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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2016

Veronica J. Austen
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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.

Keywords

David Dabydeen“Turner”Zong massacreeatingself-consumptioncultural regeneration
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 227 - 239
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 In Black Ivory, James Walvin identifies November 29, November 30, and December 1, 1781, as the dates of the massacre. See Walvin, James, Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire 2e (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 15Google Scholar.

2 See Cliff, Michelle, Abeng (New York: Plume, 1984)Google Scholar and Unsworth, Barry, Sacred Hunger (New York: Norton, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Dabydeen, David, “Turner,” in Turner: New and Selected Poems (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1995), 9–42Google Scholar, 36.

4 Ibid., 36.

5 In the resulting legal battle regarding the failure of the insurance company to pay the ship owners’ claim, the owners argued that Collingwood’s jettison of the slaves resulted from a shortage of water. Nevertheless, as Walvin describes, the shortage of water was overstated; the ship arrived at its destination with 420 gallons of water remaining. See Walvin, Black, 15.

6 Feeding the Ghosts and Zong! likewise look to acts of eating and excreting as measures of power.

7 The speaker’s gender remains indefinite throughout the poem. In the poem’s preface, Dabydeen, who identifies the speaker as the “submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner’s painting” (7), refers to the speaker as “it.” Given that referring to the speaker as “it” in this paper seemed to perpetuate the speaker’s objectification, I have chosen to assign it a gendered pronoun where necessary. Because the “I” of the poem first refers to itself in the description “small boys like I was” (10), I have gendered the speaker male, recognizing that this speaker, too, later casts himself as “mother.”

8 Mintz, Sidney, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 7Google Scholar.

9 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1Google Scholar.

10 Glissant, Édouard, “The Quarrel with History,” in Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. M. Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 61–67Google Scholar, 61.

11 Kilgour, Maggie, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 6Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 6.

13 Roy, Parama, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 194CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Quoted in Kilgour, From Communion, 6.

15 Kilgour, From Communion, 6–7.

16 Ibid., 229.

17 Ibid., 7.

18 Counihan, Carole and Van Esterik, Penny, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” Food and Culture: A Reader 2e (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–13Google Scholar, 8.

19 Roy, Alimentary, 24.

20 Loichot, Valérie, The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xivCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Ibid., x.

22 Ibid., x.

23 Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself (London: [n.p.], [1789]), 56Google Scholar. Project Gutenberg. Epub released March 17, 2005. Accessed August 17, 2013.

24 Piersen, William D., Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 4Google Scholar.

25 Fabre, Geneviève, “The Slave Ship Dance,” Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, eds. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33–46Google Scholar, 38.

26 Quoted in Piersen, Black Legacy, 7.

27 The assumption on the part of the enslaved that they would be literally eaten may not have been accurate, but the slave trade’s exploitation and decimation of black bodies proved to be its own form of devouring. As William Fox’s abolitionist pamphlet would eventually argue, the consumption of such products as sugar could be equated with the consumption of the enslaved. To Fox, “for every pound of sugar two ounces of human flesh are consumed.” See Morton, Timothy, “Introduction: Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic Period,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 11. The enslaved were serving to satisfy white culture’s appetite and subsequently being themselves consumed.

28 Harris, Jessica B., High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 35Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., 35. Devices like the speculum oris, a three-pronged tool used to force open a person’s mouth and thereby enable forced-feeding, nevertheless, compromised one’s ability to make the choice between eating or not. Similarly, slave ships like the Zong did not always provide adequate sustenance, so to not eat often came out of necessity rather than choice.

30 Dabydeen, “Turner,” 8.

31 Ibid., 41.

32 Ibid., 31, 41.

33 Ibid., 41.

34 Ibid., 42.

35 Ibid., 10.

36 Ibid., 10.

37 Ibid., 11.

38 Ibid., 33.

39 Ibid., 41.

40 Ibid., 27.

41 Ibid., 27.

42 Ibid., 27.

43 Ibid., 32.

44 Ibid., 10.

45 Ibid., 15.

46 Ibid., 40.

47 Ibid., 22–23. Turner is also cast as a predatory fisherman during his sexual abuse of the boys: “He whispered eloquently / Into our ears even as we wriggled beneath him, / Breathless with pain, wanting to remove his hook / Implanted in our flesh” (40).

48 Ibid., 18, 27.

49 Ibid., 9.

50 Ibid., 14.

51 Ibid., 15.

52 Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 30-31.

53 Ibid., 31.

54 Ibid., 92.

55 Dabydeen, , “Turner,” 42Google Scholar.

56 Ibid., 42.

57 Ibid., 34.

58 Ibid., 34.

59 Kilgour, From Communion, 226.

60 Ibid., 4.

61 Tompkins, , Racial Indigestion, 3Google Scholar.

62 Dabydeen, , “Turner,” 34Google Scholar.

63 This image importantly echoes an earlier image of the envisioned nurturing provided by the speaker’s mother. In the speaker’s lament for now being alone and “loosed / Into the sea” (23), he nostalgically recalls his mother “Nearly rolling [him] from her lap but catching [him] / In time, and when [he] cried out in panic / Of falling, pinned [him] tightly, always, / To her bosom” (23). Just as Manu recaptures the word in order to make it safe for the children’s consumption, the mother catches the child and renders him safe and comforted. Furthermore, the site of this comfort is her bosom, once the site of the child’s primary nourishment.

64 Ibid., 10.

65 Ibid., 14.

66 Ibid., 14.

67 Ibid., 40.

68 Ibid., 40.

69 Ibid., 40.

70 Ibid., 40.

71 Ibid., 40, original italics.

72 Ibid., 40.

73 Abigail Ward offers an important reading of this passage’s description of words “shudder[ing]” from Turner’s mouth. To Ward, the words are ejaculatory emissions from Turner. See Abigail Ward, “‘Words Are All I Have Left of My Eyes’: Blinded by the Past in J.M.W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and Dabydeen’s, David ‘Turner,’” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.1 (2007): 47–58. doi: 10.1177/0021989407075728Google Scholar, 54. In light of this reading, the filling of the bellies that occurs can also be read as an impregnation, an unnatural one brought about orally and likewise unnatural given boys are the ones impregnated. Importantly, their metaphorical pregnancies are “endless,” rather than a mere nine months; in other words, this is an impregnation from which nothing productive will come.

74 The duty unfulfilled is his telling of the complete story to the children.

75 Dabydeen, , “Turner,” 35Google Scholar.

76 This image casts the flies as heirs to British colonialism much as the image of “foreign men” leaving nothing but “a trail of dung for flies / To colonise” (41) did.

77 See Dhar, Nandini, “Trauma, Mourning and Resistant Melancholia: Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon,” Come Weep with Me: Loss and Mourning in the Writings of Caribbean Women Writers (New Castle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 27–55Google Scholar; Härting, Heike, “The Poetics of Vulnerability: Diaspora, Race, and Global Citizenship in A. M. Klein’s The Second Scroll and Dionne Brand’s Thirsty,” Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007): 177–199Google Scholar. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/scl/article/view/10573/11161; Moynagh, Maureen, “The Melancholic Structure of Memory in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.1 (2008): 57–75. doi: 10.1177/0021989407087825CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Craps, Stef, “Learning to Live with Ghosts: Postcolonial Haunting and Mid-Mourning in David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts,” Callaloo 33.2 (2010): 467–475. doi: 10.1353/cal.0.0651CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 468.

79 Ibid., 468.

80 Ibid., 468.

81 Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Vol. 1. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 126Google Scholar.

82 Ibid., 127, original italics.

83 Ibid., 128.

84 Ibid., 127.

85 Ibid., 128, original italics.

86 Dabydeen, , “Turner,” 34Google Scholar.

87 Ibid., 41.

88 Ibid., 26.

89 Ibid., 41. This image of the speaker fishing for the baby interestingly equates the speaker with Turner who, too, had fished for the young. The speaker must devour the child in order to form his fable, much as Turner had to destroy the speaker and his culture in order to form his story. In other words, there can be a selfish consumptiveness involved in the enforcing of one’s narrative on another, regardless of whether that narrative is meant to integrate the receiver into his or her cultural history.

90 Ibid., 41.

91 Ibid., 21.

92 This image bears an important contrast to the image of Turner’s fingers being taken by the boys as he leads them to the ship. His fingers, too, are like a “mother’s teats” (14), but Turner’s act of nourishment when compared with this later image of intimate maternal affection takes on even more an air of the grotesque.

93 This image provokes further questions. Is feeding the hurt like “feeding the flames”—a feeding that incites and heightens pain? Does his role as mother emphasize his own loss of a mother? Or is to feed the hurt to nourish it, to quell and satiate it through memory? Given this poem’s general depiction of memory as provoking both fear and comfort, both of these contrasting interpretations exist at once.

94 Dabydeen, , “Turner,” 41Google Scholar.

95 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Yolk/Yelk, n.1.” Entry 2.

96 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Yolk/Yelk, n.1.” Entry 1. Def. 1a.

97 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Yolk/Yelk, n.1.” Entry 1. Def. 1b.