Intertextual Absences: "Turner" and Turner

Abstract

The Guyanese-born British poet David Dabydeen regularly uses his work interrogate the linguistic and psychic problems associated with imperialism, diaspora, and dislocation. One of Dabydeen's primary cultural projects is reveal he calls the pornography of empire (Doring 193), and with his long poem he takes up this project once more, this time by forging complicated intertextual relationship between his poem and J.M.W. Turner's famous painting Slavers Throwing Over the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming, hereafter referred by its common name, Slave Ship. The painting depicts slave ship imperiled in storm-tossed sea, which jettisoned its human cargo. (1) In the foreground of the image, hands, shackled foot, and partially submerged head are visible above the waves. In critics have called writing back or counter-discourse the painting, (2) Dabydeen constructs a body, biography, and... an imagined landscape (Dabydeen 7) for the obscured figure in Turner's painting, figure that, as Dabydeen puts it in the preface his poem, has been drowned in Turner's (and other artists') sea for centuries (7). Indeed, the drowning figure who speaks in literally rewrites the world in that he the prelapsarian agency name the objects of his world, giving fresh names birds and fish / And humankind all things living but unknown, / Dimly recalled, or (9). Among these is stillborn child that floats past, which the figure renames as if in retribution against the artist who created in oils the figure's death. It is, however, an ambivalent retribution, for as the figure proceeds describe childhood on the African coast, he alternately focalizes himself and the child he just renamed thus identifying with the child and through it, with J. M. W. Turner himself. The stillborn child is therefore less child than site where set of invented and converging histories may unfold: what was deemed mere food for sharks will become / my (9) crows Dabydeen's speaker, and it is fable rather than subject that the poem delivers. Indeed, Dabydeen's poem does not attempt retrieve coherent, or even split, subjectivity for the drowned victim of Slave Ship; instead, the poet slips between fictive and figures (the dead child named Turner, the painter J. M. W. Turner, the poem's drowning speaker) as potential sites for palimpsestic histories that supersede any notion of subjecthood. Further, the multiple histories of Turner's Slave Ship point the ways in which such layered histories can supersede even the subjective experience of the visual. Dabydeen's poem and Turner's painting both communicate between and among these histories; taken together they communicate the way in which history proliferates in the interstices of subjectivity and the manner in which history is poised overwhelm the subject. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] To invent new history, however, is not necessarily disavow the historical. As Walter Benjamin argued to articulate the past historically does not mean recognize it 'the way it really was'.... It means seize hold of memory as it flashes up at of danger (255). And indeed, Dabydeen's poetic articulation of an invented past manages be historical without being factual. The histories are given as childhood memories, and those memories are shot through with the primal moment of danger--the arrival of the slavers. In Dabydeen's speaker posits series of plausible pasts in an effort fill the void that an act of creative amnesia entails. And while some critics have characterized these narratives as utopian (3)--even Dabydeen calls them fantasy of an idyllic past--these moments of fantasy are haunted by the history they seek forget. The childhood that is recounted, replete with its remembered wounds, portends how history, home, and the self are rendered insecure. …