The Phantom’s Passage: David Dabydeen’s Turner

Leif Schenstead-Harris Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 University of Western Ontario 23 February 2013 The Phantom’s Passage: David Dabydeen’s Turner The story goes like this: in 1783 the improbably named slave ship Zong encountered a difficulty passing across the Atlantic. Its cargo—African slaves from Accra—were falling sick and its new captain, a surgeon named Luke Collingwood, was incapacitated; moreover, poor navigational choices and a pressing lack of fresh water were raising tension among the crew. Hedging their bets and hoping to avoid the uninsurable “natural death” of the ship’s human cargo, the crew threw the slaves overboard as the desperate will burn house and home for insurance. Approximately 123 to 133 men, women and children were cast into the sea over little less than a week.1 Apocryphally, the ship’s name is improbable for its original meaning, the Dutch word “Zorgue,” or “care.” The ship’s later 1781 owners were careful enough to claim the insurance for the human cargo cast overboard. The story’s sensational nature and the resulting suit over insurance fraud in 1783 made it a celebrity cause for abolitionists, and it was later fully described in Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 History of the Abolition of Slave Trade. In 1840, a year after Clarkson’s book was reprinted, J.M.W. Turner exhibited his famous canvas Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On in the Royal Academy—its title, of course, a clear reference to the Zong atrocity. No description of Turner’s painting was more famous or powerful than that of John Ruskin, who in the first volume of his influential Modern Painters exclaimed upon the painting’s “daring conception,” “absolutely perfect”

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“Of the 470 or 442 or 440 slaves, either 150, 133, 132, or 123 were thrown in the Atlantic. Forty or fifty may have jumped into the water to avoid being thrown or ordered to jump against their will. Thirty more were dead on arrival in Jamaica” (Fehskens 407).

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colour, and choice depiction of “the most sublime of subjects and impressions […] the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, illimitable sea” (160). Ruskin thus illustrates the Romantic sublime’s obscuring influence, for the painting’s other subject—the drowning slaves—become unremarkable, casualties to artistry. As writers such as Paul Gilroy argue, the sublime exploits a subject only to render it unpresentable. In Anne Carson’s terms, it is a kind of aesthetic “banditry” (“Foam” 47). In sum, the sublime painting hides the ostensible subjects of its abolitionary politics. Unsurprisingly the story has inspired many contemporary responses from British writer Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992) and Jamaican-American Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) to Anglo-Guyanese poets David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994) and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997), and later American academic Ian Baucom’s Spectres of the Atlantic (2005) and Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008). Today I would like to focus on Dabydeen’s Turner, a minatory epic of twenty-five unrhymed stanzas that addresses questions of ekphrasis, loss, and—though I won’t be able to get to it today—lyric poetry.2 My argument begins with a simple premise: Turner performs the work of mourning through a failed ekphrasis of a melancholy painting. In other words the poem attempts to give voice to those who have been lost twice, first to death in the Middle Passage and then to an imperial archive of exotic and sublime objects and representations. I examine Dabydeen’s Turner by asking how a poet can respond to

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Turner could be called an epic or post-epic after the example of Walcott’s trendsetting Omeros (1990) which, as critics have argued, breaks open the epic tradition to “encourage engagement with classical epic” form for poets which is both “consciously polyglot” and also a subversion of the epic tradition identified most famously by Mikhail Bakhtin as one of conservative hierarchies, an “anterior, objective, and unitary” aesthetic (Burkitt 169, 161). Carpio glosses Walcott’s use of the epic form as a traditional one that highlights the affect and recognition of pain in achievement in order to distinguish it from narratives of the Middle Passage that draw from the archive. To adapt her words, then, Dabydeen like Walcott “reinvigorates the epic form to mourn the many who were erased or distorted in the pages of that archive. Through his craft and creativity, he highlights its gaps. At the same time, he does not naively position himself as one who can correct them” (47). The question at present is to more accurately define this mention of “craft and creativity.” Other classifications such as the very general “verse novel” are also possible, depending on a critical discernment of narrative in poetry (see, for example, Addison). However Turner resists such classification through narrative. It’s entire “narrative” arc is in fact a failing dream imagined from the submerged head of a drowning African slave. If there is a narrative here in the proper sense, it is one with the duration of a second—no longer.

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their perception of loss in an aesthetic form; and, further, what does this poem stage that its namesake painter was unable to illustrate on canvas? The poem, in this reading, is an exchange between living desire and a paralyzed history. It is nothing new to suggest that addressing the Middle Passage is a difficult enterprise. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Carl Pederson suggest in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage that any work faces two challenges: first, “to recover the many voices silenced by the monologic master narrative and,” second, “to embrace the polyphony of their re-memories” (10). History’s calcified archive here opposes the impossible desire for voices beyond the grave. Like any response to loss this work must be understood as a work of mourning and, as such, is subject to what Nouri Gana has called the “poetics of aporia”: mourners are suspended “between two impossible choices—two infidelities: to write and therefore to deny the deceased the right to speak or not to write and to send the deceased from the silence of death to the silence of forgetting” (42). Trauma studies tirelessly points out how the re-covery of voice literally covers over historical loss; the prosopopoeic act ironically defeats its inaugural desire. Always inside mourning’s promise is melancholy’s possibility, where the deceased have perhaps never existed at all but rather occupy some shadowy space between. David Dabydeen’s poem recognizes the full force of this mourning aporia. It takes the form of an ekphrastic apostrophe, a turn toward an absent figure or lost object situated through a description of another artistic medium, and like any ekphrasis it stages different concepts of semiotic power as the word attempts “to rival and replace the image” (Döring 2002, 151). While it’s true that ekphrasis and prosopopoeia have deep connections (Döring 2002, 144), Dabydeen demonstrates the desires and failures of prosopopoeia. His poem does, as Tobias Döring argues, at least seem to give “voice to what is absent from the painting, missing and submerged,” and in this way it certainly “question[s] the cultural function

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and status of the visual representation declared by Ruskin ‘the perfect system of all truth’ (1987: 160)” (Döring 2002, 147). And yet it is crucial that Dabydeen’s speaker—a drowned African slave who fabricates an entire life which is in turns pastoral and broken, idyllic and violated—becomes increasingly ghostly as he disappears from the specifics of narrative identity, a little like Marlow’s disappearing act in Heart of Darkness. The African “voice” embodies the desires of mourning-work for a lost object—the voice stolen from death—but passes over mourning’s usual aporia by denying any specificity to that speaker; thus it preemptively admits defeat before the force of what writers from Freud to Derrida have deemed mourning-work’s impossibility. To summarize, then, away from the prosopopoeic foreclosure of the desire to voice the lost Dabydeen instead moves toward spectropoetics. His poem exposes “voice” as a dead metaphor and turns phantasmic instead—it is a self-decreating voice—and thus the poem recasts the Middle Passage as what I have called the phantasm’s passage.3 Turner’s painting already registers the difficulties of mourning work when it gives in to the lure of representation. The canvas responds to a specific distinction between poetry and painting, where painting—distinct from the indistinct flows of poetry—has a “capacity to isolate the ‘pregnant moment,’ that instant in a narrative sequence which might sum up the developments of past, present and future” (Gage 187). Painting here gains the impression of the archive or the documentary. Turner’s awareness and opposition to this idea in practice, if not in sympathy, explains his painting’s long title— Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On—and, incidentally, ironizes the common abbreviation to simply Slave Ship. Turner’s chosen title precisely situated the painting’s environment and chronology. He accompanied the canvas with gradiloquent and impassioned poetry:

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This phantasmic voice fundamentally opposes the idea that, as one critic argues, the power of literature lies in its ability to “makes the ghosts of slavery speak” (Sharpe xii). This is a lure of recovery without recognizing invention.

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Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay; Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds Declare the Typhon’s coming. Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard The dead and dying—ne’er heed their chains Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope! Where is thy market now? (qtd. in Gage 194) These lines acutely reflect a canvas that “invests in the iconography of the slave trade while at the same time dazzling the beholder’s eye with a sublime ecstasy of light and colour” (Döring 2002, 142). They also, however, develop a chronology only implicit in the painting, from the murder of the African slaves to the expectation of market insurance; more importantly, they demonstrate the desire to mourn: they are further failed gestures attempting to historize the image. Details proliferate but cannot make up for the real loss of life gestured to by poem and painting; in short, the work becomes a melancholic obsession reified by the uncomprehending image. In another twist, as Paul Gilroy and Marina Warner argue, Turner’s abolitionist convictions are belied by the overwhelming force of his late paintings which, taken as a whole, demonstrate his belief in the “glorious adventure and mastery” of seafaring British imperialism (Warner 66). David Dabydeen bypasses this classic liberal dilemma to directly address the nexus of sentiment, capital, and complicity: in his poem the slave ship is a thing “anchored in compassion / And for profit’s sake” (I, 9). Although Dabydeen evidently disdains the vacuous handwringing of Turner’s sentimental aesthetic, it is only a smokescreen for his real target, the losses effaced by history. The poem’s animus is couched in terms of aesthetic judgement, however; in its preface Dabydeen writes that the “intensity of

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Turner’s painting is such that I believe the artist in private must have savoured the sadism he publicly denounced”; the figures represented in the painting, he argues, may neither “escape Turner’s representation of them as exotic and sublime victims” nor “describe themselves anew”; instead they “are indelibly stained by Turner’s language and imagery” (8). From this standard critique of representations of historical loss drawn solely from the imperial archive the poem’s spectral voice emerges: “What was deemed mere food for sharks,” the voice says in the first stanza, will become My fable. I named it Turner As I have given fresh names to birds and fish And humankind, all things living but unknown, Dimly recalled, or dead. (I, 9) Thus the poem’s beginning already questions archival representations. The speaker implies as much when he manufactures “fresh names” in his self-proclaimed invention, his “fable,” attempting like Adam or Linnaeus to name the world around him. However when Dabydeen describes the poem’s speaker—the “I” of the preceding quotation—as “the submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner’s painting,” he emphasizes the failures of even these “fresh names.” Eventually they too are rejected, just as the African rejects the fabrications of an idyllic past. His real desire is to begin anew in the sea but he is too trapped by grievous memory to escape history. Although the sea has transformed him […] [t]he desire for transfiguration or newness or creative amnesia is frustrated. The agent of self-recognition is a stillborn child tossed overboard from a future ship. […] He wants to give it life, to mother it, but the child—his unconscious and his

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origin—cannot bear the future and its inventions, drowned as it is in memory of ancient cruelty. (7-8) Dabydeen is caught between the positions of mourning-work: desiring to bring the lost African’s voice up from the silence of forgetting, he can nonetheless no more let that voice speak than Turner could illustrate its bodily absence. Instead he can only posit a fictional “agent of self-recognition,” a child from the future whose aborted but invented nature reflects the speaker’s own creative enterprise: both are stillborn—or, to use the poem’s first words, both are “Stillborn from all the signs” (I, 9), negatively inscribed by the marks of frustrated desire. Further, Dabydeen returns to Ruskin’s evaluation of the painting’s subject— the “open, illimitable sea”—to submerge his speaker there: “I float eyeless, indelibly / My mind a garment of invention” (IX, 19) the speaker explains, and in this abyss he is washed and changed by the waters, bleached […] of colour, / Painted […] gaudy [with] dabs of ebony, An arabesque of blues and vermillions, Sea-quats cling to my body like gorgeous Ornaments. I have become the sea’s whore, Yielding. (IX, 19) The speaker is pulled from Turner’s sublime image of the sea as an amorphous and changed construct, bleached and recovered but, essentially, without any sign of individuation—it is in the end a “body” that has, in fact, given up on the corporeal in its passage into textuality. All that remain are the ghostly echoes of his voice and the memory of brilliant colours and ornaments of Turner’s sublime sea. “[E]yeless,” and with an “I” explicitly the self-conscious product of a “garment of invention”—the creative fabric, textuality—the speaker experiences what could be called a second birth, were one Derek Walcott. From

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the sea’s abyssal oblivion he emerges to find textual shape. And yet still there is the nagging reminder that this semiotic uncertainty cannot succeed. He is stillborn, despite—or rather because of—his phantasmal existence in the sign system that conjures him into voice: “Stillborn from all the signs.” From the poem’s inaugural gesture, then—where “all the signs” render mourning’s desires stillborn—the poem Turner signals that its concern is with the creative machine of language itself as it fails to carry out the desires of its users. As Anne Carson reminds us, however, “the failing of the sign is itself a sign” (Ep. 5). For the speaker, these signs are all he has left. “Words,” he says, “are all I have left of my eyes, / Words of my own dreaming and those that Turner / Primed in my mouth” (IX, 19). Although an uneasy inheritance, words and the linguistic systems in which they circulate to gain meaning are also nevertheless the lasting ruins of lost things; they remain threshold markers of ideologies and suspicions, dreams and visions. The poem later rages against Turner’s language: “blessed, angelic, / Sublime; words that seemed to flow endlessly / From him, filling our mouths and bellies / Endlessly.” (XXIV, 40). This distrust of language is reflected in the poem’s dense, conceptually obscure diction and intricate imagery—an internal system that is, more often than not, self-reflexively negative, as if the speaker could purge his imperial heritage by imploding the medium used to articulate that same heritage. Thus Dabydeen’s Turner both relies on and resists “the cultural authority that historically preceded and discursively dominated the very position which it must now reclaim” in Turner’s sublime canvas (Döring 2007, 40). It follows one turn with another. The position is not, of course, without its attendant ironies, most prominent of which is Dabydeen’s use of the English iambic pentameter. Dabydeen’s poem ends with a crescendo of negative potentiality that unmoors the poem’s entire structure which, however shakily, had granted it narrative coherence. Its final stanza narrates the stillborn infant leaving the speaker, “loosening from the hook / Of my desire, drifting away from / My body of

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lies” (XXV, 41). Here the speaker makes clear the appropriations that link mourning’s work with the torture attributed to Turner—“the hook / Of my desire”—in the falsifying work of narrative as desire reaches toward its lost object. Finally its narrative inventions drawn from intuitions of the speaker’s memory collapses in a barrage of negations. “No savannah, gods, magicians, / To heal or curse,” the poem’s final lines run, “No men to plough, corn to fatten their herds, / No stars, no land, no words, no community, / No mother” (XXV 42). The negations of these possible memories clears a space for Dabydeen’s “creative amnesia”—they demolish the melancholy lures of representation. With the final loss of mother—and, “by implication, of mother country” (Döring 167)—there may come the creative liberation of an aesthetic ex nihilio that, crucially, traces historical lacunae. The past is named and negated as “absent memories are textually present, and even in denial their past is reaffirmed through verbal acts” (Döring 167). Tobias Döring calls this a process of disremembering. Dabydeen, for his part, has called it an epistemological freedom, “what creolization should be, coming to an awareness that we are free […] we were freed of certain traditions, knowledges, and so on, and while we have sorrow about the loss of those, nevertheless, we are always on the threshold of originality” (2001: 202). To close, I would suggest that such an approach is spectropoetic: images of lost objects are imagined and decreated to become phantasms, the proper subjects of linguistic imagination itself exposed as threshold figures of creativity. This occurs, in Walter Benjamin’s words, at those “moments of transition where phenomenon are about to dissolve [and become] ephemeral images fading into memory” (cited in Teyssot 90). Passing over this threshold is the phantasm, the fugitive figure of remembrance, but not of memory. Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris both suggest that today the Middle Passage is a space of limbo, a “certain kind of gateway to the new world” (Brathwaite 233), “a limbo gateway between Africa and the Caribbean” and almost a “shared phantom limb” that facilitates the “psychic assembly or re-

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assembly of the muse of a people” (Harris 1970, 157, 162). At this gateway, or threshold, an expression occurs, one distinct but emerging from the self-acknowledged failures of representation in the work of both Turner and Dabydeen. This limbo of language-space is, as Harris argues, a resource beyond semantics: language is “the medium … [and] to hint at a medium is to embrace a vision of patterns and capacities beneath and beyond every conventional game of one-sided meaning” (1967, 21).4 Dabydeen’s decreated African voice exemplifies this uncanny, asemic space: his is the indistinct passage of the phantasm lured in by the poem’s imaginative liberties, and his absence of being is appropriated by the hook of mourning’s desire. Shifting from the images of painting to the decreated if ekphrastic phantasms of language is, for Dabydeen, a powerful political and poetic act that reframes the discussion of history and aesthetics through its turn from melancholia to mourning. The abyss of melancholic despair turns to creative mourning. Giorgio Agamben suggests to us that “what could never be possessed because it had never perhaps existed may be appropriated insofar as it is lost” (20). If Turner is in fact not just “a great howl of pessimism about the inability to recover anything meaningful from the past,” it is at the same time “a kind of howl that is also a release into the future” (“Interview” 197-98). It exploits all the powers of a spectral voice in a belated text. Self-effacing but not self-destructing, the phantasm of the African’s voice works neither in the memories of an imperial archive nor in melancholic despair; rather, it is housed in a creative negation and a future-oriented remembrance living with one’s ghosts allows. “No mother,” the poem ends; even in this negation comes an affirmation tethered to an earlier observation, for the decreated speaker’s mother is “neither ghost / Nor portent of a past or future life / Such as I am now” (XIII, 24). The voice that is no voice at all reveals its identity as a “ghost,” the “portent of a past or future life”: a phantasmic construct, the mourning figure made visible.
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This is a consistent theme to Harris’ thought: there are, he repeats, “uncanny lines” in Anglo-Caribbean writing (1999, 249).

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Works Cited Addison, Catherine. “The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?” Style 43.4 (2009): 539-565. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture [Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale]. 1977. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print. Brathwaite, Kamau Edward. “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature. Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 190-258. Print. Burkitt, Katharine. “Imperial Reflections: The Post-Colonial Verse-Novel as Post-Epic.” Classics in PostColonial Worlds. Ed. Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 157-169. Print. Carpio, Glenda R. “Postcolonial Fictions of Slavery.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 30-57. Print. Carson, Anne, trans. Antigonick. Sophocles. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012. Print. ———. “Foam: (Essay with Rhapsody) On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni.” 2001. Decreation. New York: Vintage, 43-58. Print. Dabydeen, David. Turner. 1995. Turner: New and Selected Poems. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2010. 9-42. Print. ———. “Interview with David Dabydeen.” Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets. Ed. Kwame Dawes. Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. 196-214. Print. D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1997. Print. Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Carl Pedersen. “The Middle Passage Between History and Fiction.” Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Eds. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 5-20. Print.

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Döring, Tobias. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Fehskens, Erin M. “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue.” Callaloo 35.2 (2012): 407-424. Print. Gage, John. J.M.W. Turner: “A Wonderful Range of Mind.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Print. Gana, Nouri. Signifying Loss: Towards a Poetics of Narrative Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Print. Harris, Wilson. “History, Fable and Myth.” 1970. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. Ed. A.J.M. Bundy. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 152-166. Print. ———. Tradition, The Writer and Society. London: New Beacon, 1967. Print. ———. “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination.” 1992. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. Ed. A.J.M. Bundy. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 248-260. Print. Ruskin, John. “Of Water as Painted by Turner.” Modern Painters. 1846. Ed. David Barrie. London: Deutch, 1978. Print. Tlaostanova, Madina. “A Permanent Transit: Transgression and Metamorphosis in David Dabydeen’s Art.” No Land, No Mother: Essays on the Work of David Dabydeen. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2007. 86-105. Print. Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print. Teyssot, Georges. “A Topology of Thresholds.” Home Cultures 2.1 (2005): 89-116. Print. Warner, Marina. Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. London: Vintage, 1994. Print.