bw 16

transcript |  waterways | up

This city was built on water. It was built where a river meets the sea and there are countless springs bubbling up underneath the surface of the city. When the first settlers came, they found a muddy swamp full of duppy crabs and muddy water, and with a rickety bridge built across by the Amerindians who had long gone. They cleared a swamp and built a city, and named it after the Indian bridge. It became Bridgetown.

The city prospered and grew. Bridgetown was a city when Boston was a village. It was a busy port. This harbour was full of schooners, the wharf was piled up with barrels and goods. The main exports were margarine, manjack, and molasses. The main trade was in slaves. (repeated) African slaves, Irish slaves, and Scottish slaves, all brought to this wharf side and herded up these alleys to be sold retail in the centre of Bridgetown.

Across the waters is Fort Willoughby, where you now see restaurants and fishing boats used to be the main transit slave markets. The people were brought from Africa, held in Fort Willoughby and you can still see the original walls there to be shipped out to other parts of the Americas. Times change; fortunes change; but some things remain eternal. (repeated)

If you go down to Bridgetown at night when it’s dark and quiet, you will still find the duppy crabs. The sea is the sea, and the land is the land. And, where the two meet, there is always magic.

artist profile | lilian sten-nicholson | up

With regard to this her first attempt at working with sound as a means of creative expression, Lilian Sten-Nicholson states simply, “My visual art is largely drawn from musical forms. My writing attempts to create visual images through the written word. Perhaps, the creation of imagery through recorded sound completes the creative triad.”

Lilian Sten-Nicholson was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has lived in the Caribbean since 1965. She studied painting at St.Martins School of Art in London, UK, Hovedskou School of Art in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Chong’s School of Chinese painting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Archeology and Social Anthropology at Gothenburg University. Sten-Nicholson has exhibited widely in the Caribbean, Europe, and the USA. She is a former president of the Barbados Arts Council and has made a significant contribution to the Arts of the Caribbean as a painter, writer, and curator.