The opening stanza of Derek Walcott's Names slices through waves breaking on the windward side of Barbados, the landing point for the first black slave society: “A sea eagle screams from the rock, and my race began like the osprey, with that cry, that terrible vowel, that I.” Travelling inland from the shore, the narrator of Helen Cammock's essay film—always speaking in the first person, whether as herself or as the embodiment of other voices (from writers to emigrants)—searches for the last vestiges of the sugar trade, a colonial project in freefall.
