David Dabydeen’s Turner is a response to J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the
Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). The painting utilizes sharp reds and
oranges to depict a rocky sea, where a slave ship sails in the background and
drowning slaves tossed overboard bob in the foreground. Turner’s painting has
been crowned “the noblest [sea] certainly ever painted by man” (Dabydeen, 7). It
is remembered as a beautifully tragic depiction of a typhoon, Turner reaching
genius through his composition of color and tone. The painting’s depiction of a
slave ship with slaves sentenced to death by storm is ultimately disregarded.
In response, Dabydeen sought to illustrate the existence of the overboard
slave. His work here pulls the overboard slave from under the surf and illustrates
his life. Dabydeen utilizes a fictional biography to illuminate the effects of enslavement
both individually and generationally.
The subject of
Dabydeen’s narrative poem is a man who was tossed off a slave ship to die at
sea. He writes that the head of the slave has been drowned by artists for
centuries (7). Upon this resurgence, the man has only vague memories from his
former life. He imagines a world for his past self in an effort to begin a new
life at sea. However, the appearance of a stillborn baby at sea jolts his
memory, bringing his time on the slave ship back to him like a flood (21).
The drowned man remembers more and
more of his time on the slave ship. He recalls the white men, the owner of his
ship named Turner. Dabydeen paints the slave owner as manipulative, pedophilic,
and greedy, contrasting a common, modern view of history. One excerpt from the text
stands out as a clear depiction of what Turner was to this man:
“[Turner’s] blue eyes smile at
children/As he gives us sweets and a ladle from a barrel/Of shada juice./Five
of us hold his hand,/Each takes a finger, like jenti cubs…/As he leads us /To
the ship./Why is my mother screaming… And where is my father?/Why does Turner
forbid her to touch us? …Why are all the elders in chains?” (14).
Here, the man walks back into the
memories of his childhood. He recalls Turner as nurturing, even maternal,
taking his hand like a cub would its mother. He was naïve in his youth, but the
man’s mother knew the truth of the situation, even in his spotted memory. She screamed
as Turner interacted with the children. Turner separated the man from his
mother and father, and chained all the adults. There is a distinct disconnect
between the way Turner treats the children and their families. He is able to
manipulate the children into trusting him, even competing for his approval. The
boys on the ship race to be the first to polish Turner’s boots, striving to be deemed
“most faithful” (14). Turner uses their devotion to his advantage. His position
of absolute power allows him to defile the children in whatever way he wants, often
“beneath him/ Breathless with pain, wanting to remove his hook/ Implanted in
our flesh” (40).
The
man does come to realize the truth of what Turner was. His imagined world
included foliage, birds, and fruit, a land filled with artists and visionaries.
But Turner destroyed even that for him, “vandalized [it] with a great sweep of
his sword” (33). Though he once was naïve to see Turner’s manipulative ploys,
he grows to understand the slave owner’s true effects on him.
The enslaved man
recognizes that Turner’s impact was lasting. He envisions the stillborn baby
crying obscenities at him, categorizing him from “some hoard of superior
knowledge – guarding a lore buried by priests, philosophers, fugitives” (31). The
man is acknowledging that the oppression of his people has been guarded among
generations. The stillborn has the ability to identify him as distasteful,
proving the man’s understanding of the world as a culturally structured system.
Though he tried to imagine a world free from Turner, his mark was made.
Even in the
construction of this imagined world, Turner’s impression is inescapable. The
man states that in his imagination, he names all the things he can no longer
see, these words both from his own dreams and those that “Turner primed in
[his] mouth” (19). It’s depicted in the text that Turner forced himself onto
the children, all the while obsessing that they repeat his language back to
them. He would whisper we desire you, we
love you, we forgive you, and blessed,
angelic, and sublime, until the
children repeated them, trancelike, back to him (40). His persistence and force
engrained his rhetoric into the children’s minds, sticking with them throughout
their lives. Even after our protagonist suppressed his memories of the ship for
many years, even the specifics of Turner’s vocabulary come alive again. If such
specifics about his language can imprint in the man’s life, it’s no wonder Turner’s
attitude toward his slaves was the most catastrophically impactful.
The
man notes that, even after the ocean had bleached the “sin” from his skin, the
stillborn that appeared to him was able to recognize it at once. In turn, after
distinguishing the man’s perceived wickedness, the stillborn turns in on
itself, “sensing its own deformity” (31). The infant here serves as a modern
example of rhetoric in today’s society. From a traditional upkeep of immoral
values, the infant learned that black was to be hated. “A lore buried by
priests, philosophers, and fugitives” suggests that individuals of all classes subscribed
to the idea of white dominance. Dabydeen illustrates this mindset as such an
integral aspect of society that a half-born infant would yield to the rhetoric.
The stillborn has internalized an innate hatred of blackness from even before
birth. It isn’t until the infant verbalizes this hatred that it realizes the
world’s hatred is directed at himself. It immediately learned a hatred of
blackness, only later discovering that this hatred was therefore pointed openly
at him. Dabydeen comments on how the man attempts to make a new, imagined life
for himself. However, neither the stillborn nor the slave can escape from Turner’s
“language and imagery,” forced to navigate the gravity of this generational influence
(8).
The
man sought to start over after the ship. Before the stillborn appeared, the man
had pushed out all memories of the slave ship (17). Even then, he began
imagining what life was like in those forgotten years, forming words and names
for the images he had forgotten of his childhood. Once the newborn appeared to
him, the memories of the ship flooded back (21). He saw the newborn as a
miracle, an answer to “a longed-for gift of motherhood” (9). Instead of
embracing the reality of his past, the man longed to create a new world for
this child. He acknowledged the memories the stillborn’s presence resurfaced,
but chose instead to counter those ideas. The man wished to create a new world
for and with the child. He had already created names for birds and fruits in
his imagined world, and yearned to “begin anew in the sea,” with new ideas and
values. However, the stillborn could not transition out of its gripped mindset.
The man states that his face is “rooted in the ground of memory, a ground
stampeded by herds of foreign men” who destroy the land before them (41). The
impact of an entire people’s enslavement was engrained on this child even
before it saw life. Though the man attempted to make a new life for his
fostered child, there was little he could do to reteach the inherent ways of
the world, even in regards to perception of self.
Dabydeen’s
commentary on institutionalized racism comes to fruition through the fictional
voice of an often submerged reality. The enslaved man, pushed overboard by his
slave owner, effectively pushes away any memories of the slave ship. Until a
child floats up to him in middle of the sea, all cognition of that trauma has
been forgotten. The man had instead, cultivated an imagined reality far away
from the actuality of institutional racism and slavery. However, the stillborn
child that appeared to him was the switch that flooded all the memories back.
The realization of all that had happened on that ship urged the man to foster a
better life for this infant, the man’s maternal instincts heightening. But the
stillborn personified the prevalence of black hatred, squirming at the man’s
and its own “obscenity.” Both the enslaved man and the stillborn child identified
as how Turner believed them. The slave owner, through his manipulation and execution
of power, enforced his beliefs and superiority on the submerged man. The
stillborn serves to personify the generational impact of oppression and
enslavement, as realized through Dabydeen’s careful imagination of existent life.
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