“Dead men tell no tales, but dead white men document plenty”: Imagining the Middle Passage in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts

Abstract

ABSTRACTCreative works by black diasporan authors have often been viewed as offering a counter-history or “counter-memory” to the received history of slavery. Frequently, the Atlantic Ocean has taken on a particular relevance in such creative texts, as both a literal and an imagined site of untold diasporan trajectories. This article focusses on Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River and Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts, exploring each author’s varied representation of the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. While Phillips and D’Aguiar share a pressing interest in the past of transatlantic slavery, it is evident that neither author engages with the archive in a straightforward way, with Phillips’s creation of a postmodern collage of discordant fragments of historical documents, and D’Aguiar’s distortion of the “facts” by modification of historical details. For both writers, though, the creation of literary representations of the Middle Passage is absolutely necessary.