Refusing to "Rest on the Sea's Bed": The Sea of the Middle Passage in David Dabydeen's "Turner" (1994) and Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1997)

Abstract

The essay focuses on maritime imagery in two postcolonial texts by contemporary Guyanese-English writers: David Dabydeen's poem “Turner“ (1994) and Fred D'Aguiar's novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997). Both texts take up the historically documented events on board the infamous slave ship Zong to address the atrocities during and the lasting consequences of the Middle Passage for the black diaspora. The essay first provides an overview of the historical context of the Zong case and discusses influential nineteenth-century representations of and responses to it. This pertinent background information is followed by the analysis of “Turner“ and Feeding the Ghosts. Drawing on Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, the essay demonstrates that the texts in question engage in a postcolonial literary historiography which attributes a crucial, if contradictory, function to the sea: the latter epitomises the break in African history entailed by colonisation, but at the same time, it is envisaged as an open and transformative realm from the depths of which a non-linear and distinctly spatial kind of historiography can emerge.