“Dead men tell no tales, but dead white men document plenty”: Imagining the Middle Passage in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts

ABSTRACT

Creative works by black diasporan authors have often been viewed as offering a counter-history or “counter-memory” to the received history of slavery. Frequently, the Atlantic Ocean has taken on a particular relevance in such creative texts, as both a literal and an imagined site of untold diasporan trajectories. This article focusses on Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River and Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts, exploring each author’s varied representation of the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. While Phillips and D’Aguiar share a pressing interest in the past of transatlantic slavery, it is evident that neither author engages with the archive in a straightforward way, with Phillips’s creation of a postmodern collage of discordant fragments of historical documents, and D’Aguiar’s distortion of the “facts” by modification of historical details. For both writers, though, the creation of literary representations of the Middle Passage is absolutely necessary.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• Middle Passage
• diaspora
• literature
• memory
• remembering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Transatlantic slavery may be seen as an early example of what Arjun Appadurai has called “diasporas of terror, [ … ] diasporas of despair” ([1996] 2000, 6).

2. More unusually, in Phillips’s (1991) novel Cambridge, the narrative voice of Emily also draws on some rare white female voices from the archive, including Lady Maria Nugent, Janet Schaw and Mrs Carmichael.

3. See also Derek Walcott’s (1980) poem “The Sea Is History”, from The Star-Apple Kingdom (25–28).

4. In his 1789 slave narrative, Olaudah Equiano provided a short description of conditions aboard the slave ship, but soon added that it was “a scene of horror almost inconceivable” (quoted in Edwards 1996, 25).

5. As Herbert S. Klein (1978) points out, there is a good deal unknown about the Middle Passage voyage: “what the ‘typical’ voyage might have been in any trade or during any period is virtually unknown” (xvii).

6. There is some uncertainty over the number of slaves thrown overboard, testifying again to the unreliable nature of sources on this past. The Gregson v. Gilbert legal report states 150; D’Aguiar suggests 132; other sources report 133 (perhaps including the slave that survived being thrown overboard, though this is not made clear). Walvin (2011) states the figure killed by being thrown overboard was 122; another 10 slaves committed suicide by jumping from the ship after seeing what was happening (98).

7. Such a view also ignores the role played by white women in fighting for abolition. See Kirsten Raupach (2004) and Seymour Drescher (2009, 249–251).

8. Many examples of this phrase abound; another is Carol Gilligan’s (2003) claim that “[i]n Beloved, Morrison gives voice to a mother who has killed her daughter rather than see her taken back into slavery” (xviii; my emphasis).

9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ([1985] 1987) raised a similar point in her discussions about the subaltern: “The radical intellectual in the West is either caught in a deliberate choice of subalterneity, granting to the oppressed either that very expressive subjectivity which s/he criticizes or, instead, a total unrepresentability” (209). See also Spivak ([1983] 1995).

10. While Lord Mansfield (who presides in Feeding the Ghosts) was indeed the judge of the Gregson v. Gilbert case, the actual trial commenced after the death of the captain, Collingwood. Low (1999) explores the implications of D’Aguiar’s gendering of the slave as female (108–109).

11. Of course, slave resistance is often theorized in relation to Haiti and Toussaint L’Ouverture. See C.L.R. James (1938).

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Notes on contributors

Abigail Ward

Abigail Ward is an instructor in the Department of English at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar and David Dabydeen: Representations of Slavery ([2011] 2015) and editor of Postcolonial Traumas: Memory, Narrative, Resistance (2015). She co-edited a special issue of Atlantic Studies 6 (2) (2009), “Tracing Black America in Black British Culture”, and recently published an essay, “Long-Memoried Women: Slavery and Memory in Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry”, in Memory and Postcolonial Studies: Synergies and New Directions, edited by Dirk Göttsche (2019). She is finalizing a manuscript on literary representations of Indian indenture, and working on a second interdisciplinary project exploring legacies of the transatlantic slave trade in Canada's modern-day slavery, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.