“Our Broken Word”: Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and the Slave Ship Zong

Abstract

J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting, titled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying,” was inspired by an actual historical incident: In 1781, the slave ship Zong departed from Liverpool, bound for the West Indies. When many slaves fell ill on the voyage, the captain ordered that they be thrown overboard. My paper examines two texts that reimagine or recover the stories of the dead and dying slaves, Fred d’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997) and David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1994). D’Aguiar tells the story of the Zong in part through the character of one Mintah, a female slave who voices the slave narrative buried, or drowned, at sea and exemplifies the difficulty, or impossibility, of recovery. Dabydeen explores the “broken word” of the slaves and their descendants and interrogates the appropriation of the Zong in Turner’s painting and the subsequent reception of Turner, e.g. in Ruskin’s Modern Painters. In reimagining the Zong, moreover, both d’Aguiar and Dabydeen address the contemporary moment in which they write. I will conclude my paper by situating both texts in the context of the 1990s - the Thatcher era and its aftermath, British debates about race, immigration, and citizenship, the burgeoning of black British culture, both in Britain and in diaspora.