Turner
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 by art critic John Ruskin “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 representation 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
drowning slave out 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. For centuries, this drowning man had
been lost at sea, reflecting how artists and art critics have so often neglected
the voices of slaves throughout history (Dabydeen, 7). At the beginning
of our narrative, the man has only vague memories from his former life. To make
up for lost memories, he has taken to inventing his own world, naming the people
and creatures around him from his own imagination. The man is startled by a
crash, what he comes to realize is a stillborn child. This discovery breaks the
surface of his repressed memories, bringing his time on the slave ship back to
him like a flood. The way Dabydeen depicts their meeting sheds light onto the
infant’s literary purpose. The child materializes to him, breaking the water, “salt
splash burning [his] eyes/ Awake” (Dabydeen, 17). From their very first
encounter, the infant made the man’s past transparent and unmistakable. From
then on, the memories of his past on the slave ship were unavoidable.
The drowned man remembers more and more
of his time on the slave ship. Most notably, he recalls a white man, the ship’s
owner named Turner. Dabydeen paints the slave owner as manipulative,
pedophilic, and greedy. His first-hand account contrasts the more common
picture of history taught today. Modern renderings of slavery often forget the more
gruesome reality represented through this work, choosing instead to remember
slave owners as normal people, even good people, who just happened to own
slaves. Dabydeen challenges this notion. One excerpt from the text stands out
as a clear depiction of what Turner was to this drowned man:
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?” (Dabydeen, 14).
Here,
the man walks back through memories of his childhood. He recalls Turner as
nurturing, even maternal, taking their hands like a mother protecting its cubs.
His judgement of Turner was distorted with naivety, but the man’s mother
understood the reality of the situation. She screamed as Turner interacted with
the children, foreseeing that his innocence was not the extent of his character.
Turner separated the drowned man from his mother and father, and held the
elders in chains. There is a distinct disconnect between the way Turner treats
the children and their older family members. He is able to manipulate the
children into trusting him, and they even begin 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” (Dabydeen, 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” (Dabydeen, 40). Though the speaker was
blind to it at first, Turner was not an innocent man. The audience learns
through recalled memories the gravity of this situation.
After
ruminating on his memories, the speaker comes to realize how Turner manipulated
him. The span of his impact can be looked at in two categories: affecting
reality and affecting his imagined refuge. Though he once was naïve to see
Turner’s manipulative ploys, he grows to understand the slave owner’s true
impact on both of his worlds.
The enslaved man first
recognizes Turner’s impact on his physical life. He hears the stillborn baby crying
“N----r,” categorizing him from “some hoard of superior knowledge – guarding a
lore buried by priests, philosophers, fugitives” (Dabydeen, 31). This states
that the child has learned to name this man from a reserve of ideals passed on
from past peoples. It has been taught how to categorize a black person, and
does so through a cruel racial slur. Hearing this, the man acknowledges that
his people’s oppression has been guarded among generations. The stillborn, with
exactly zero life experience, still identifies him as a “n----r”, proving the
man’s understanding of the world as a culturally structured system. Turner’s
impact on this man’s life reflects a generational impression on society.
Even in the
construction of an imagined world, Turner’s impact is inescapable. The man
states that in his imagination, he names all the things he can no longer see. The
words he uses are such his own mind and those that “Turner primed in [his]
mouth” (Dabydeen, 19). 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” (Dabydeen, 33). He was able to taint even
the imagined parts of the speaker’s life. The text depicts how 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 (Dabydeen, 40). His persistence
and force engrained his rhetoric into the children’s minds, penetrating their
worldviews for their entire lives. Even after our protagonist suppressed his
memories of the ship for many years, the specifics of Turner’s vocabulary come
alive again. He had effectively been brainwashed into believing along the same
lines as Turner without much question. The specifics of Turner’s derogatory language
infested the man’s subconscious, affecting his imaginary world as well as his
physical one.
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” (Dabydeen, 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 (Dabydeen, 8).
The
man sought to create a new world for the stillborn, but found it impossible to
escape history. Before the child appeared, the man had
pushed out all memories of the slave ship (Dabydeen, 17). He then 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 (Dabydeen, 21). He saw the newborn
as a miracle, an answer to “a longed-for gift of motherhood” (Dabydeen, 9). The
child introduced a new realm of identities for the drowned slave. He takes on a
maternal role, wishing he was able to nourish the child with breastmilk (Dabydeen,
21). The lines separating gender roles and identities become blurred, the child’s
existence bringing the drowned man a novel sense of self. In return, the
speaker wished to invent a better future for the child. He acknowledged the
memories the stillborn’s presence resurfaced, but chose instead to counter
those ideas, inventing 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 (Dabydeen, 41). The impact of an entire people’s
enslavement was engrained on this stillborn 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, especially 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 learned
to identify precisely 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.
Works Cited
Dabydeen, David. Turner.
Peepal Tree Press Ltd, 2010.
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