On the cover of Brathwaite’s latest collection Born to Slow Horses (2005) one can see the disturbing, distorted face of a half blind dead-alive girl: the photograph of a spide’s web as eventually taken with an old box camera, after the lens of the author’s digital one had split. This was almost a decade ago, on Cow Pasture, a stretch of land on Barbados that Brathwaite and his wife had just bought and which the government wants to turn into one more road to the airport. Then the face, the place spoke to the poet, from several centuries earlier he claims, telling of the ultimate disrepect of leaving bodies without proper funeral.
This experience resulted in the short poem called “Namsetoura.” Covering hardly more than four pages it develops into a kind of voodoo incantation that calls upon some secret (sacred) experience that could redeem the violence of slavery.
The present paper examines how the poem fits in Brathwaite’s work (referring to poems in his first two trilogies, and to more discursive writings, including notes in Barabajan Poems), how effective its use of nation language is, and what it might contribute to the theme of reconciliation. I propose to use a recording of the poem as read by the author.