Adding to the Picture: New Perspectives on David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’

Abstract

This chapter examines David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ (1994), an ekphrastic response to J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On (1840), more commonly known as The Slave Ship. The chapter begins with an outline of the historical incident memorialised in the painting that inspires Dabydeen’s text—the atrocity aboard the Zong in 1781. The chapter proceeds to situate the text in dialogue with John Ruskin’s ‘Of Water, as Painted by Turner’ in Modern Painters I (1843) but, in a departure from other critics, places the emphasis not on the set-piece ekphrastic rendition of The Slave Ship with which ‘Of Water’ closes but earlier parts of that chapter’s art-critical reflection, analysing how they obliquely inform Dabydeen’s poetic vision. While these elements of Ruskin’s account of Turner have been sidelined in critical readings of ‘Turner,’ two other intertexts have been much more significantly neglected: Macbeth (1606) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). ‘Turner’’s engagement with Morrison’s novel is particularly noteworthy because it enables the poem to sidestep the Anglo-Caribbean lines of influence which most critics see in it, moving it into a new relationship with the African American literary tradition instead.