Learning to Live With Ghosts: Postcolonial Haunting and Mid-Mourning in David Dabydeen's "Turner" and Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts

Abstract

Jacques Derrida’s reflections on spectrality and mourning suggest a productive and responsible way of engaging with unresolved histories of racial and ethnic oppression. In this essay, I will draw on the Derridean concepts of “hauntology” and “mid-mourning” to analyze how two literary works by contemporary British Caribbean writers memorialize the Middle Passage, a history which has come to epitomize the experience of people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world: David Dabydeen’s epic poem “Turner” (1995) and Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997). These two texts, I argue, open up a space of remembrance in which historical losses are neither introjected nor incorporated, neither “properly” mourned nor melancholically entombed within the self, but constantly re-examined and re-interpreted. Disrupting popular understandings of history as a linear progression from a colonial or slave past to a liberated “postcolonial” present, they invite an ethico-political practice of anamnestic solidarity with the oppressed of the past and the present. In Specters of Marx, the book which initiated the perceived “ethical turn” in his work, Derrida argues that the possibility of a just future depends on our readiness “to learn to live with ghosts” (xviii). He insists on an obligation to live not solely in the present but “beyond all living present,” aware of and attentive to those already dead or not yet born. Being neither fully present nor fully absent, ghosts do not have a determinate ontological status but belong to a liminal “hauntological” domain which allows for an ongoing politics of memory and a concern for justice: