphasising their capacity to tell the stories of enslaved individuals who had little power to formally shape the spaces and histories of where they lived, and whose knowledge was and is still undervalued. The article concludes with a call to include broader perspectives in the ongoing process of commemorating neglected plantation sites, and advocates for more creative and inclusive forms of remembrance. An appendix containing the first publication of poems by eight prominent Saint Lucian writers who participated in workshops at the site will also be included.