Esther Phillips, the Barbados poet laureate, grew up next to Drax Hall Estate, once one of the Caribbean’s notoriously violent slave plantations, where tens of thousands of Africans are said to have died in terrible conditions during the transatlantic slave trade. But she was well into her career when the harsh realities of slavery hit home.
The poet began writing at a young age, and was inspired at first by the “trees, flowers, birds, the smells of the plants or shrubs, the air, the cane fields” she encountered as she walked to school.
But after she attended a lecture about slavery about eight years ago, her writing took a new course.
