Self-Consumption and Compromised Rebirth in Dabydeen’s “Turner”

Abstract

This article, which focuses on David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994), addresses acts of eating/excreting as reflections of power relations while also figuring cultural regeneration as a pursuit of nourishment. Through acts of consumption, the speaker of “Turner” seeks to forge a continuum whereby the past feeds the future and the future satiates the emptiness caused by colonialism and the slave trade. Nevertheless, in “Turner,” this emptiness cannot be overcome, and acts of cultural feeding are not regenerative but instead destructively self-consumptive.